When it came to sex, he was the soul of discretion, referring to parts of the body as Eastern European pastries. Even now, I'm embarassed to walk into a bakery. When he felt like skirting the issue, he implied that sex was something to get out of the way before marriage. Mother may have gotten it out of the way after. "Sex, shmex," she used to say. This, then, was shmex education.

Not that there weren't resources avilable to the resourceful: for deep background, the yellowed copy of The Sexual Habits of Mankind the folks kept between their mattresses and box spring, this being the life work of the traveling Italian sexologist Paolo Mantegazza, who stumbled across nuptial huts the way some globetrotters seem to run aground at just the right bed and board.

I don't know what he did for Mom and Dad -- there were no drums far into the night -- but for me Mantegazza was an early and pervasive influence: When I married, my bride and I were annointed with oil and saffron while burnt offerings were made. In hindsight, I think this may have gotten us off on the wrong foot, but for sheer pageantry, it was worth every goat of it.

Woof to the warp of my cross-cultural insights was the clinical evidence gleaned from my brohter Clayton's medical books, which fell open magically to "Reproduction, Human." It was all Latin to me, of course, and catechism in lieu of Hebrew school was not in the cards. The illustrations, particularly Figure 18-1, were of more than passing interest, but, being cross-sections, they were difficult to reproduce in the field.

School, in loco parentis, as usual, begat Hygiene class, the value of which no one who's ever used a washcloth properly can fail to appreciate. The vanguard in the war on puberty, Hygiene class was where gym teachers went when they could no longer spin medicine balls on their noses.

The closest we ever steamed to a sexual iceberg was a brush with certain promising vitamins found in tomatoes and said to promote vigor. Since my peers and I were nearly audibly tasseling out as it was, the implications were of little interest. In recent years, though, I've made it policy when ordering a B.L.T. to ask for extra "T." And, for insurance, a side of antelope horn.