The Coleman Cooler

Jeanine reminded me of the funniest story this morning... if you work at Berklee, you cannot read this.

I was taking her to work and we passed the Fenway building. Fenway Community Health is a fabulous organization that serves the LGBT community. When we first decided to get pregnant, we went there for an informational meeting. We learned all about temperature taking, speculum using, and timing for pregnancy.

According to my mother, it's was easy as sitting on a toilet seat. Not so.

We went there to pour through catalogues of sperm donors. It was hard to imagine we could pick the traits we wanted, but we did. After many months of charting, we were ready. We ordered through the Fenway and went to pick up our sperm.

Very expensive sperm, mind you. For two hundred dollars a vial, we were ready to go. They suggested using two, so we bought our two and waited for the right time. When we thought we had a green light, we were to go to the Fenway and pick it up.

Now, sperm comes frozen, at least the kind that's been 'washed' and tested and is available to purchase. We had to bring a cooler to add some dry ice to, that they would supply, and take our lovely little specimen home to make a baby.

All good, right? Well, no one told us how big of a cooler to bring. And I'm thinking, for four hundred bucks, it's gotta be a whole helluva lot of sperm. Buckets full. So I grabbed our big ol' coleman picnic cooler.

Big cooler.

We walk into the Fenway, with our enormous cooler and the staff starts to crack up. Yes, they are professionals but the sight of these two lesbians, with terror in our eyes about what we are about to embark on, with a cooler ten times the size needed must have been quite a sight.

They composed themselves and showed us to where the dry ice was- of course there wasn't enough there to fill even a quarter of our cooler. We took some and then got the two vials of sperm.

They were about an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. Half full, I might add.

Now we knew why they were laughing.

We took our two little baby hopes home and the next day Jeanine purchased a much smaller cooler for the next trip. As we became pro's at this, we had the tank itself delivered straight to the house- which is another long story about the FedEx guy and dropping off the goods, which will be for another day.

Today, as I was driving Jeanine in, she said she'd been thinking about it because Berklee is buying the building, our sperm building, and putting offices, classrooms in it.

I don't know if I'll ever be able to keep a straight face, she said.

Of course, we still have the enormous cooler. It's gone to Maine and back for years.

Ready to carry anything.