ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, September 11, 1996 TAG: 9609130179
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BEN BEAGLE
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
As a person now coming up on the BIG 70, I can tell you that it doesn't help a lot when your oldest daughter hits the BIG 40 - which will happen on the 24th of this month.
I mean, what did Ann John Beagle Beheler have to go and do that for?
Society expects people my age to get completely syrupy about their children. I tend to remember diapers and years of great anxiety.
When we brought this kid home to our new $11,950 precut house, I watched all night to make sure she was breathing.
Bringing a baby home was a trifle more complicated than taking in Pixie, our late, but still-revered, white boxer.
Pixie scattered a lot of water on the kitchen floor when she drank, but you didn't have to burp her.
Ann came before Pampers. It was a time when diaper-changing tested what you were made of. A lot of men snapped and were never the same again. I survived, and my diaper-changing technique was a thing of great beauty.
Those were times when men were men and women were even better than that.
People who lived in $11,950 houses couldn't afford clothes dryers. I'm not even sure they'd been invented yet.
This meant:
(A) You subscribed to a diaper service and admired the guy who came in the truck to pick up the used ones.
This was a good solution, but it had its drawbacks. It cost a lot of money and sometimes the truck with the clean supply was late and you almost died from worrying that it wouldn't come.
(B) You washed the diapers at home and hung them on the line, which was good for you because it got you out into the fresh air and made you feel kind of like a pioneer.
Drawbacks again. In the winter you froze your fingers hanging them on the line and the diapers themselves froze to the consistency of taco shells and you had to be careful not to break them before they thawed out.
But, boy, did we have fun. The second Christmas, she trashed the tree. I had no idea babies did things like that.
Pretty soon, she took up chewing mothballs, which certainly made for lively times around the house.
Now, she has two kids of her own, raised in the Pampers era, and the clock is running.
Don't expect me to turn into a sentimental old fool - except to say I thought she was headed toward a career in Hollywood the winter she wore that little red coat we bought at a long-gone genuine downtown department store.
LENGTH: Medium: 53 linesby CNB