I’ve had this story rolling through my mind since last night whilst I was making spaghetti (the tie-in is later revealed, dear reader). It is a story of innocence and odd mental pathways of our elders, oh yes. I was probably 13 or 14 at the time, so this is probably riddled with half-truths and filled in with egregious lies. But I bid you read on…

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So, I was in the Boy Scouts as a young man — an experience I very much value to this very day. (Ed: It should be noted that the lowest levels of the BSA are quite OK, but the upper levels of administration have shown themselves to be homophobic and exclusionary). But that is neither here nor there. Up until I was about 14 we lived in Middletown, a suburb in Eastern Jefferson county (now Metro Louisville) and I was a member of Troop 71 which was sponsored by the Epiphany Catholic Church. One Thursday, at our weekly meeting, we had a visitor from another Troop — an elderly man whose name escapes me, but suffice it to say he had been scouting since the 20′s or 30′s. I remember him as a slightly Wilford-Brimleyesque man replete with white moustache. He was here to talk to us about the stamp collecting merit badge as he was apparently quite the philatelist. We quickly went through our weekly points-of-business, and then we all congregated around this gent (who also reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt) to have him talk to us about the ways and means of the philatelic hobby.

As we all settled around him in a semi-circle with his back to one of the windows in the youth center we called home, he began to explain to us that anyone and everyone collects stamps. Old, young, black, white, rich, poor. He could have left it alone with that, but no, gentle reader, he did not. He began scuttling down a side-road of conversation that I’m sure we’ve all encountered. We being young Scouts had no reason to wonder why we started to turn down the grisly road that I am about to explain, so we followed the leader.

“You see, young masters, that I sometimes work with retarded and otherwise slow children. Some of them have been abused by their no-good parents or perhaps just neglected by people of the same sort. One of the sorrier examples of these children is a young child that we have taken to referring to as the ‘dip baby’. You see as a young babe he was often inflicted with cholic, a malady that haunts many a young child. Cholic causes a child to be most cantankerous and will cause the child to cry for hours upon end. As you could imagine this can be most irritating.”

“One unfortunate day, the mother of this child had reached her pitifully low tolerance for the bellowing of this sorry child, and decided to attempt to soothe this child of his contemptuous malady. Normally, this can be achieved by running a vacuum-cleaner or a trip in an motor-car. This mother, however, chose a method of cessation known only prior to medieval torturers and the cannibals* of Darkest Africa. She chose to dip this child into a pot of boiling water.”

Needless to say, we were taken aback at where this old man had taken us! We had somehow strayed off of Main Street, Anytown, USA into some horrible and macabre back-alley. Why had he brought us here? What was to happen next? He continued…

“Children, you see the mother was quite possibly insane — Perhaps she was syphilitic or had forsaken proper child-rearing instinct for the lure of some chemical retreat — I cannot say. The mother was quickly imprisoned, and her child made a ward of the state. He has since made a very painful recovery, and lives everyday in near-constant agony. His one love in this terrible world? Stamp collection. I hope this goes to show you that anyone, even a child dipped in boiling water, can enjoy the wonderful world of stamp-collecting.”

So, there we were finally were, back onto the safe road, having been dragged through the twisted wood of this man’s horrifying yarn. We were all fairly shocked, I think, but he continued on to explain to us the ins and outs of stamp collecting, and soon enough it was all over. I don’t remember much of what he said about stamps that night, but I certainly learned a lesson about innocence and the odd mental pathways of our elders. Perhaps you have as well.

* – it should be noted that he had, many years earlier while I was a Cub Scout, stood in front of a large audience of Cub Scouts, ranging from Tiger Cubs (6 to 7 years of age) to Webelos (11 to 12 years of age), and detailed the process by which he had seen Congolese cannibals make shrunken heads.