The Start

I don’t remember my birth.  I remember reading Carl Sandburg’s autobiography, volume one, where Sandburg describes his birth, his actual birth, in first person.  He wrote about what it felt like being pushed from his mother’s womb, forced through the birth-canal, and squeezed into a cold, bright, frightening world.  It was an interesting.  Sandburg was a good writer, and his  account of his own birth was interesting, but give me a break, he did not remember his birth. 

But there is nothing wrong with writing about stuff you know happened, but you were not there, or were in no position to actually remember.  The thing is, Sandburg wrote about the feelings of his fetal self, but Sandburg was writing as if he actually remembered something that he could not remember.  I don't want to do that.  I don’t want to invent my past as I write about my past.  My aim is to leave a record of myself.  But let me warn myself, my siblings and any friends that read this, that inventing what happens will happen.  Memory is at best a jumble of recall filled in with honest guessing.   

But why write about my life at all?  To leave a trace?  To vent? 

Yeah, yeah, I know that nothing lasts.  Some creative stuff outlasts the life of the maker, but eventually the plays of Shakespeare will be dust, the paintings of Vincent Willem van Gogh will crumble into dust,  and since I am not successful, since I am an insignificant being, really, that what I leave behind, is going to last just a tiny bit longer than I do, nevertheless, I am certain that I will soon be forgotten, my paintings will rot in a landfill, and my writings will dissipate like cigar smoke on a windy day.  I wish I could have a lot of readers and recognition, but there is value in this for me, so I will continue.  I will eventually publish a version of this autoblogaraphy using Kindle Direct Publishing.  And yes, I did just create a new word:  autoblogaraphy.  This new word may never catch on but still, I did it.

I started life, being born to a child mother, and a barely legal father.  I heard about all this, so take it with a grain of salt.  (parenthetical notation:  Hypotheses of the phrase's origin include Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, regarding the discovery of a recipe for an antidote to a poison.^[2] In the antidote, one of the ingredients was a grain of salt. Threats involving the poison were thus to be taken "with a grain of salt", and therefore less seriously.)

                                             

What I have been told is that my mother was still in high school, but she wanted to be a medical doctor, and she felt that graduating from a Cameron, Texas high school just might be a disadvantage, so she asked her father if she could stay with her grandparents who lived in Austin, and finish up her high school graduating from an Austin, Texas high school.  

My soon to be mother moved to Austin in the mid-summer, and one Sunday my soon to be father saw her.  It was like what Eve did  in the Garden of Eden:  saw it [the fruit of the tree of life] it looked good and it was pleasing to the eye, and also desirable. That same thing happened to my father.  He saw her, she was pleasing to his eye, and she was desirable.  In other words, he thought my mom was one smokin’ hottie [or some version of that sort of saying] and he immediately introduced himself and asked her on a date.  

My grandparents told me that they knew they had spoiled my father and he was ill prepared to be an adult, but their plan was to use this same summer to teach him some basic life skills like:

washing his own clothing, making a budget, learn how to shop, and shit like that.  It didn’t happen.

As soon as my father saw my mother he fell into lust, but, being raised in the Church of Christ he knew he would never get any sexy business from any woman until he married that woman, so, at that moment of lust, my father started doing what he needed to do to get him some sex.  Before that summer was over my father and mother were engaged.

It is odd how life and fiction have some similar characteristics.  If I were making this story up, I would have to throw in some complication at this point in the story, and guess what, in the case of my parents and their engagement, a complication was thrown.  My parents told me their plan was just to be engaged until my father finished a year at college and my mother finished her high school education and graduated.  After that year of educational stuff, then they would get married.

The complication came from my Aunt Dorothy, who, I think was already married and living in Wyoming. Aunt Dorothy wrote my granddad Crawford to say she thought it was just scandalous for a young girl [like my soon to be mother] to be living somewhere away from her parents while engaged to someone the family didn’t know.  Apparently my granddad agreed, because he wrote my mother a letter that my mother said included these words: “Get married, or come home.”

So my mother  got married.  She was maybe sixteen, because I was born when she was seventeen years old and my father was 19 years old.  It seems that almost immediately she was pregnant.  I guess, on the honeymoon, my father preferred it "bareback." (parenthetical documentation:  Bareback sex is physical sexual activity, especially sexual penetration, without the use of a condom.) 

I can’t believe that sedentary me out swam a million other sperm.  I am not and never have been athletic, but apparently I won just this one time.  It was the first and only time in my life that I came in first, but it happened.  I got to the egg first and that win gave me life.  I’m happy about that.  I know I have been an annoying whiny butt, much of my life, but as of right now, I am happy to be alive.

