Twelve Days of Christmas 2021, Part V: No, we do not actually keep jars of baby s$&% in the fridge

*Steve (right) and I have been best friends since the eighth grade (1989-90). My old man treated him like a third son*. This photo was taken during our senior year of high school.

“No, we keep jars of baby shit in the refrigerator.”

With that, the Ernie Webb Jr. and Steven Peterson pseudo-father-son relationship was born in 1989.

Steve and I have been friends since we were eighth-graders in 1989. The old man and my mom had just moved our family from Lebanon, where my brother and I were happy, to Burlingame. I was nervous, to say the least, a few months later when we started a new school in a town about 10 times smaller than our previous home.

That nervousness didn’t last long because I met Steve on the first day of class at Lincoln Middle School. It was obvious immediately that we were kindred souls. We had the same sense of humor. We were both what our classmates likely considered “nerdy.”

I invited Steve out to our place for dinner, and Dad pulled the grill out that night and made hamburgers and hot dogs. As we all went inside, Steve went to the fridge and couldn’t find the mustard.

“You guys have any mustard?” he asked politely.

Dad grabbed the door, pulled it open and grabbed the French’s off a side shelf.

“No, we keep jars of baby shit in the refrigerator,” Dad said bluntly.

My brother and I laughed hysterically as poor Steve, stunned, just looked at my father.

Of course, we were used to this kind of comment: Blunt, curt, with a touch of snarky, dry, cutting humor. That was Dad’s way of saying he liked my best friend.

Steve was on the receiving end of the occasional “baby shit” remark through the years. The other one I remember vividly is my father’s reaction when he found out Steve hadn’t asked him for help when he needed it.

“You big dummy!” Dad, channeling Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford, said.

Until the day my father died, Steve was a third son. He was there for road trips, fishing trips, birthdays, holidays, graduations and weddings. Steve also was one of the last people my dad asked to see in the weeks leading up to his death.

The old man also wasn’t afraid to treat his adopted son like he did his biological sons, especially if it impacted business. Steve still talks about the time he showed up late to work on a day when he was supposed to be watching my father’s booth during the Christmas craft show at Westridge Mall. Dad read him the riot act and said he’d fire him if he was ever late again (of course, I knew that all too well).

“I was never late to his booth again, I know that,” Steve said.

What my father liked the most about Steve is that he was just a good dude, as he liked to say about men he admired. One of the many pieces of wisdom my father passed on was this nugget when I was 13 years old: “You are who you hang out with, son.”

Even if that means hanging out with people who keep jars of baby shit in the fridge.