The Weekly Meat

Where Babies Come From

When I was in third grade, with two younger siblings, I finally asked my parents where babies came from. They smiled uncomfortably and looked at each other in a way that said, "The day has come."

"Where do babies come from?" I repeated.

"Well," my father volunteered — the one syllable hanging on his tongue like good wine — "two people have to love each other very much."

"Oh." Good enough. "Well how long does it take?"

"Nine months," my mother volunteered.

"Oh."

I was satisfied with the answer. What did I know? I had never heard any different — as opposed to the four-year-old daughters of two separate friends, who each volunteered recently that babies come from "my mommy's vagina." Needless to say, my parents must have been ecstatic that I was satisfied with their non-answer.

It seemed very simple to me. Too simple maybe. But then again, I had never tried it.

I figured I'd give it a shot. I tried to think of which girl in the third grade I loved enough to make her have a baby. I wondered if I'd even have to tell her, or just love her and wait nine months. Kelly? She kissed me once. Maybe she was already pregnant. I didn't think I loved her when she kissed me, but who knew?

It was then that the full impact of this love thing hit me. Forget the girls in class. What about my girlfriends on TV? Leather Tuscadero, Daisy Duke, two out of three Charlie's Angels (sorry Kate). I couldn't say exactly whether I was more in love with Suzy Quatro, Barbara Bach, Jaqueline Smith, or Farrah Fawcett, but clearly — as the Notorious B.I.G. once sung — "I see some ladies tonight that should be havin' my baby."

In any case, I waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing. I started to think maybe there was more to it than my folks had told me. I thought back on it. "Two people have to love each other very much." Ah. Okay, so maybe that was the catch. "Girlfriends" needed to reciprocate your love. Now we're getting somewhere.

But who knew how women felt and what they thought. (I still don't know.) But for argument's sake, say one loved me back. Then she'd get pregnant? Again, I'd have to wait nine months to find out. And there was the nagging Charlie's Angels question. I wondered: if Jaqueline or Farrah were pregnant, would they still be on the show? You can imagine my concern.

At school, it didn't strike me that anyone in my class was pregnant. But I was getting a little scared. Whom had I been in love with — and when? I wasn't ready to be a father. I was hardly even ready to be an older brother. It all seemed like a heavy responsibility, and one that had little to do with the other things I loved — namely hockey, and pasta, and TV.

A few short years later, my friends and I knew all the titillating facts about where babies came from, and had seen all the requisite diagrams and such — which we augmented with full-color glossy photos of airbrushed nakedness from the drawers and bookshelves of our 1970s suburban fathers, all of whom seemed to have countless samples of "gentlemen's magazines."

But still, we had no real concept of what sex was all about.

Around these Playboy (or as one younger neighbor mistakenly called them, Pep Boys) years, one friend described walking in on his parents several years earlier while they were "making Shelley," as he called it (he had a younger sister, Michelle). At the time, it didn't occur to either of us to question his logic: his parents were having sex, he had a younger sister, therefore, he must have seen them in the process of creating his younger sister.

It would be yet another year or so before we finally understood — despite our preoccupation with the feathered-hair girls of prime-time TV and our familiarity with the soft bits of the female anatomy — that sex was not just for procreation, but for recreation.

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My older daughter is three-and-a-half. It is only a matter of time before she is no longer satisfied with knowing that from time to time, our friends and acquaintances have a "baby belly." She'll be looking for answers, and we'll be expected to supply them. Still, AKL and I have not discussed what our story is, let alone gotten it straight.

I don't imagine it will start and end with the conceptually obtuse "two people have to love each other very much." Then again, I don't see it containing only the clinical facts either. (Though, clearly, I might be forced to say the word vagina.) For me, and for my kids, the story lies somewhere in between, I imagine, in that gray area that, admittedly, I sometimes still don't quite understand myself.

My 10 Favorite Online Videos

[Forgive the lighter fare this week. I'm sick, so are my kids, and work is on me like media flies on what now amounts to The Jackson Four.]

