Somehow I woke up this morning with a song stuck in my head that I haven’t heard since I was maybe nine (though, I will say, I have thought about it pretty frequently). The conceit of the song is…I suppose it’s explaining, amusingly, animal mating and where baby animals come from. Sample lyrics:
There’s two kinds of wombats
Dad-bats
And Mom-bats
Dad-bats love Mom-bats
And that’s why
There’s wombats
He (Tom Chapin, that is, and yes, Harry Chapin’s brother) goes on to sing about Him-ulls and Her-ulls, and him-ulls being “nuts about” her-ulls giving us squirrels, he-gulls and she-gulls giving us seagulls, and so forth, eventually winding up with “He-ples” and “She-ples.”
Every time I think about the song I remember that as a child I thought that Dad-bats and Mom-bats was the best, most precise portmanteau (if that’s the right word) of all of them, but that “Dad-bats love Mom-bats” wasn’t as good as the more species-specific choices like squirrels being “nuts about” each other.
And then I’d sit around trying to think of animal puns he hadn’t gotten around to.
