When I was six years old, in Southern California in 1974, I remember quite clearly a conversation I had with a classmate of mine. I don’t remember the boy’s name, but I remember his face, and the expression he had—he was lording it over me and the other boys listening to him in a semi-circle in our first-grade homeroom class, confident in his superior knowledge, yet at the same time hiding a tinge of worry, as he was deploying this superior knowledge without really understanding it.
He was telling us a new development in what had heretofore been a rather boring saga. Previously, he had told us—casually and not particularly interestedly—that he was going to have a baby brother or a baby sister: A perfectly common occurrence among our six-year-old set. In fact a few months before, I myself had told my clique of friends that my mom was going to have a baby, and had gotten an earful of varying opinions about having young siblings—usually negative if it was a girl, but slightly less negative if it was a boy.
But then my friend gathered us all around him with a new piece of startling news: He wasn’t going to get a baby brother or a baby sister after all—and the phrase he used to explain this new development is a phrase I have remembered quite clearly all these years later: He explained that they had “vacuumed up the baby from mommy’s tummy.”
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