In no particular order:

All-Blacks Haka — New Zealand's All-Blacks rugby team does their ritual pre-match Maori Haka. Intimidating as hell.

George Laraque v. Raitis Ivanans — Three words: "Good luck, man."

Bobby Clarke scores his 1,000th career point — I specifically remember the moment earlier in this game when Reggie Leach (who had arguably the hardest shot in hockey) struck Clarke above the eye with a deadly slapshot. Clarke did not even go down to the ice. He simply shrugged slightly, as if shaking wet hair off his forehead, and the blood began pouring down his face. He personified both the mental and physical toughness that I still aspire to, and this clip highlights his perseverance.

Harlan McCraney, Presidential Speechalist — The best thing Andy Dick will ever do in his life. Hilarious.

Secretariat runs away with the Preaknesss — (~3:20 of the video) Secretariat demands hyperbole, and I will not disappoint: He was the greatest athlete of the 20th century, and the move he made in the furlong around his first turn at Pimlico in 1973 was the most perfect and inspiring thing I have ever seen.

Lazy Sunday — The video that launched a million videos and made YouTube (and later Hulu) a household name. Still brilliant.

Rob Hisey lacrosse-style shootout goal — Mike Legg did it first, and in an actual game; Sidney Crosby's done that too; Robbie Schremp does it better; but I saw the Hisey video first, and was blown away. Amazing dangling chops.

Tiger Woods Nike commercial — Tiger's parlor trick was just stunning when I first saw it, and is no less so today. It has spawned many imitations, some of which (Ronaldinho, Freestyle) are equally Nike and equally impressive.

Battle at Kruger — Lions and water buffalo and crocs, oh my! If you're one of the three people who hasn't actually seen this, it's worth eight and a half minutes of your life to be reminded that human beings are only one of hordes of thinking creatures on this old planet.

All your base are belong to us — The single most perfect example of the power of the Internet. Simple yet brilliant, geeky yet hip, global yet communal. A spot-on, time-sucking, poorly-translated, painstakingly-executed phenomenon.

Parents Say the Darndest Things

I've always been a good speller. I took third place in the fifth grade spelling bee, and my abilities, in part, have not only translated into a career in editing, but recently, have served me in good stead at home as well. With young RK now in her fourth year of life, and her vocabulary burgeoning, it has become necessary for my wife, AKL, and me to do more and more spelling out of words.

We use ridiculous euphemisms, shorthand, and spelling in an attempt to code our discussions to a level above RK's already-wise ears. (Just last night, when AKL stumbled onto a cache of mushed raspberries under the table and exclaimed "Jesus!" RK, with flawless timing, added "Christ!") So when it's necessary to talk about things that concern RK in front of her, we do things like refer to her as "the elder" and talk of ice cream as a "cold, dairy-based non-savory comestible" and such.

Normal conversation requires quick, nearly unthinking, spelling, and I seem to have a knack for it. (I knew that college experience in improvisational comedy would come in handy at some point.) But then the methodical editor in me tends to check for errors in the letters that have just escaped my mouth — a review process that occasionally causes me to actually miss AKL's response to whatever is was that we had been talking around. Resulting, of course, in the unpopular husband F-A-I-L.

We know RK will shortly outgrow the spelling and then we'll need new wordplay (even my family's dog learned to spell "W-A-L-K"). Time to dust off the high-school French, or start using military shorthand — wherein words and phrases are shortened to their root letter and then expanded, using the military alphabet, so that "on the move," for instance, becomes "oscar mike" and "what the fuck?" becomes "whiskey tango foxtrot?"

I drop the occasional street-hipster syntax too, because RK and two-year-old E-O don't roll like that yet, and, you know, that's how we 40-year-old honky-ass dads do. And because when discussing the often gargantuan and malodorous results of our young'ns' peristaltic process, yo, let's face it — dropping terms like "P double-O to-the-P" can make dealing with said parenting moments slightly easier to take.

