Not long after my little boy, Owen, was born six months ago, I discovered he had clout with women.
He's a pint-size flirt when he wants to be — a genuine lady killer — and I sometimes worry whether he's using this seemingly irresistible power for good or evil.
Looking back, I got my first inkling of his puzzling charm just minutes after he was born. But I was too dumb — and possibly dumbstruck — to recognize what I was seeing.
Watching the nurses in the delivery room as they counted his tiny fingers and toes, I assumed that all the cooing, smiling and cries of "Hey, handsome!" were simply standard hospital fare — though certainly a very nice, warm and friendly way of welcoming a new baby boy into the world.
When this stream of compliments followed the two of us into the nursery, however — and then continued even after the angry bellowing with which Owen resisted his first bath — I began to wonder if all these people who looked at babies every day for a living didn't have some unusual power of perception. Clearly, they were responding to my pale, wrinkly and unexpectedly hairy baby boy in an extraordinarily flattering way. But whatever it was that prompted this near-universal show of admiration, I simply couldn't see it.
I blinked and blinked, in fact, after our friends Molly and Patrick appeared to meet the new arrival just a few hours later. "Well, that's it!" Molly said abruptly, sizing up his behatted, tightly swaddled form in a matter of seconds. "Owen is officially CUTE!"
Not for two or three months was I finally able to see that the little lad isn't bad looking. When my wife went back to work, however — and I began to take him along on errands during an all-too brief stint of daddy day care — I realized that his charm doesn't begin to stop with his blueberry-blue eyes and precociously boyish hair.
Though not even 4 months old, Owen had already mastered a formidable arsenal of smiles, including engaging half- and quarter-grins backed up by twinkling eyes and eloquently expressive eyebrows. And as we made our rounds to the different doctors' offices, sandwich shops and even seafood markets on our list, he would pull out all the stops, shifting from his usual expression of well-behaved curiosity to full-fledged, lady-killing flirt.
At the physical therapist's office, the women behind the front desk dropped their work, then rushed out to trade smiles and coos after I stood the grinning Owen on the counter. He ensnared the assistants at the neurologist's office, too, singling out one for such an intoxicating series of grins, giggles and jumps that she finally had to stop, catch her breath and fan her flushed face, declaring, "That boy is giving me the baby fever!"
Another audience formed at his pediatrician's office, making such a commotion that I began to feel just a little uncomfortable as the other parents and kids looked up from across the room.
Then it was on to the seafood market, where the lady behind the stainless-steel counter instantly broke into a broad smile and extended her arms, saying, "Hand that handsome boy over!"
Truth be told, Owen seems to relish such encounters as much as his devotees. He once enticed, then whipped a group of never-before-seen German ladies into a baby-hugging frenzy, laughing, smiling and wiggling happily as they took him from my arms and closed around him in a boisterous circle of adoration.
On another occasion, he stoked a friend's infatuation with such relentless expertise and joy that I thought they'd both explode. And I couldn't stop laughing when she finally broke away and breathlessly blurted out, "If he keeps smiling at me like that, somebody's going to get lucky!"
Still, it can be a little scary when your kid is capable of exciting such unexpected affections. I've also discovered that there's a price to pay when you make the mistake of showing up on your own.
Returning recently to an estate sale that Owen and I had checked out the previous day, I couldn't help but notice the disappointment at my solitary presence. I'd gotten the same mildly stern look upon my lone reappearance at the neurologist's office.
"You know that we always like to see you," one of his priestesses intoned. "But we like it even more when Owen comes along, too."
©2009, Daily Press (Newport News, Va.). Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.