My first husband was a young man when I married him, and he had a lot of erections. Tons and tons of them, morning, noon and night. Since we're divorced now, I know nothing about the current number or duration of his erections, and in no way wish to. My second husband is still a young man, and he has a lot of erections as well, though this is not why I married him.

Anyway, in my first marriage, because I was interested in avoiding sex about 95 percent of the time and could come up with hundreds of reasons why it was not a good idea, my husband's erections were threatening. They were an object in the world drawn out of a sleepy sheath for persuasive purposes, and taught me in short order to hone my rhetorical skills. "Oh, you can't be serious," I might say with a turn or shake of the head. "Oh, you've got to be kidding." Of course, as anyone who has had any experience with them knows, erections often operate independently of their owner's wishes, so it makes no sense whatsoever to use ideas against them. Erections are not interested in ideas. When an erection sees an idea, it laughs out loud.

I was in labor with my daughter at the ripe old age of 35 when my attitude toward erections began to unmuddle. My midwife suggested my husband and I take a shower together. I mean, we were getting stressed, and she wanted us to relax. I wasn't yet in hard labor, but I was in labor enough to need to lean against the shower tiles during contractions -- right in the beginning of that place where you know what's coming and can't quite believe you've gotten yourself into this again and would, if you weren't getting ready to have a baby, demand an immediate hysterectomy -- when I felt the erection.

My husband was standing behind me. I was leaning slightly forward, trying to remember how I was supposed to be breathing. I am pretty certain I laughed, though not at the erection. I laughed in joy because of it. It was speaking its mind at the most inopportune time imaginable, and you could tell it couldn't help itself. It would have a whole birth and weeks and weeks and weeks to wait, I suppose it knew, and yet still it stood up and made its rather impressive comment right there underneath the streaming flow of water.

This experience compels me to think that the erection, like the first crocus you see in the spring or a lone pine tree in the woods, is a freethinking agent of nature hellbent on its own satisfaction. But it is also a thing in bloom, a thing in celebration of the vast and heartbreaking beauty in this beautiful, beautiful world. It is rapture itself, and more alive than any other male or female external body part I know of.

It's a symbol of the body's praise of the body and of the body's sometimes uncontrollable wishes, a symbol of the body's dance outward to express its interest in being inward, its interest in union and alliance in absolute war against its longing not to be so alone and hanging like a clothesline in a thunderstorm down the long river of the left side of the pants.

It's a symbol of everything we should remember, but too often forget. It wants to partake and collaborate, to sing a little undressed duet in the middle of the night or, better yet, at dawn, right when the birds just outside your window are also rising and clearing their pretty, yellow throats.

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