Anyway, we showed up for the first class, along with about 15 other couples consisting of women who were going to have babies and men who were going to have to watch them. They all had matching pillowcases. In fact, some couples had obviously purchased tasteful pillowcases especially for childbirth classes; these were the North Shore couples, wearing golf and tennis apparel, who were planning to have wealthy babies. They sat together through all the classes and eventually agreed to get together for brunch.

The classes consisted of sitting in a brightly lighted room and openly discussing, among other things, the uterus. How I can remember a time, in high school, when I would have killed for reliable information on the uterus. But having discussed it at length, having seen actual full-color diagrams, I must say that although I respect it a great deal as an organ, it has lost much of its charm.

Our childbirth class instructor was very big on the uterus because that's where babies generally spend their time before birth. She also spent some time on the ovum, which is near the ovaries. What happens is the ovum hangs around reading novels and eating chocolates until along comes this big crowd of spermatozoa, which are tiny, very stupid, one celled organisms. They're looking for the ovum, but most of them wouldn't know it if they fell over it. They swim around for days, trying to mate with the pancreas and whatever other organs they bump into. But eventually one stumbles into the ovum, and the happy couple parades down the fallopian tubes to the uterus.

In the uterus, the "Miracle of Life" begins, unless you believe the Miracle of Life doesn't begin there, and if you think I'm going to get into that, you're crazy. Anyway, the ovum starts growing rapidly and dividing into lots of specialized little parts, not unlike the federal government. Within six weeks, it has developed all the organs it needs to drool; by 10 weeks, it has the ability to cry in restaurants. In childbirth class they showed us actual pictures of a fetus developing inside a uterus. They didn't tell us how these pictures were taken, but I suspect it involved a great deal of drinking.