DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

My 4-month-old son has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for two massive, head-jerking, whiplash-inducing double takes. Before old age takes over and my brain finishes ossifying, I’ll commit the stories to the global digital archive, which unlike my memory has a decent chance of lasting more than 15 minutes.

Last Fall, my forward-thinking (and still-pregnant) wife retrieved an infant doll from the toy bin at her office, with the idea that we could practice diapering without the added stress of a wailing baby, flailing limbs, or fresh warm feces. I wasn’t particularly motivated to play papa with the doll, so I ignored it, and like anything that sits in one place in the house awaiting attention for a couple days, it became invisible. I forgot about it.

Then one day, in a rush to shower and dress for some event or other, I dashed into the bedroom. Out of the corner of one eye, I spied what appeared to be a newborn baby laying naked on its back on my side of the bed, arms reaching up as if to say, “Just because I was born a couple weeks early doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like a diaper right about now.”

It’s totally unreasonable to believe that (a) my wife would give birth without my knowing or (b) even if she had, that she’d leave the baby unattended and naked in the bedroom, on my side of the bed no less. Just tell that to my visual cortex. Or my heart, which stopped.

The second neck-wrencher happened just a couple weeks ago. It, too, regards diapers, but then what about newborn babies does not? Raphael was in the middle of a diaper change when I noticed, glancing sideways from one eye, what appeared to be a clump of gray pubic hair on his testicles. The juxtaposition of old-man-pubic-hair with hairless-newborn-infant was too much to process rationally. Had my head spun any faster I might have knocked the house off its foundation.

The hair turned out to be a piece of fuzz from the lamb’s wool playmat, which I’ve now taken to shaving daily as preventive maintenance for my cervical spine.