Letter From a Country Run Entirely by Babies
Dear Uncle Barry,
Sorry I haven’t written in some time. Some events can be truly extraordinary here, and some simply banal. There is an awful lot of time spent doing housework — but in this case my house is a mud hut with a dirt floor.
Without washing machines and restaurants, one must cook and wash clothes by hand.
Being an anthropologist in the field comes with many challenges, but also has its rewards.
The people here are babies. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean that the median age of a citizen is 1 and a half.
The elders are around 3 years old and are highly respected because of their ability to form loose, semi-intelligible sentences.
The tribal chief is almost 4 and is reliably potty-trained. This garners great respect from the other babies.
These babies have no technology. They don’t wear diapers, which means there are piles of human feces that one must step over. There are no bathrooms. I have fashioned one for myself far from the others.
An anthropologist must not interfere with cultural customs.
There is a Medicine Baby who treats the other babies’ colic by shaking a rattler. I see no evidence that it works for the condition, but the crying stops temporarily.
At village naptime, the sound of crying can be deafening.
In studying this civilization, I’m still trying to piece together why the babies don’t grow up and how they’ve managed to survive in the wild without adult supervision.
Another conundrum is that many of the babies are newborns, yet there are no parents in sight. I have yet to find an egg in which the babies are hatching from, or a single female who is giving birth.
There are a few huts I have not peeked into yet, but I hope the answer is in one of them.
However, these babies have constructed a baby colosseum for sporting events.
As you know, babies like to play and this has taken the form of baby gladiators play-fighting one another with an audience of baby spectators googoo-ing and gaga-ing at the sight. It’s miraculous.
The topper is that there is a celebrity baby gladiator in the bunch. He is the biggest — but not the oldest of them and wins a large portion of the baby olympics.
He is an especially handsome and robust baby, and a good little boy.
I hope you and Auntie Sarah are well. How is Priscilla’s tooth? I hope she gets a visit from the tooth fairy very soon!
Take care, Uncle.
Yours,
Denny Wildenberrish, Ph.D
