Editor's note: This column was last published in 2016.
In 1974, when I was 11 years old, I flushed an apple core down the toilet.
In fact, my dad converted the basement into a family room with a powder room.
Always trying to save money, and with six children to support on a single income, he bought the cheapest toilet he could find.
It never worked properly and they couldn't afford to hire a plumber, so my dad spent a lot of his free time trying to unclog it.
Armed with this knowledge, what I've done is amazing.
One Sunday morning, after munching on a large Washington apple, I lay on the living room couch, too lazy to get up and properly dispose of it.
About 12 feet away, I noticed the toilet lid was up.
Like a madman, I aimed the core toward the toilet with a flick of my wrist, and it rocketed majestically into the air in a perfect trajectory before landing in the center of the bowl with a satisfying “Kill-BOOM!”
After that, they flushed the toilet and didn't think anything of it again until a few months later, they reported that the clog had occurred again.
As fate would have it, this happened on a Sunday morning while I was lying on the couch holding another Washington apple core and watching TV while my dad struggled to clear the clog.
But nothing he tried could clear the clog. A plunger wouldn't work, but he was soaked before it could. Two bottles of Drano didn't help. Even the plumber's hose my dad borrowed from a neighbor when all else had failed couldn't dislodge this clog.
My dad was furious, so he unbolted the toilet from the floor and then, in one swift motion, lifted it off its stand and placed it in front of the TV.
He knelt before a black hole in the floor, thrusting his powerful paws into the hole, then his forearms, then his biceps.
His head was pressed hard against the cold, damp linoleum, sweat was dripping from his nose, and the veins in his temples felt like they might burst at any moment.
