Lesson One: Don't actually sit on the baby

Well, my essay rejections are coming in fast and furious, so I’ve been a little busy, what with filing and such. And really, I blush. Some barely seem like rejections at all. I’m pretty familiar around those New Yorker offices, so they ask me whether the rat is finally dead and did I get my brakes fixed.

"Keep pitching us!" They say. "We saw something round and pink fly by, and it smelled like bacon."

So I’m thinking, just as the banana plant so accurately predicted the direction of our economy, can a corn plant do the same for my writing career?

My corn is getting its male bits pretty early in the game, and that doesn’t bode well. I think the stalk should be at least my height before it goes through puberty. Who around here also admitted to detassling corn as one of their nasty kid-jobs (Jean? Petrea?).

Those nasty kid jobs teach you a thing or two. Take babysitting.

That was my profession, from about ages 12 to 14. As a teen-aged babysitter, I could fix hotdogs for the kids and tell them when to go to bed. And if they didn’t eat or wouldn’t sleep, I scraped the dogs into the garbage disposal and we all crashed in front of the TV on the livingroom floor. Really, I felt my true job was to be able to call my mom in case of fire or if one of them died.

But, inadvertently, I learned some stuff.

After the fact, babysitting taught me one has to do a disgusting thing with that diaper before it goes in the washer.

Babysitting taught me how to apply make-up. I’d spend most of the evening in the wife’s powder room, working on my Maybelline eyes. Do you know, moms out there, that every babysitter you hire will rifle through your Estee Lauder? Maybe that’s where you got that cold sore.

Babysitting taught me you don’t ask your boyfriend over when there’s a full liquor cabinet. (Story for another day.)

I find it amazing when someone claims to “love children,” as though children were pudding. One either likes pudding or doesn't like pudding, because all pudding is pretty much the same. But I think we become more pudding-like as adults, once we learn the fine arts of equivocation and compromise. But each child is so much his or her own person until the edges wear away.

And I don't like it. Pudding, I mean.