Ringo Starr “Liverpool 8”

My daughter was squirming at the dinner table. Not unusual for a two-year old, but my wife recognized the body language.

“Honey, do you have to go in your cage?”

I don’t know where my daughter got this phrase, but she started saying it very early on. When she had to poop, she’d say, “I’m going in my cage,” and she’d get behind a chair, or cram into a corner, and grunt.

So my wife let her down, and she toddled off to her bedroom.

A minute or two later, there was shrieking from that end of the hall.

“A BUG A BUG!!!” She was standing on her bed, pointing down at the space where “her cage” is.

I honestly didn’t see anything, but my wife got down on her hands and knees, and said “Awww . . . “

She stood back up and with her gentlest voice, said to my daughter, “Look. It’s a little beetle.”

This was certainly the tiniest beetle I’d ever seen. Smaller than the tip of a ballpoint pen, and just as black.

The girls spent the next few minutes examining the beetle, my wife working her magic to make the tiny creature a thing of wonder, not of worry.

“Isn’t he cute? We’ll name him Beetle Paul. The Cute Beetle.”

We’ve played Beatles songs for my daughter, from Day One. They’re a big part of our lives. We even have a fish named “Mr. Kite.” So she got the Beetle Paul reference.

The smell in my daughter’s pull-ups was getting ripe, so my wife said, “Okay, I’m going to put Beetle Paul outside, because that’s where he should live. You and Daddy should go to the bathroom and dump your dirty britches.”

As an early stage of potty training, when she goes poop we make a bit of a spectacle of it, showing her how poop goes in the big potty, and you get to flush---this as an incentive to one day not just “go in her cage.”

So she and I are in the bathroom and I’ve pulled off her Pull-ups, to reveal a fairly small effort on her part.

“Okay, let’s dump this cute little poop in the potty!”

And before she does, she looks at it and said, “We’ll name him Ringo.”

Flush.


For a better appreciation of Ringo, check out Ray Whitaker's Just Four Guys show on the Starr drummer.