The Enormous Pacifier by Alice Kinerk

You’ve probably heard about this already, but one day some kids dug up an enormous pacifier, and in doing so pretty much brought chaos into the world. Apparently the kids were playing in the strip of woods by Route 42, just poking sticks in the embankment there, no thoughts of upsetting nesting bees, preventing future mudslides, or their moms having to pretreat their laundry stains afterward. Because where the dirt fell away, they uncovered something that shouldn’t have been there. A large, old, manmade hoop.

If you saw the news you know the dimensions, but it was about five feet round, with a flatter side and two rounder sides, and a squeaking hinge where it was still stuck in the ground. Made of material as wide as a man’s forearm. They spent an hour scraping away at it. When they were done, it hung against the embankment like a door knocker. One of the kids said it was a pilgrim’s plow, and another said it was part of an alien spaceship, and still another surmised it was a piece of construction equipment leftover from when Route 42 was put in. 

They agreed though that it was attached to something else. So they continued to dig. It was attached to a flat, round disk, again about five feet wide, this one perfectly circular in shape. The hoop was the tethering part of the pacifier, the ring that a fastidious adult ties to Baby’s onesie. The disk of course was the pacifier guard.  The first ones to deduce it had baby siblings at home.

They went on digging. 

By afternoon, they unearthed the squishy nipple. As soon as they scraped out the upper edge the dirt gave way and the whole thing came tumbling out, down the embankment, rollicking, picking up speed, bumping over hillocks and flattening bushes. The kids were lucky that none of them were taken out by it. It was that big.

Finally, by the creek, it slowed to a stop. They gathered round, dumbfounded. As archeological finds go, this was unusually intact. Whereas today’s rubber would crack and crumble exposed to so much weather, the material which had been used to plug wee giants’ mouths was apparently so resistant that it still had give to it. The kids took turns punching, kicking, and throwing themselves against the business end of the enormous pacifier. It bounced back every time.  It was like the rubberized safety surface at our playgrounds. It was impossible to hurt yourself on it.  

By the way, if you don’t believe me, Google it. I am not shitting you. It absolutely happened. It did.)

Initially they planned to keep it secret, but of course word got out. One of the kids had a sister with influencer aspirations, and the viral potential of such eye-popping content proved too tempting to resist.

Enter TikTok.

After that, everything was out of their hands.

Immediately people started trekking out to the spot to see for themselves, to take selfies and kick the nipple and spraypaint their personal tags all over it. Then someone proposed there, which made the rounds on daytime TV.

Officials got wind. The county government parked a white van on the side of Route 42 and went in with a stretcher and the enormous pacifier was carted out, strapped it into the back of the van and driven away, as if the 1950s had returned and the pacifier was a lunatic on his way to a frontal lobotomy.

When the discovery was confirmed it made headline news for weeks. The kids became overnight celebrities. They were Time’s People of the Year and guests on every talk show/investigative news/podcast.  They were trotted out for conference lecture panels and basically showed up everywhere for a while.

The historians said this changes everything, and the Christians pointed to the book of Genesis, and the textbook authors got dollar signs in their eyes and started writing their new revised editions, and the conspiracy theorists toasted their Double Gulps and went on as they always had, theorizing.

Long story short, we are living in the Post Pacifier Era.

These days as you know the pacifier is on permanent display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. It’s inside a plexiglas case with a long label on the wall explaining about the kids, the carbon dating, its location by Route 42 and everything. And that’s nice, because now anyone who wants to can go see the enormous pacifier as it’s in safekeeping for perpetuity. But on the other hand, that’s unfortunate. And maybe it’s just me, but I personally believe that the experience of seeing something in a museum (where the viewer is soporific with slow-walking, over-exposed to “priceless antiquities” and inevitably looking forward to lunch) is only a pale imitation of observing an artifact in its original location, intact.

What’s less known is what happened to the kids who’d made the discovery. Unfortunately, theirs was the fate of those who peak too soon. As you can imagine, it was hard for any of them to be taken seriously. Always being asked the same inane questions, always feeling out-of-place with their peers. It was difficult for them to form lasting relationships. Some people were frankly jealous. They were given nicknames like Binky and Nukey, and people on the street would make sucking noises when they passed by. Pacifiers were spraypainted on their front doors and car panels. Here’s a sad fact: None of them grew up to have kids of their own.

In the end, it was overdose, cirrhosis, cardiac arrest, suicide. Deaths of despair, every one.

And that’s the story. I certainly don’t know what to make of it. An admonishment not to dig too deep in the earth?  Or, if we choose to dig, be prepared for what might fall out?

Alice Kinerk

Image by Bruno from Pixabay – A blue dummy (pacifier) on a blue background.