Finally, they handed me a pamphlet called "The Pathfinder" which, it is fair to say, essentially portrayed all members of the opposite sex as wellsprings of evil without giving any information.
My parents just laughed when I said, "The guy who is the author needs to be put on medication."
No further information was forthcoming.
So, I went to the next best place to learn about sex -- The Gutter.
And for years I bragged that "everything valuable I ever learned about sex I learned from The Gutter."
And not only did I teach myself about the plumbing, I also figured out on my own what God's plan was for our plumbing.
Years later, in college, I was dating a girl 4 years older than myself. We were having dinner with her parents in their Havertown, Pennsylvania home. At one point, my girlfriend said, out loud at the dinner table, with complete seriousness, "I just don't get why there's such a big fuss over petting!" and she took her right hand and stroked the hair on the top of her head. I thought to myself, "Well, now her parents know what we haven't done." I was tempted to say out loud, "I'll show her later," as a joke, but I guessed that her father would have dumped his plate of spaghetti on me. So, I just winced ambiguously in front of everyone.
At any rate, after Rise` and I married and had sons, in our house there was no specific "birds and the bees day" for our sons. We gave them a constant flow of age-appropriate information on sex and relationships in their lives -- usually, without their asking. The annoying thing was when they became old enough to say "no," and the learning stopped.
When little Nhu, the Vietnamese girl whom we babysat for years, became old enough to ask questions, I had limited permission from her mother to answer "plumbing"-level questions. The first thing she asked me was, "Do babies breathe in the womb with gills?"
I told her that the gills she had heard about were "vestigial," explained what that meant, and explained that the baby gets all oxygen through the umbilical cord attachment to the baby's "belly button." "The baby inhales and exhales amniotic fluid, but that is only exercise to prepare the baby for breathing. It does not give the baby any oxygen."
"What???!!!" she asked, "There's liquid in the baby's lungs in the womb???!!!"
"Sure!" I said. "You inhaled and exhaled amniotic fluid when you were in your mother's womb."
She fell silent. I and that kid were both lefties who could almost read each other's mind. So, I knew what she was going to ask next.
"Do babies pee and poop in the womb?" she asked, "And, so, do they breathe that in, too?"
Okay. I knew the answer to that question, but I confess that I did not learn it until 1987, when Rise` gave birth to our middle son, Reid.
Because Rise` and I used Lamaze when she gave birth, I was in attendance at each of the boys' births.
When Reid popped-out, the first thing he did was pee all over the doctor.
I thought, "What???!!!"
I said, "Wait a second, doctor!!! He can pee???!!! Can babies pee in the womb?"
"Oh, yeah!" he answered. "Of course! Much of the fluid in the womb is pee! A little bit of it is meconium fluid, from the bowels, which is sterile!"
"But the baby inhales and exhales that stuff!" I objected.
"The pee from a baby in the womb is very clean. And the sterile meconium from the bowels is not a problem unless it is very concentrated. So, no problem," the doctor answered.
"But the amniotic fluid smells so sweet!" I objected.
"Like I said," the doctor answered, "The baby's pee in the womb is very clean."
When I left Rise` and the new baby's bedside at the hospital to go to our Jackson Avenue home that cold, snowy day to check on Rise`'s daughters and to tell them and the neighbors about Reid's birth, as I drove up to our house I saw our 9 months pregnant neighbor Janey (who lived with her hubby "Doc" in what is now Briggs' house) gingerly stepping through the snow to get to her car.
"Hey, Janey!" I yelled, "Do you know that warm feeling in your heart when you get pregnant? Well, it's not love!"
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