baby making in progress

Catalogue of delights: 5

There is delight in the way our minds find spurious associations between things. I was looking out the window of a coffee shop at a heap of snow recently formed by an overnight storm, when suddenly my eye caught it: a small white dot on the window, and above it, a trail following a sud of soap. “Baby making in progress” was my first thought. Baby making in progress. I rolled my eyes and laughed at myself. Jesus, I thought. He would be disappointed. I was then brought back to high school health class, which reminded me of the young female teacher my friends and I oogled on the daily like helpless puppies. I don’t think we learned much in that class, but I do remember how strange it was to watch the movie on baby making. You know the one. Heavily pixelated, generic voiceover, 1990s feel to it. We, the freshmen, were deemed mature enough, supposedly, to bear witness to the miraculous, complex machinery of our collective conception. I watched, mesmerized, as animated swarms of sperm raced shoulder to shoulder in an attempt to create new life, to give themselves over for the continuation of our species. Not all of them would make it the narrator said with dramatic indifference. But, as if it were inevitable, there would be an eventual winner. There had to be, he said. That’s the promise of obsessive single-mindedness, singularity of purpose. All they ‘wanted’ to do, all they ‘lived’ for (how lovely and unavoidable our tendency to anthropomorphize) was this. And, perhaps, to stun naive, unlearned high schoolers in Southern California. I was a hopelessly lost child who knew only of video games and brotherhood. That was life, just me and the boys (though sometimes girls were involved too). But perhaps I wasn’t so different from the little swimmers that trained day in and day out within the confines of my developing body. They were my first clue that you didn’t need much to get far in life. All you needed, maybe, was intention and the willingness to swim. How delightful it is then that I am where I am, a decade and a half later, giving thanks to gravity, a watermark, a dried up soap sud, and the beautiful machinations that animate our minds.