My mother notified the Austin High School she intended to attend, and let them know that she was married and pregnant, and, in 1950s Texas, they did not allow pregnant girls to attend high school.  So my mother had to dropped out. My mother finally got her GED after he was 60+ years old.  More about that GED stuff later.   I believe my parents were living with my grandmother and grandfather Norman.  I haven’t heard much about my birthday.  I don’t know if they drove to a hospital, or if my grandparents had to drive to the hospital while my mom and dad sat in the backseat, or what.  My folks could’ve taken a bus to the hospital for all I know.  Very few of us know many details about their actual birthing day.  Only Jesus and Carl Sandburg remember being born.

Now that I am closer to my death day than my original birth day, I think more about death, and life.  I wonder about prelife, you know.  Where was I before I was born.  After ejaculation propelled me into the vagina, (parenthetical documentation:  The average man's ejaculation happens at a speedy 28 miles per hour) and before my long swim through the cervix and up the fallopian tube, where was I?  Billions of sperm die every day.  Only a few sperm run into the right egg, woo that egg properly and finally the egg relents, and sperm is allowed inside and they couple "doing it" make a baby.

I wonder if being dead is like what it was like during that pre-birth stuff.  It is my recollection that I was not worried about a thing before I was born, therefore I assume that I will not be worried about a thing after I’m dead.  I may be lying to myself [I do that a lot] but I don't think I am afraid of death.  I have accepted that I will die.  What I am afraid of is dying.  I hate the thought of drowning, and the death rattle sounds like someone is drowning in their own spit. so I am afraid of that part of dying.  I would hate dying in a crushing and blazing car crash, but after the dying part, I don't think I am afraid of death.  It disappoints me.  After years of depression I am finally happy to be alive, so I am sorry that I have an end, but I do, and I accept it.

Obviously there is a lot that I don’t know, and a lot that is UNknowable.   

                                                   

If I was a fundamentalist I might believe that humans are souls that have a body instead of bodies that have a soul.  I might believe that birth is a lot like all these souls are crammed into this gumball machine looking thing.  When people “do it” it is like the gumball drops, the soul just falls from heaven and plop it is no longer sperm and egg it  conception and the little zygote is a human being.

If I was a progressive Christian, not a fundamentalist, I might have been a charismatic spiritualist of some sort that believes in mystery and other dimensions.  Perhaps I might be given to chon

                                                               

If I was a pantheist, and it is possible I am a Christian pantheist, I would say something like this: 

Matter can not be created, or destroyed, it can only be changed.  To me this means that matter has always existed.  That is a little like what some say about God, that God is eternal that God has always existed.

I start to imagine that matter is God and God is matter.  Maybe, possibly, perhaps, God is not at all like traditions and cultures have made him out to be, God is matter, and there is something about matter that wants to organize itself.  Matter has to wait until it is just close enough to a sun to be warm enough without being too warm,  and not so far from a son that it a frozen ball of ice, and it has to have elements required for life, like water has to exist, for instance, and  there has to be a lot of carbon and stuff on that periodic table.

When conditions are just right it seems as if matter starts to react to sunlight and other elements and somehow, and I have no clue how:  matter becomes a cell, and then cells react to stuff and become multi-celled organisms and they start farting oxygen and on and on things go until matter creates part of itself into something that can contemplate itself.  We are all made of star stuff, the atoms of matter that have always existed, and for a time some of those atoms arrange themselves in such a way that matter has made me.  Soon I will die and the atoms that made me will be mixed back into the sea of star stuff and this particular arrangement of atoms I call me will never happen again.  I want to enjoy the briefness of life because death is a long, long time.

If I was an atheist, or an agnostic, or maybe just some sort of scientist I might believe that while a lot is known about life, that eventually we will figure out how life comes to be; how chemistry becomes biology will be known.  What we are pretty doggone sure of is that life is an explainable thing that requires nothing from God or any higher power, and that one day, if we have been alive we will stop.  Life is like some old oscillating fan that just shorts out, it stops working and that’s it, we throw it out.  We are alive one second, and we are just a pile of dead meat the next.

Telling What I’m Told -- Chapter Two

What do I know about the immediate days after I was born?  Nothing.  

I was told stuff and there are pictures.
                                     

                                             

I don’t have many photos of myself as a child, but more about that later.

I was told that I lived with my parents in the same house with my grandparents, my Uncle Bert, and my Aunt Patsy, who goes by Pat now.  I don’t know how long I lived with my Norman grandparents.

