Last night I witnessed a distinguished group of elderly ladies suddenly disintegrate into babbling, wide-eyed, blithering idiots.
“OOOH!” the women said, “oodle, oodle, cha-cha-cha-cha, figgidy, figgidy, blurp!”
It was a sad moment.
All of us watched as some cupped their hands over their faces for a few seconds, only to emerge with stricken looks of crossed eyes and raised eyebrows.
Others stuck their tongues out.
Oh, the pain of it all. Was it mass hysteria? Group dementia? It was a horrible and embarrassing scene to watch.
The six-month-old infant the old lady brigade was “talking” to, however, was greatly amused.
Said baby began to gurgle, which is a nice way of saying he burped and drooled all over the place.
I do not coo at children. Nor do I pinch them, squeeze them, or throw them up in the air. For the record, I have never made a motorcycle noise on a baby’s belly.
This is not to say that I don’t like babies or don’t make an effort to entertain them. Nay, nay. I just strongly believe there are certain precautions that must be taken when playing with a baby. Rule number one: babies have the unique power to turn people into fools and make them forget the English language for brief periods of time.
Rule number two: babies, despite looking cute and cuddly, love to jam their tiny fingers right into your pupils and can perform other feats of super-human strength when you’re least expecting it.
Rule number three: all babies look like a short version of Winston Churchill unless they’re yours.
For the record, when mother says, “Isn’t she the cutest little darling you’ve ever seen?” The correct answer is NOT, “on the bright side, there are some South Pacific cultures that consider one huge eyebrow attractive.”
Rule number four: babies are like bottles of club soda. They explode all over you whenever you’re wearing a tie you like or a newly cleaned outfit.
So before I bounce a baby on my knee, I often ask strategic questions like, “Hmmm, when did little jr. last eat?”
I probably got this behavior from my childhood nanny, Mama Jack, who was always asking “when did you last eat?”
In retrospect, this probably stemmed not from rule number four, but from the fact that Mama Jack was what polite people might call “sturdy.”
Her husband, who was not a polite person, called her “big as a damn house!”
She had a distinct fondness for Mississippi mud cakes, Little Debbies, and peanut brittle. That woman wolfed down enough sugar on a daily basis to give moose diabetes.
So naturally, Mama Jack’s was heaven for a little boy. Unfortunately, Mama Jack also liked to bounce me on her lap (which was, for all practical purposes, somewhere out over her knees when she was sitting down). Without getting too graphic, let’s just say that bouncing and Little Debbies do not go together.
My second babysitter was named “Miss Grace Gray.” Never “Miss Gray.” Not “Miss Grace.” But the whole thing, said very quickly, “mizzgracegray.” When I first met her, she had been one hundred years old for the past twenty years.
Miss Grace Gray lived with a noisy yellow parakeet and Methuselah’s older sister, Eunice, two blocks from my house.
They didn’t drive. They didn’t garden. I’m not sure I even remember them breathing.
Since they were both Southerners, most people referred to them as “old spinsters.”
Had they lived in Los Angeles, however, they’d have probably gotten a TV sitcom and a Vice Presidential commendation.
As old spinsters in Alabama, however, all they got was me.
I liked Miss Grace Gray, even if she and the blue-haired Miss Eunice would kiss me with yucky old lady kisses.
I vowed to never do that to harmless children.
Tragically, one evening Mama and Daddy came home and found Miss Grace Gray pinned under our Christmas tree.
She had not heeded rule number two, and I had toppled our tree, partridge, angels, and all, onto her.
Evidently, the trauma of being hit upside the head with a Frasier Fir proved to be too much excitement for Miss Grace Gray, so she retired.
When I was five, Mama and Daddy found Miss Dorothy, a large, Frigidaire of a woman who could fry up the best chicken in the state of Alabama.
I sure loved Miss Dorothy, even if she did take out her teeth when she got angry. On her first day, she sat me down and said, “You are the young man of the house, so I’m never going to talk down to you because you have a responsibility! A duty!”
“To do what?” I asked.
“To have a good time and not worry about all us old people gooing, pulling, and pinching on you.”
To this day, I still don’t.
—Morgan Murphy