By Tim Sanders

Last Thursday I sat down at my keyboard and went through my usual ritual, preparing to write my weekly column. I closed my eyes, pressed my index fingers to my forehead, and concentrated with all my might. After my head began to ache, I opened my eyes and ate several of the peanuts I’d placed on the TV tray next to the computer. Hemingway wrote best when surrounded by gin bottles, and I write best when surrounded by peanut shells. Maybe if I could tolerate gin, my stuff would be a little better, but I know my limitations.

I finally settled on discussing an article in the September 28 edition of the South African Cape Times, which explained that the Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax, England, had "stopped visitors cooing at other people’s newborn babies for fear of trampling over the youngsters’ human rights."

The article quoted the hospital’s neo-natal manager, Debbie Lawson, who said, apparently with a straight face:

Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.

Well, I knew that I, as a bonafide, self-actualized ex-little person with an overabundance of personal dignity, and rights up the wazoo, wouldn’t necessarily want to be coochie-cooed at, but that was only a matter of personal preference. I didn’t believe that cooing was dangerous. I’d known several people who were constantly cooed at as babies, and none of them grew into dysfunctional adults who thought they were homing pigeons.

So I set out to write a column exploring either the real or imagined dangers of unsolicited cooing, and whether or not there was something in the atmosphere above the British Isles which turned the inhabitants there into a bunch of umbrella-toting loons. Then the phone rang.

"To whom am I speaking?" asked the lady on the other end.

I appreciated her good grammar, but still gave my standard reply to that kind of question, "You called. You go first."

This confused her for a moment, and then she apologized for dialing the wrong number and hung up.

The distraction made me lose my train of thought. Oh yeah, what could the deleterious effects of cooing be? I pondered that for awhile, and almost came up with something when the phone rang again.

"Is this Timothy Sanders?" the gentleman asked.

I told him it all depended on who was calling.

"Is this Timothy?" he asked again. I knew he was either a salesman or an undertaker. Nobody else calls me Timothy.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"I’m Nathan VanDerworter. Is this Timothy?"

He was persistent, but I wasn’t going down wihout a fight. I counterpunched. "Who are you with?" I asked. The question was not aimed at determining if his boss’s wife, Ramona, was sitting in his lap, only at finding out just which corporation he was shilling for.

He realized he didn’t have the stamina to go another round, so he hung up.
I went back to my keyboard. It crossed my mind that if anyone could come up with research proving that cooed babies were ten times as likely to grow up to become telemarketers, then maybe cooing should be outlawed on this side of the Atlantic, too. When the phone rang again, I was ready.

"Coochie-coo?" I offered, hoping to strike a responsive chord from the caller's dark, neo-natal past.

It was one of those guys who raises money for the Alabama Deputy Sheriffs’ Coalition, or whatever it’s called. "Coochie-coo" obviously did not ring a bell where he was concerned. I knew what he wanted, though, because he, or somebody like him, calls on a regular basis. He was going to ask me to help the widows and children of deceased deputy sheriffs with a generous cash donation because the deputies apparently made a whole lot less money than I did, and usually died penniless, without burial insurance. Since I am relatively sure that the remaining deputies wouldn’t care much about contributing to my widow were she to do me in with an iron skillet, I told the guy I was broke. "I gave my last fifteen cents to the state troopers," I said.

He hung up immediately, oblivious to my financial plight. He did not offer to send me a check or a money order. He did not even say goodbye. Go figure. Maybe the Deputy Sheriffs' Coalition could raise money with fines collected from visitors to local maternity wards. I mulled that over, and from there went on to ponder whether or not traumatic early childhood coochie-cooing might have caused Charo’s pathological speech defect. The phone rang once more. This time it was one of those voice activated pre-recorded messages, which offered me a luxury suite at some overpriced hotel in that vacation paradise, Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I did not stay on the line for the details.

My fifth call was from a meat delivery service which also installed gutters, and the sixth was from a lady wanting me to sign up for a credit card. When I told her I wasn’t interested, she asked me why. I didn’t appreciate her attitude, so after a long story about my recent incarceration, I told her, in my best Billy Bob Thornton, Sling Blade voice, that I was naked, and asked her what she was wearing. She decided I didn’t need a credit card.

I received a seventh call from a representative of SAD, which turned out to be the American Society of Dyslexics. He was not soliciting money; he’d simply transposed the first three digits of the number he was calling with the last three. He said he’d suffered a serious personal injury through no fault of his own when he sped past one of those pesky red octagonal signs in Birmingham because, as he put it, "I didn’t need any POTS!" He thought I was an attorney–some guy named either Nutshell or Shelnutt, he wasn’t sure which.

My last call was one of those which communicates with you by a series of clicks, and then a dial tone. I discovered that when you throw a cordless phone against the wall several times, you’ll find that Satan is not in there, only a few plastic parts and some tiny wires.

So, due to constant telephone interruptions, I didn’t finish my cooing column. You’ll have to draw your own conclusions as to whether it is more cruel to smile and coo at a squalling, grunting, pooping in his diaper newborn who probably cannot distinguish you from a piece of nursery furniture, or to telephone a perfectly innocent columnist who seldom grunts and absolutely never poops in his diaper, and annoy the living crap out of him until he discards his peanuts and turns to gin.

I did make a mental note to have our phone number added to the National Do Not Call Registry. That is a federal program which, when a telemarketer calls you, will instantly dispatch fifteen large FBI agents to hunt him down and beat him to death with a New York City phone directory. It’s the very least a generous, compassionate society like ours can do for us.