My father, wanted to be an artist, but since he was suddenly married, and a father, well, my father took jobs as a bank teller.  That happened mostly because my granddaddy Norman was vice president of the First National Bank of Austin and he knew people and could get my father hired.  

I know that at some point my parents moved.  I was told that as an infant we lived in an apartment in Houston, Texas.  While we were living in Houston my mother found out she had something wrong with her spine.  My father told me about this and his words, as I remember them were like this:

“I came home from work and found out that your mother had done no housework at all.  The house was a mess, you were crying and needed to be changed, the dishes had not been washed,  I thought, ‘well maybe I just married, you know, a lazy woman.’   

“Your mother was acting odd, but she cooked dinner.  It was pork chops and succotash.   Your mother held the meat steady with her fork, she cut into the meat, and her knife cut through and just tapped hard on the plate.  Suddenly your mother just started trembling and crying.  She didn’t seem to be able to stop.  I got you ready, got your mother in the car and we went to the hospital.  

“Eventually we learned that your mother had something wrong with her spine and they needed to fuse some of the vertebrae together.  The doctor that was going to perform that surgery had only seen the operation done once and had assisted someone once.  We were told it was a very dangerous operation.  Bone was taken from her hip and used to fuse part of her spine together.”

That was the story.  My mother was dramatic in her telling of the story.  My mom told me all the muscle of her hip had to be cut and pulled back.  I imagined the cut one of her butt cheeks to the bone and peeled the muscle back.  Now I don't think they did it that way.  Then bone was sawed off her hip bone.  The only saw I’d ever seen was one of those handsaws. So I imagined a doctor cutting her hip bone like it was a two-by-four.  Then the bone was fused to her spine.  I had no idea what that was, but I knew it was an operation and it sounded bad.  The muscles of the hip were sewed back where they go, the spine fusing was done and that cut part was sewed up and she survived.

As I write this now I am 66 years old and I think my mother was overly dramatic.   Nevertheless, my mother told me that she was in agony through much of her recovery.  My father could not work, care for me, a newborn, and a wife who has had this agonizing surgery and painful recovery.  For these reasons, my parents decided to move to Cameron, Texas, and to move in with my Crawford grandparents.  My grandmother, Pansy Crawford was an LPN [a nurse] and she could give morphine shots and follow doctor directions.  My grandmother could also take care of the infant me.  So we moved to Cameron, Texas.

My father looked for work in downtown Cameron, and all he could find was to do the books for a guy who ran the drug store.  My father told me that he would go to the drug store after it closed and do the books for that day.  He told me how much he hated Cameron, how much he hated small downs, and that he was not comfortable around my mother’s parents.  My father said that one night, while doing the books he decided he just could not stand to keep working there.  He called my mother from the drug store and told her he was driving back to Austin.  My father said he would look for work in Austin and that once he had a job, then as soon as she was healthy enough, he would return to gather up his wife and son and take them to Austin.

My father, in a rare moment of self-reflection, said, “Can you believe it?  I just left and when the pharmacist opened up his store the next morning he found the book work not done.  The pharmacist calls your mother to ask where I am, and I left your mother to explain to the druggist that I had walked off the job and left town.”

The story says a lot about my father’s character.  Like all children I did, for a short time, idolize my father.  Over time I came to view my father as a self-centered, selfish man with a short temper.  

It took me years to learn that when you have a problem the best choice is almost always to face up to the problem.  You go through difficulties, not around them.  You stand up to trouble, you don’t run from it.  My father’s pattern of behavior is perfectly epitomized by how he coped with living and working in Cameron, Texas.  My father did not stay by mother’s side while she recuperated from her surgery.  My father left my mother to explain his behavior to the boss he walked off from.  My father left my mother to explain his behavior to her parents.  My father was the sort of person who has to have what he wants as soon as possible.  What he liked is what he would do, and if anyone was with him they did what he wanted.  My father never learned to be polite, to take turns, to postpone his wants to provide for the needs of his wife or children.  

I don’t know what happened next.  My memory of life goes fairly far back; I remember things that happened when I was 3 years old, but these infant/toddler times are dimly lit.  I know that we moved around.  I was told that we lived with my Norman grandparents, and that my mother worked as an elevator operator in a down town department store.  I remember both my mother and father telling me that they figured up the extra cost for clothing for my mother to work and they decided that it was cheaper for my mother not to work.  This sort of rationale dominated decisions by my parents.  My mother’s working days were short.