My Navel 4-18-11

When I was thin, I used to keep my navel clean.  Lint from my t-shirts accumulates over time and gets stuck in there. I gave up cleaning my navel years ago when I joined the fat and sloppy nation. I remember the frustration of not being able to get that junk out of there. I hoped my inability to clean my navel would prod me to stop eating so much. It didn’t help, and I got used to not cleaning my navel.

It had been years since I thought about my navel and that I was once thin enough to clean it; until yesterday.

I’m on vacation with my family and I have been swimming with my daughter every day for a week. After we got out of the pool, I was laying on the chase lounge and my daughter looks over at my stomach and says “Daddy, what’s that in your belly button?”  I hadn’t seen inside my navel in years.  It was stuffed with junk.

I told my daughter what it was and she immediately volunteered to clean it herself.  She wanted to dig her finger in there and clean it out like a nostril.  My navel isn’t like a nostril, its way bigger, and it has to be cleaned gently and carefully.  Not only am I fat and sloppy, I’m also a delicate flower.  I tell her “I’ll get it.”  Still, she insists, and I tell her “no” again.  I have to quickly find a way to clean it before I lose this great viewing angle.  This will require a potentially embarrassing public naval cleaning; something I have never done before.  But since I’m married and fat already, I’m going for it.

The only cleaning implement I had handy was hotel room key card.  I was making some cleaning progress with the edge of the card when (and this is where the embarrassing part comes in) I look up, and the beautiful 23 year old bikini clad waitress is standing over me.  She announces that our lunch is ready.

I ate my grilled chicken and french fries quickly.  I couldn’t wait to get back to my room to clean my navel.  There were no tweezers around, so I used the hook from my nail clippers and began dislodging years of accumulated, forgotten, hardened lint.  It took a while, but finally I got it all.