While the coronavirus pandemic has gripped the nation, a subtler, far more dangerous pandemic has silently infiltrated the minds and bodies of America’s men: Soy Boyism.

Nobody gets a cat on purpose, no one wakes up one morning and decides they want to take care of a small useless predator for a decade or more; cats just sort of happen to a person, we end up with them, like children or guns.

For my entire life anytime I complain about anything my mother responds with some newly acquired anecdote about someone who has it harder. I first noticed the pattern in college after I griped about a roommate and she told me about a boy born without hands who had taught himself to paint by holding a paintbrush between his teeth. 

We’ve all heard horror stories about small town medical practices.  I guess I got off lucky. I grew up in the 1950s in Frederick, Maryland, at the time a town of fewer than 20,000 people. I never had to go to the local orthopedist, a man nicknamed “Wrong Knee” or had a colonoscopy performed by that doctor who kept his patients awake and just had them lean over a sawhorse to let the scoping begin. Things were a little dicier for me, though, in the dental arena.

When things go wrong in my life, I blame it on the fact that no one in my family knows what day my birthday is.

It was the morning of my eighth birthday when it was brought to my attention that I’d had the wrong date for my birthday.

For eight years.