And Now I Know the Rest of the Story

Growing up, we all had moments in our lives that impacted us and strongly shaped how we view the world. Some of those moments shook the foundation of what we knew, or what we thought we knew, and taught us a great deal – possibly more than we wanted to know.

A lot of things fit all of those conditions: the first time we learned about death, the first time we ate a school-issued lunch and, of course, the first time we learned where babies come from.

As I’m sure is the case for most people, the first time I learned where babies come from was a jarring, unwelcome experience. The information was heaped on me in an unsolicited manner, much like the overcaffeniated people selling timeshares who make it difficult to go anywhere these days, including even Dairy Queen.

I was eight years old, and the messenger of darkness was an older woman – a nine year old by the name of Natalie Something. (I’m omitting her last name not to protect her, but because I don’t remember it. It’s not important.) I was enjoying a sunny afternoon outdoors at my then after-school program (it’s no longer my after-school program), when this harbinger of evil skipped over to me with a grin on her face.

She asked me the seemingly innocent question, “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

Not knowing the devastation she planned to deliver, I happily obliged by answering, “I have one brother.”

Barely able to control her giggles, she informed me, “That means your parents had sex twice.”

She skipped away, giggling even more furiously than when she approached, leaving me shocked and confused. Not to mention a little nauseous.

I don’t remember how it was that I knew about sex, or how much of the particulars I knew (like why people participated), but I did know about it because I was shaken by the revelation. I didn’t have to ask what sex was, just why God would allow such a thing to be true. Perhaps I saw something on TV after staying up past my bed time, or maybe I heard someone’s older brother talk about it. However I learned of it, I never gave it much thought until Natalie’s brief biology lesson.

In my mind, I probably thought sex was just something done by actors, and even then only because they were getting paid to do it. If anyone in real life actually did it, it was only those people who lived on the fringes of society – belly dancers, lion tamers, New Yorkers. These types of people.

If a subject wasn’t talked about on The Dukes of Hazard, I didn’t care. For all I knew, Daisy wore those skimpy shorts because they were the only pair she had. Looking back on it, that’s true. No one on that show ever changed their clothes. Ever! I know they were poor, but if they could afford enough gas to drive 100 mph all over the state of Georgia, surely Uncle Jesse could afford to go down to the thrift store for ONE new shirt.

I’m getting off topic.

At any rate, as I watched Natalie ask the same question of each of her peers, subsequently destroying the will of the other kids on the playground, I dismissed the notion that my parents secretly put her up to it. My memory is fuzzy after this. Before completely blacking out, I think I ran inside hoping no one would see me and start to think about what my parents had been up to. I was also grateful that I wasn’t the kid in my class who had five brothers and sisters.

(At this point I should mention that three years earlier, a different girl told me Santa Claus isn’t real. If it had been the same girl, you could argue that I grew up around a child with a particular mean streak. However, the fact that two completely unconnected little girls delivered these pieces of information speaks volumes about the female population. Somehow I’m not gay.)

Despite Natalie’s efforts to crush my fragile soul, I eventually grew into a reasonably well-adjusted adult (insert your own joke here). Nevertheless, I can assure you that my son won’t learn about the birds and the bees, or even hear the term ‘sex,’ until he’s 27. And my daughter won’t learn of it until she’s 45. Why the discrepancy in their ages? Well… because that’s just the way it is. I don’t have to explain myself to you. I’m the dad, I make the decisions.

And I’m confident that I’ll have as much control over the situation as my parents had when I first learned the facts.

Yikes.

Cue the Scary Fish Music

There are only a few great television traditions to look forward to each year: the Super Bowl, A Christmas Story on Dec. 24, Duke losing in the NCAA tournament and Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

During Shark Week, the Discovery Channel runs programming devoted to sharks in some form or another (as they did again recently). Whether it’s stories about world record-setting catches, documentaries about the history of sharks, interviews with people who have been attacked, or the network’s regular shows adopting a shark theme for the week, the programs never fail to entertain.

A lot of times on these shows, people will intentionally get in harm's way for the sake of our viewing pleasure by jumping into shark-infested waters and begging the animals to attack them. I often wonder what these people’s health insurance premiums are like, or if they lie to insurance companies about what they do for a living and just hope none of the adjusters see them on TV. That’s probably a safe bet because I imagine a lot of insurance adjusters only watch Sean Hannity or historical accounts of Native Americans getting robbed of their land and stripped of all their natural resources.

Anyway, Shark Week programming also strikes fear into its viewers by offering evidence that, at the point of birth, most sharks are roughly the size of a subway car. On top of that, during the first week of its life, a baby shark is taught by its mother to crawl on land and hunt down small children as they stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Shark Week even provides some comic relief because there’s always at least one documentary which says humans are more of a threat to sharks than they are to us. Yet these documentaries never show footage of a surfer emerging from the water, arms raised in victory, with a dorsal fin hanging from his mouth.

I know, I know, every year thousands of sharks are poached by hunters, but by and large the practice is limited to the eastern hemisphere of the globe. Not that that makes it right, I just personally don’t know anyone who’s ever had shark fin soup or has the complete set of a Great White’s upper and lower jaw mounted on their wall.

When I hear that we’re more dangerous to them than vice-versa, I don’t think about the reality of sharks being hunted, I instead think about the fantasy of a person wrestling a shark. It’s what we as American males do. We like to picture two creatures – human, animal or a mix of both – and imagine which one would win in a fight.

If you're factoring in strategy, sharks have multiple rows of teeth, and each tooth has a column of serrated “mini teeth” running vertically along its side. They clamp down on their prey, then whip their head back and forth, effectively sawing into their victim. My money’s on the shark.

I think we all went to high school with a guy who we thought had teeth like this (someone who probably repeated the 10th grade a number of times), only to learn he simply suffered from a severe lack of oral hygiene rather than being the product of some evolutionary man-fish crossbreeding. Whatever the cause, that guy was always in a lot of fights and he always won. It’s mother nature’s way – if you have shark teeth, you are winning most fights. You may not climb the corporate ladder, but that’s an issue for another day.

What was my point? Oh yeah, Shark Week is cool. And don’t get in a fight with a guy who has rows of teeth.