I don’t know if my father saw my penis much when I was a baby. Midcentury Italian American men did no diapering. We weren’t Jewish, so there was no bris ceremony at eight days. Circumcisions were done at the hospital where you were born (Yonkers General, in my case), on the day you were born (February 9, 1954): a one-stop affair. It’s possible that my father may have checked me over at birth to make sure things were OK, but after that, I was on my own in the penis department. We skipped the birds-and-bees talk when I turned twelve out of mutual embarrassment.