Love, loss, and the year of the bidet

[cartoon id="233327"] 2025 was one heck of a year (and that’s the clean version). It was a year defined by devastating departures, including what was left of my youthful good looks. First, as you may have read about in a previous column, last summer, my wife and I moved our eldest and most expensive daughter from East Texas to the outer reaches of Colorado on a hapless journey that should have starred John Candy and Steve Martin. In fact, I think a couple of my lumbar vertebrae are still wandering around lost somewhere in New Mexico. We miss our daughter terribly, and I can still hardly bear to go into her empty bedroom at home to take measurements for my new man cave. In December of last year, our beloved family cat, a fifteen-year-old Siamese mix, Missy Starbright (named by our three daughters, of course), crossed the rainbow bridge – paved with hundreds of Fancy Feast cans and more than a decade’s worth of vet bill receipts. I always got the feeling Missy could do with or without me, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because I always greeted her with a snide comment about her bad breath and by making loud fat-jiggling noises while I wobbled her primordial pouch. My wife still insists that ladies don’t like that. But most tragically, we also lost my precious mother-in-law, a saintly woman who managed to look past my general uselessness and even had the grace to feed me the kind of home-cooked meals that would make a grown man cry into his third serving of pineapple nut pie. I’ve always said that, in addition to my wife’s inner and outer beauty, the promise of her mother’s cooking was a key factor in my matrimonial intentions. I don’t know what we are going to do without her, but I know I’ll be a lot hungrier. I wasn’t sure I could (or should) write about her in a humor column, but she dearly loved to laugh, so I think she’d be ok with it. After experiencing these tremendous losses and with the promise of a new year, I decided to do what any normal person would. I purchased and installed a bidet. The first time I heard the word “bidet,” I thought it was some kind of French pastry. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My first encounter with a bidet was at a Washington, Texas, bed and breakfast, where I accidentally pressure-washed the bathroom wall opposite the bidet while meddling with some mysterious buttons and knobs attached to the toilet. I was convinced to “go bidet” myself after a recent conversation with a friend who had installed a Cadillac model with heated water and a drying fan. He said that once you try it, you’ll be sold. And he was right on target – if you know what I mean. I decided to go basic with my bidet since I’m still a novice and don’t like the idea of electricity that close to my valves and flapper. After carefully following some over-simplified instructions and minimal cursing, I finally got the bidet installed, and it has really hit the spot – if you know what I mean. So here’s to a new year with sweet memories of those who are gone and moving ahead into new experiences full force – if you know what I mean. And if I change my mind about the bidet, I can always use it as a pressure-washer. - Copyright 2026 Jase Graves distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Graves is an award-winning humor columnist from East Texas. His columns have been featured in Texas Escapes magazine, The Shreveport Times, The Longview News Journal, and The Kilgore News Herald. Contact Graves at [email protected].