"What Are You Doing to That Baby?!"

An episode from the "Unimaginable" series...

A baby in his crib. What could possibly go wrong?!

It was a Sunday, Summer, 1964. I was living in our New York City apartment on 53^rd street with my Dad and my Grandmother (Mom’s mother, Grandma Theresa) who had moved in with my Dad when my mother died in April, 1964 of Cancer, when I was four months old. (That’s the subject of several other episodes in this blog, including “The 4:46” and “I Don’t Have a Ring to Give You” and “Happy Thanksgiving, Mom – Sorry I Broke Your Leg”.)

Like all Sunday mornings, this meant that my Dad would be sitting on the couch drinking coffee, smoking his L&M cigarettes, and reading the Sunday New York Times (which in those days weighed about five pounds). Grandma Theresa would be going to Mass at the Catholic Church down the block. This left only one other item – the baby. That would be me, just over a year old, probably, sleeping in my crib in the second bedroom of the apartment, where Grandma was sleeping while living with us and caring for me. No worries, she had left me in the crib and let my Dad know she would only be out for a short time. (Men did not go to Church as often as women in those days – not sure why – they just went on the Big Three – Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter.)

“I’m going to Mass, Pat. I left the baby sleeping in his crib, without a diaper. I won’t be gone long. He should be fine.” (I am reconstructing their conversation, from what my Dad related to me years later.) “Ok. Thank you, Mother.” (He always called her Mother, as I imagine my Mom and her siblings had done, not Theresa and not the less formal Mama, which is what he called his own mother. I called her Grandma Silvester and my cousins called her Grandma Theresa. No one called her Mother Theresa. LOL.) She was a very sweet, incredibly loving woman, but she was kind of formal on the outside (just as my other Grandma was and all the “old Italian ladies” I knew in my childhood), and her “resting face” always looked like she was judging you and was disappointed. At least to me, anyway. She was a wonderful grandmother and, in this case, a mother to me.

So far, so good. Grandma at Mass, Dad reading the Sunday Times. Baby asleep in crib. What could possibly go wrong?

The way my Dad told it, about an hour later, he heard shrieking coming from my room. “As if someone were killing you”, he told me. “So, I got right up and ran in to see what was happening. I opened the door, and there you were -- standing in your crib, screaming with delight, covered in your own excrement. And you were painting it everywhere – on the crib, on the walls, on yourself – everywhere.”

Houston, we have a problem.

Let us remember, my Dad worked on Wall Street. He was a conservative, forty-four-year-old man who always wore a button-down shirt, and a tie and jacket if he were leaving the house. He humored us when we tried to get him to wear jeans in the 70s, at least while gardening. When we lived in Mt. Vernon, we always had a garden in the summer (of course, we had tomato plants, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce - even corn and cantaloupe – in our garden). When I was old enough to help him with the gardening, I would wear my blue jeans and sneakers, and he would garden in his old work shoes (“wing-tips”), his old work pants and, since it was summer, it was hot, and he could be less formal because he was gardening, a short-sleeved button-down shirt. No lie. I always joked to my friends that “my Dad was born in wing-tip shoes.”

So, this is the guy who was faced with the baby throwing feces, like a monkey in a zoo. But, what to do? “I knew I had to get you to the bathtub, so I could bathe you”, but this man who had been through U.S. Army basic training, and served overseas during a war, was terrified and just could not bring himself to simply pick me up. He knew that would end badly – with both of us covered in poop. But he had to do something, after all, Mother would be home soon. So, he had to think fast.

Dad, ever the problem-solver, went out to the living room and got the New York Times he had been reading. Then, he approached me with it, using it like a shield, lest I take aim at him. “Gotcha”, he must have blurted out, as he grabbed me with “All The News That’s Fit To Print” and started wrapping me in it. Success! He managed to swaddle me in the crumpled paper, picked me up and it was off to the tub. He lifted me out of the crib and reached the door of the bedroom holding this unholy mess. Next stop, tub.

Not so fast. Wouldn’t you know it, at that exact moment, the front door sprung open and who was staring him in the face but …Mother.

The look of horror on her face stopped him dead in his tracks. Mother was not amused.

“What are you doing to that baby?!, she exclaimed. “Well, Mother, you see,” he stammered, “I was going to give him a bath…” If you saw what he did…”

Dad never got out another word. “I don’t care what he did. Give him to me.”

And that was the end of that. Dad spent the next hour cleaning up the poopy bedroom while Grandma cleaned up the poopy baby.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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Copyright, 2024 by Patrick Fraioli. All rights reserved.