Dear John

For my birthday recently, I got an unusual but much appreciated gift from my daughter and son-in-law. In fact, I was flushed with excitement when I opened my birthday card and read the following message:

Your birthday is such a special day!
And we surely don’t want to spoil it.
So we’ve made a decision...
To buy you a TOILET.

This may not be at the top of everybody’s wish list, but I’m now in the third year of redecorating my 1970s-built home, and this porcelain throne (complete with installation) put me that much closer to my goal. Besides, this is my first brand-new, never used before, commode.

Two questions occurred to me on installation day:

• What kind of weird coincidence was it that the book on my bathroom shelf was Iris Johansen’s On the Run?
• If my daughter and son-in-law had been stopped by the police, and the police had found in their trunk a toilet that they were planning to deliver to me, could they have been charged with possession of pot with intent to distribute?