Fly Me

When I was just hitting puberty, or vice versa, I ran across a cartoon that still makes me smile. A man and his little boy were sitting in the den; they had just had The Talk; and the boy, looking troubled, was saying, “I like the stork idea better.”

So did I, come to think of it. Once you take to the other idea for a while it can be pretty hard to remember how unappetizing the idea of sex is to a childish mind, and, particularly, how grotesque is the application of that idea to your two (apparently normal) parents. Sir Thomas Browne, sanest and sweetest of men, made a famous complaint: “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition: it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.” You can say that again.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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When I was just hitting puberty, or vice versa, I ran across a cartoon that still makes me smile. A man and his little boy were sitting in the den; they had just had The Talk; and the boy, looking troubled, was saying, “I like the stork idea better.”

So did I, come to think of it. Once you take to the other idea for a while it can be pretty hard to remember how unappetizing the idea of sex is to a childish mind, and, particularly, how grotesque is the application of that idea to your two (apparently normal) parents. Sir Thomas Browne, sanest and sweetest of men, made a famous complaint: “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition: it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life.” You can say that again.