Is there a song about toilet paper? Marco Polo reported that the Chinese used paper to wipe themselves.

When his strange tale was repeated back in Europe two entirely new endeavors soon blossomed. Papermaking and toilet paper.

We look back aghast at those days a few hundred years ago, when the choice was a rag or nothing. Is it any wonder that perfume predates paper in the West?

Sliced Bread and Toilet Paper

No one knows where it comes from but everyone knows where it goes.

I recently stayed in two different hotels. One had a room on each floor of the hotel stacked to the ceiling with toilet paper. The doors to these toilet paper storage rooms were left open, as if to prove to the guests how plentiful was the supply of flushable paper. I know that all the doors were opened because I explored the hotel to find out what they did with the partial rolls of paper left in a room when a guest completes his or her stay and checks out. Full, wrapped rolls were bountiful.

In this London hotel I found no bins of half rolls. Perhaps they directly recycle the rolls with a local recycler.

I also stayed a week in a different city, at a favorite little hotel. There, they have a different attitude and personally see to the recycling of unfinished rolls. Unlike the London hotel which has a few hundred guests at a time, the tiny hotel may have a dozen or so on any given night. Their guests seem to stay longer, too.

The small hotel has but one closet for towels, cleaning things, extra pillows, eensie shampoo bottles, postage-stamp sized slabs of soap, thin boxes of almost Kleenex, and a few cases of toilet tissue.

Speaking of toilet tissue bought in bulk, I had a friend whose family skied annually in Switzerland. There were eight family members. It was an expensive outing. To afford such a trip they cut corners on certain necessities, any money saved went toward the ski trip. I do not know how much money spends on toilet paper, but imagine how many rolls of toilet paper a household of eight people might flush away in a year. The mother purchased a full year’s supply of toilet paper in gigantic cardboard cartons and stored it in the basement.

The unit cost was a fraction of what toilet paper cost for one roll at a time. The carton of 144 rolls meant a savings of about fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars is fifteen dollars, after all. Well, before half of the carton could be used, the basement flooded.

It was just rainwater and only enough to cause the toilet paper rolls to swell up and then pucker when they were dried.

The mother had emptied the rolls from the basement storage and stacked them around the house to dry. The mother insisted the fifteen dollar savings not be wasted, so refused to purchase additional tissue until the puckered paper was gone.

In this family all the children began to spend a portion of their weekly allowance upon toilet paper. Clandestine toilet paper, at that.

The upside to this story is that the mother never had to buy toilet paper for the family, ever again. The children became accustomed to buying a roll when they needed one or begging a sibling for a roll. A bartering system evolved.

Toilet paper became to this family like cigarettes to convicts. The mother could now more easily save for the ski trip, too.

But, back to the tiny hotel, where recycling was more personal. A large box, about the size of a dishwashing machine, was the receptacle for partial rolls. These odd diameter tubes were used in the staff bathroom, taken home for personal use, folded and tube removed and inserted into empty Kleenex boxes, donated to hospitals, given to homeless shelters, and otherwise given extended life.

There were other items left, or discarded, by guests: such as perfume, shampoo, and aftershave. Those products lined a shelf and filled the open medicine cabinet. None of the personal care items wore brand names you would recognize. The overflowing box of partial rolls was the elephant in the room.

My mother's mother lived in town. Barely a small town, it was the big city to a kid who lived on the shore of Lake Huron. To go to the food store we had to get into the family car and ride for a while. My definition of city included the proximity to stores. One block away from her house was a store. Ergo she lived in the city.

Although there was a small neighborhood market a block from her house she did all her shopping a mile away. There was a good butcher, a friendly baker, and the Great Atlantic and Pacific for everything else.

We had just returned from the A&P when I asked Mum, my grandmother, why she drove so far to shop when she had a store on the next block. She emptied the grocery bags and put everything away except for a loaf of Sunbeam bread and a roll of Scott's bathroom tissue.

She put a crisp dollar into my hand and sent me to the nearby store to purchase a loaf of Sunbeam bread and a roll of Scott's bathroom tissue.

My uncle Pat accompanied me to the store. It was a crisp Spring morning and the sun was somewhat shining in it's usual overcast Michigan way, meaning not strong enough to break through the clouds in a meaningful way.

The door opened and announced our arrival with a bell that dangled from the top. Pat and I were the only customers in the store. I noticed that unlike the A&P, which was brightly lit by fluorescent tubes, there was a single incandescent bulb intended to illuminate this shop and it wasn't turned on. The few aisles were dark and the selection limited to a few items, with no alternatives. There was Scott's bathroom tissue and no other brand. I took a roll and left the other five rolls alone. There was no wandering around trying to figure out where anything was located. The bread was next to the toilet paper.

Now that I think of it, that is a juxtaposition you never see in a modern supermarket.

It was a loaf of Sunbeam bread, made by the Aikman Baking Company.

I put my dollar down and the wrinkled old lady behind the counter gave me some change out of a cigar box.

Pat kept quiet the entire trip, when we returned to Mum's he vanished into his bedroom to listen to the radio.

Mum asked me to take both loaves of bread and count the slices. Then she asked me to unwrap both rolls of tissue. There were two more slices of bread in the package from the A&P. I asked if I had to count the tissues on the rolls? She laughed and told me to just stack one on top of the other.

That was funny. The roll from A&P was bigger, too. I said I understood why she shopped at the A&P, they gave you more for your money. She smiled and told me to take all the time I wanted to think of another answer.