Mr. N

(entry for 7/17/2024)

[Warning: This post contains references to bodily functions and bodily activities. If you are under the age of 25 or so, or are easily offended by written works intended primarily for people at that age or above it, you may want to skip this one.]

If you look up the word ‘Naïve’ in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of me.  Actually, you’ll see several pictures of me, at various ages including age 84, which is what I am now as I write this. (To illustrate how naïve I am, let’s take the example of the ‘Warning’ above. I do know perfectly well that that sort of thing is going to attract more people than it is going to put off. But I wrote it anyway. As a warning. I’m Mister N.)

 

It has always been thus. When someone knowledgeable says something meaningful, I’m always the last to know what was meant, and sometimes I never do figure it out. It gets worse. If the knowledgeable someone who is speaking says something that has overtones of sexuality or other bodily activities, I never catch on at all. Until too late.

 

For an example of my obliviousness: Until about age nine or so, I thought the only correct term for going to the bathroom the liquid way was ‘Tinkle.’ I had heard the word ‘pee,’ but thought it was a dirty word and never used it myself. I also had no idea what ‘Number One’ meant. (I had heard the term but had no clue as to its meaning.) Nor had I ever heard of Number Two at all. For that other type of bathroom activity, I was made to understand that the only acceptable term was ‘Grunt,’ called that because of the vocal noise you were making when you did it. The product of such activity was called ‘BM.’ I didn’t know what the letters stood for, only that they were to be used in that order. 

 

“I need to grunt.”

 

“Don’t forget to flush your BM.”

 

An earlier example: When I was about six, as the family was driving down a street in Denver, my dad suddenly asked me, out of the blue, if I knew the difference between a boy and a girl. I answered that a boy had short hair and a girl had long hair. He laughed and asked how they knew which way to wear their hair. Or, more importantly, when a baby was tiny and didn’t have any hair at all yet, how did you tell? I thought for a while, and then came up with the answer. Boys were sent home from the birth hospital in pale blue blankets, girls in pink. That’s how you could tell. He laughed again. How did they know which color blanket to put on the baby? That stumped me. It was many years before the answer dawned on me. And then my face turned red. Not pink or blue. Red.

 

Call me Mister N.

 

When I was nine I saw a five-year-old boy giving another small kid ‘the finger.’ I had no idea what it meant. So later that day I asked my mom. She scolded me for asking and didn’t answer the question. I had no idea why but could tell that I had violated some taboo or other. So I never asked anyone again. Later I found out what it meant. A lot later!

 

Until I was twelve I thought that a girl had only two openings in the nether regions. By now I knew they were called number one and number two, but I thought that was it. I thought ‘two’ was as high as a person could count, down there. At age twelve, when my dad and I visited Uncle Heath at his medical school in California, I was allowed to watch a medical motion picture that included all the gory details of a woman giving birth to a large baby. Thus I discovered the existence of something called a ‘vagina’ and was a bit overwhelmed. Along with a fear of being potentially swallowed by one.

 

Until I was sixteen, I thought that the only time a couple ever had sex was to produce a baby. Most six-year-olds know better, but not me. Sixteen! I honestly believed until then that my parents had had sex exactly twice in their lives, once to produce me, and once, four years later, to produce my sister. It never dawned on me that people might ever want to have sex for any other reason. But when I was sixteen I had a baby-sitting job one night, and after the kid went to sleep I wandered through the apartment looking for something to read. What I found was a book about the normal sexual activity of adults. No pictures, just words. (I don’t think I could have managed to look at the pictures, even if there had been any.) What I found out from the words was that, according to this expert, married couples sometimes had sex as frequently as two or three times per week. I was flabbergasted. I had heard that the world population was exploding, but now I finally understood why. (It was another year before I learned that there was such a thing as birth control. I thought condoms were rather strange balloons.)

 

Do call me Mister N if you please.

 

Until I was about eighteen or so, I thought the slur-term ‘homo’ meant somebody who masturbated. I also thought that ‘queer’ meant odd or strange. I didn’t understand why people laughed at the Christmas-carol line “Now we don our gay apparel.” It never dawned on me that people could be sexually attracted to other people of the same gender, let alone do anything about it. This in spite of the fact that a boy about my age had once crawled into my bed, and had tried to get me to fondle him and to allow him to fondle me. I merely tucked myself down between my legs and ignored him. He finally gave up and went back to his own bed. But it never dawned on me that it could mean anything. Or that it could ever happen to anybody else. Or that the approached person might in some cases actually respond. 

 

There’s a picture I love of a puppetized (is that a word?) Mister Rogers, from a very long-ago episode of the kids’ show Mister Rogers Neighborhood. You don’t see the live, actual Mister Rogers himself. You see his puppet, who in turn is holding another puppet. This one is just a little gray blob. (I don’t remember what color it was in real life.) That little gray blob is me. No idea what is coming or what has already come. Or what is going. To happen, that is. 

When I was a sophomore in college, a guy once called me a “Little Fruit.” I thought he meant I was a vegetarian who didn’t like vegetables. OK, I’m lying. I didn’t think that. But on the other hand I didn’t know what he meant, either. I didn’t find out till much later. And of course when I finally did find out, I was mightily offended. I didn’t think of myself as effeminate or anything even remotely related to that. In fact, at the time he said it, I doubt I knew what effeminate meant.

 

Mister N strikes again.

 

I feel rather certain that by now you think I’m fibbing or at least exaggerating. I’m not. I really came to my understanding of the facts of life rather late. And I don’t mean merely the birds and the bees. I mean all the facts of life. I still don’t know or understand most of them.

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