Fertile Stares

Last Saturday, my husband and I took the kids to a local park. While Tim and my older three attempted to make themselves puke on the merry-go-round, I took Cameron for a walk on a paved trail that winded through the woods and several people's backyards.

I had been walking for about two minutes when exhaustion and the fumes from the nearby freeway overcame me. I stopped with the intent of asking the person who was walking several feet behind me if he/she happened to know how long exactly the walking loop was. To my great delight, the person in question happened to be a man in his mid-sixties who was lacking a shirt and most of his teeth.

Instead of answering my questions, the man told me that he had stopped smoking cigars eleven days and 5 hours earlier. Before I could congratulate the man on his impressive achievement, he asked if he could walk in front of me from that point on. "It's hard to walk with my eyes closed," he said.

I fell right into this one.

"Why are you walking with your eyes shut?" I asked.

"I'm a father of seven," the man explained with a straight face. "I can impregnate a woman just by looking at her!"

At that, I abruptly turned the stroller around and began jogging briskly in the opposite direction.

By the time I reached the playground, I had thought of two good reasons why I should be immune from this man's fertile stare:

1. The Pill
2. A person wearing knee-length shorts and a sun visor bearing the name of an over-the-counter heartburn medication can hardly be called a woman.


P.S. My daughter gave me the visor for Mother's Day. They were handing them out at the grocery store a few weeks back.