One of my twin daughters, Chloe, who is almost two, came into the kitchen the other week carrying a bronzed paperweight shaped like a penis. It's actually shaped like my penis, because I had a mold of my penis made one year to make the paperweight as a gift for my girlfriend at the time. When we broke up, she returned it — a fact that has always wounded me because of the very literal nature of the rejection.
I wasn't surprised to see Chloe wielding the paperweight; she and her sister, Isabella, have recently discovered that they can work together and negotiate furniture around a room to gain access to higher places, such as the shelf where the paperweight rests — I mean, I am a good parent; I don't just leave penis paperweights sitting around at kid height.
Or at least I thought I was a good parent until Isabella came trailing in the kitchen after Chloe, pulling apart a pack of rolling papers. I panicked — climbing on furniture to reach heavy, blunt objects is one thing, but Isabella had gotten into my nightstand drawers.
Fortunately, a child under the age of two doesn't know what rolling papers are, so after I gathered them up (along with the paperweight) and found another distraction for the twins, I went back to my bedroom to consider what I regard as a very sacred, private place: my drawers.
Every father has one or two drawers in which he keeps his most valuable possessions.
Inside lay the things that had started to dominate my mind over the past year: magazines full of naked women.
I know this because when I was in seventh grade my friend Chris brought a condom to school that he'd found in his dad's nightstand drawer.
"There's a whole box of them," he said as he displayed the plain Trojan in its crinkly blue wrapper to a group of us who'd gathered around first base on the softball field. "I think my parents might even use them."
This got me thinking what might be lurking in my own father's bedside drawers, what adult enterprises lie in the darkness, awaiting discovery. As soon as I got home I headed straight for his nightstand, a two-drawer mahogany affair that matched my mother's on her side of the bed.
The top drawer yielded little: a check book, some spare keys, an extra wallet with my dad's initials on it, and an old cigar box filled with bits of paper. The bottom drawer, however, was a revelation.
How is it I'd never thought to crack open this treasure trove? Inside lay the things that had started to dominate my mind over the past year: magazines full of naked women. Oh, it was glorious! There were at least a dozen, mostly Playboy, but there was at least one issue of Penthouse. With trembling hands, I took an issue and retreated to my room.
