The Case of the Missing Baculum

and other human mysteries

My holiday season was bookended with mysterious events. The episode of early December had nothing to do with me, but the occasion of mid-January is a mystery of my own making, one I still haven’t reconciled. 

But I like to think both have to do with where human fallibility meets human magic.

In early December, I was getting ready for work in my bedroom. And as the screams of breakfast discontent rose from the floor below, I turned up a news podcast. Even the global BBC can’t resist a juicy local story: in Milford Haven, Wales, a neighborhood had been evacuated for a garden ornament. 

The ornament was older than the residents of the neighborhood. 100 years ago, a man selling lemonade from a cart had found it on the beach, lugged it home and plunked it in his front yard, like a garden gnome. Painted a cheerful tomato-soup red to match the window trim, for a century it sat amidst pots and windmills. Mrs. Edwards, the current homeowner, regularly banged her garden trowel on its top to loosen the dirt when digging. 

Last week, the ornament was revealed to be an undetonated 64-pound naval projectile. "We didn't sleep a wink all night. It knocked us for six," said Mr Edwards.

But committed to their years with the object, he explained further: "I told the bomb disposal unit 'we're not leaving the house, we're staying here. If it goes up, we're going to go up with it.’"

Even after the ornament was determined to be a bomb, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards refused its lethality, like those optical illusion straight lines that appear diagonal, even once you’ve been shown they’re straight lines. The brain refuses the proof.

The Müller-Lyer Illusion: read about how it works here

I’ve always delighted in optical illusions. Where my brain sees something that doesn’t actually exist feels more like a form of magic than a betrayal. And listening to the Edwards’ story, I was reminded of my own shock at an object revealed, how even after revelation it felt impossible that one thing could be actually another thing. 

When I was a sophomore in high school, we were itinerant, our house under construction, living in rentals, motels, inns. I spent a good amount of time staying with friends. One afternoon at a friend’s kitchen table, I’d finished my biology homework and bored, flipped through to the back of the textbook. And I gasped. There on the page: an object straight out of my childhood, so memorable I could smell it on the page. I had used this object, pulled out of its pink case, countless times as an oxygen mask: running around the upstairs pretending there was a fire we had to escape, playing the role of firefighter and victim, taking deep breaths. And there it was, a photo on page two of chapter 24, “rubber dome placed at the upper end of the vagina, may be used along with spermicides.” A contraceptive diaphragm. 

My first reaction was that the textbook must have gotten it wrong. Because how could I have been so wrong? My bomb was my mother’s diaphragm. 

I am the only one in my family who believes this memory, the rest refuse its possibility. But, dear reader, the shock this image of a diaphragm sent through my 15-year-old body, the visceral memory of texture, scent, color is not one my imagination could create.

Or could I?

There are times when something seems so outlandish (an active bomb as ornament, a diaphragm as toy oxygen mask) that we can’t believe its reality. But there is also the pesky blending of historical truth and narrative truth in memory.

We treat things as certain, but they’re our perceptions of things and we are nothing if not uncertain (that dress is white with gold stripes unless it’s blue with black stripes! My husband’s Laurel will always be my Yanni). We trust the tangible, the infallibility of the object because we trust our senses. Just as we indulgently trust our own memories. 

In 1997, neurologist Oliver Sacks was assembling a book about memory, Uncle Tungsten, and in it, telling his own story of bombs that landed in his neighborhood in World War II.

In the first story, Sacks is seven and creeping in his pajamas with the rest of his neighbors as softly as possible away from a thousand-pound unexploded bomb dropped in the garden next to his. The blackout is in effect, and they use torches dimmed with red crepe paper to guide them away from possible obliteration.  

In the second story, a thermite bomb lands in his back garden and he watches his father and brothers ladle buckets of water from a stirrup pump on the “terrible, white-hot heat [...] hissing and sputtering.”

The neighborhood Oliver Sacks lived in during the Blitz now happens to be the neighborhood I live in

After Uncle Tungsten was published, Sacks’s brother Michael approached him with alarming news. Sacks and Michael had been away at boarding school, safe in the countryside, and had been told the story in a letter from their older brother. “You never saw it. You weren’t there.” 

Sacks, enchanted by the letter, had made the memory his own.

Plagiarizing others’ experiences in our memory and story-telling is called “cryptomnesia.” As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her memoir, memory “is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t exist.” We all do it, unwittingly co-opting the experiences of others, writing them onto ourselves.

When talking about memory’s fallibility, my friend recounted a story her father told about a walk he took in the woods. He stopped at a sound, a sound that got larger and stranger. Sounds that convinced him it must be a bear. And then, the bushes shivering, a large man stepped out onto the path, his torso dressed in jars of blueberries. A blueberry picker. 

From across the fire, my friend’s older sister and mother yelled at him: “You weren’t there!”

How many experiences does any one person believe he participated in without ever realizing “you weren’t there”?

When Sacks interrogated both his bomb memories, he realized, in a marvelous footnote in a later book “I am struck by the way in which I could visualize the garden scene from different angles, whereas the street scene is always ‘seen’ through the eyes of the frightened seven-year-old I was in 1940.” So in imagining, strangely, he was gifted perspective.