Summer of Sal

I graduated college in 1990 with a degree in studio art and not the faintest clue how to put it to use. So after skipping town, I decided to backpack through Europe, largely solo, for a month and a half. I left soon after graduation, traveling on the cheap, and quickly dropping the bit of weight I'd added over four years of beer and late-night pizza.

It was a fairly lonely time, but I fancied myself an artist and a writer, and figured solitude and thought went part and parcel with being a creative person.

In college, due to both my love for Jack Kerouac's persona in On the Road, and a used-clothes-buying habit, my friends called me Sal. I liked the name, the chance to have a persona slightly bigger than myself.

Like Kerouac's Sal, I was excited by life and on a quest to discover all it had to offer. I talked to strangers, visited friends, slept on floors, ate and drank, read voraciously, wrote pages and pages of songs and poems, sketched a bunch, and mostly had a great time.

And then I got sick.

Somewhere between Salzburg and Munich, I managed to pick up Salmonella and Rotavirus, and by the time my night train from Munich arrived in Paris, I was sick as a dog.

It was early morning (maybe 6), and I had no place to go. I hadn't been to the Louvre on my first pass through the city weeks earlier, so I went there, figuring it'd be empty right when it opened. Alas, the Louvre, as you might imagine, doesn't open quite so early in the morning. But it was a warm enough June day and so I laid down on the edge of a fountain by I.M. Pei's then-new ziggurat façade.

I'm usually a bit of a fussy sleeper, but I passed out proper right then and there, lost in the emptiness of the plaza. When I woke, hours later, there were hundreds of people milling around me, in a line that snaked through the plaza, waiting for the doors to open.

I made it through the museum, barely, and for the next day or two — knowing full well that they contained some of the city's finer public restrooms — I gamely toured many of the city's finer museums and subsisted on take-away Cantonese Rice (which I still love and which still comforts me to this day), bread, and water.

Finally, unable to keep in food any longer, and with my fever skyrocketing, I hunkered down in a crappy one-star hotel in the garment district. For more than a week, as the parasites went about their business, I was delirious and dehydrated and went without food for long stretches (days, not hours). I alternately burned and shivered, slept and could not. Looking back on it, it seems far less like Salmonella and far more like what a long heroin withdrawal must be. I awoke one night certain that I was going to die in that hotel room, and I earnestly wrote down a last will and testament so I could fall asleep again. Clearly, it didn't come to that, but in many ways, it was the most frightening and defining period of my life.

When, finally, I threw in the towel and changed my plane ticket to come home a week early (best $50 change fee I've ever spent), I weighed 20 pounds less than I do when healthy, and looked every bit as strung out as Brad Davis in Midnight Express. Still, instead of being tossed in a Turkish prison, shockingly, I passed through Customs at JFK without a second glance.

I hadn't been to a doctor in four or five years, so I went to my childhood pediatrician, who took one look at me and whose first words to me (in the pinnacle of bedside manner) were, "Wow. You look like shit." He sent me down the hall for the lab to run tests on my blood, urine, and stool, and a few days later called with the results.

The worst thing about Salmonella is that there is no curative magic pill; they just let it run its course. And run it did. It was several weeks before I felt better, and another month just getting my strength back. In the meantime, the board of health called my house (to make sure I understood the health risks of Salmonella and that I had no contact with the public food supply), and I moved back to my college stomping grounds for a final summer before real life set in.

Slowly, I recovered, and I did stomp, working my old bartending job and living in a garage-top apartment I had sublet from my acting professor — who left his old tube amp for me to use when the guitar-playing muse struck me. It did, as did many other muses. It was a magical summer, post-college and stress-free, but I was serious about life and its prospects. I had no idea what that fall would bring, yet I had nothing but optimism. I could paint and I could write. Neither paid well (and they still don't), but I was Sal Paradise, dammit, and — clad in beat Salvation Army garb — I had outlived Salmonella. I was alive, and healthy, and at the top of my game.