We are marvelous creators. And that is what I’m trying to determine about the mystery of this past weekend: how much of it is my own creation? Can we anticipate something so much that we remember it, even if it didn’t happen?

My holiday season ends with a party my husband and I host for the English department (if you imagine Netflix’s “The Chair,” you’re not far off). The party’s theme “Give It Away” requires everyone bring a wrapped gift they received this season that they’re eager to get rid of: a Bruce Springsteen LP, a tie-dye kit, a bottle of moonshine, a ceramic tray with mirrored bottom, Tucker Carlson’s autobiography. There’s a fire in the backyard and we write down the sins and the mistakes of the past year to burn and the night ends with a re-gift white elephant, where sometimes one’s trash does indeed become another’s treasure.

A week prior to the party, my colleagues and I were discussing fox penises in the office. This time of year, you can hear shrieks of pain at night all over London. Our first winter in London, I felt sure someone was being murdered on my street. But it turns out it was just female foxes yowling in pain during mating season because the male fox’s penis is barbed, ensuring the female can’t run away before his semen is released.

But in this conversation, we were talking about the baculum—or penis bone—which brought us to the question of why most mammals have them but humans don’t. 

It turns out we did—well 50% of us did. Shortly after our evolutionary break with chimpanzees, when monogamy started to become a thing for our species, the baculum disappeared in humans. Some scholars believe Genesis may include the story of how human man lost his baculum

In an etiological myth that looks for answers to our origins, it would make sense. Why was man created? To care for God’s garden. Why were animals created? To keep man company. Why was woman created? Because the animals were lacking in some respects, for man. Why doesn’t man have a penis bone anymore? Because he gave it to a woman who was then created. The rare example of the male of a species doing the work of creation. Like seahorses.

In many ways, it makes more sense than the rib—none of which are missing in the typical man’s skeleton, they’re even and equal to woman’s. The first appearance of “rib” appeared in the 3rd century BCE in a Setuagint (Greek) translation of Hebrew’s tsela‘. But tsela‘ appears 40 times in the Hebrew Bible, in a variety of contexts: as an ark, an altar, a side-chamber, a mountain branch—what each iteration shares is the idea of something lateral to the main structure. An appendage if you will.

Could Adam’s rib really be man’s baculum? The world’s version of the Edwards’ missile and my mother’s diaphragm? 

As I was planning for our party, this felt like the ultimate “Give It Away.” The baculum would have to make an appearance. 

So I began plotting. Amazon doesn’t sell bacula, but Etsy does, with a whole host of options: racoon baculum, otter baculum, fox baculum. But the soonest delivery was two weeks. I tracked down a friend who has a coyote baculum, but she left it at her mother’s house years ago. A surrogate baculum would have to do. That very day, the cafeteria was serving chicken. I put a clean drumstick on my desk to dry, but it was gone the next morning. Roast chicken for dinner then. 

River otter bacula for sale on Etsy

My plan: hide a baculum-esque bone in the cake, like a king’s cake. The person who found the baculum in their piece would have a year of abundance. Have your cake and eat it too sort of thing.

On the day of the party I cleaved the chicken bone to proper size (2 inches), boiled it, picked out the marrow with a skewer, boiled again, sanded into shape. If you find this weird or grotesque, I won’t try to disabuse you, just know that for a couple days last week, this became of the utmost importance to me. 

Once the crust of the cheesecake had set, I have a distinct memory of setting the bone as a radial into the cheese cake, between layers of pouring, so it would come out in a single piece.

95,000 years ago, man lost his baculum, and again on 20th January, 2024, we lost the baculum. Not a single piece had the bone in it. Colleagues and partners scraped their plates, some Googled whether the combination of lemon and dairy could dissolve a bone in a few hours of chilling. 

The baculum was gone.

My friend Phoebe still read to us from the opening page of Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain:

“SATURDAY.—I am almost a whole day old, now. I arrived yesterday. That is as it seems to me. And it must be so, for if there was a day-before-yesterday I was not there when it happened, or I should remember it. It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing.”

from Mark Twain’s Eve’s Diary (an excerpt of which was a reading at my wedding)

In the days that have followed, I’ve wondered: could I have forgotten to put the baculum in the cake? In all my excitement and anticipation, did I create a memory of something I intended to do, but never did? We talk of making memories, is that what I did? Did I manufacture a precise memory? The words Phoebe read, Eve’s words by Twain, have come back to me: “It could be, of course, that it did happen, and that I was not noticing.” But in my case: it could be, of course that it did not happen, even though I was noticing. 

As we look back on memories, things give our memories substance. It’s what creative writing programs tell young writers to do: get things in there, their corporeal presences are the anchors of a story. But things are more illusory than their tangibility promises. And memories are just stories we tell ourselves over and over again, where fiction and fact are sifted so finely it’s impossible to distinguish one from the other. 

As a species, we’re slow, our vision running 100 milliseconds behind the real world; it’s only through guesswork and assumption that we’re able to hit a ball, kill a mosquito. Our perception is a constant act of imagination. And because of it, even in the things that seem infallible—a clear memory, an object—we are fools, making bombs into gnomes, diaphragms into oxygen masks, bacula into ribs, safety into danger, and danger into safety—the highest order magicians of our own existence. 

But I must have put the chicken-bone-as-baculum into the cake. Where else could it be?