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Retirement Talk for Boomers, Seniors, and Retirees |
Frog Spit
Jackie Spinks
Chapter Eight
I was born in St. Lukes’ Hospital, a few months before the crash, on April 13th; and that was the day Daddy made the biggest flub-up of his life and Mama never let him forget it or forgave him for it.
Now, every wife has a need for her husband to sit around the waiting room, anxiously smoking Camels or a cigar, or a joint, or whatever is the fashionable smoke of that era and worry about her welfare, while she’s having a baby—plus listen to her screams of agony, the kind of agony that his sexual selfishness wrought. And the more contrite he feels when he enters his wife’s room—the better.
But my father, who was in his twenties at my birth hadn’t been advised of this crucial responsibility. He was a greenhorn at births, with no father or older, knowledgeable friend to clue him in on the formalities of behavior.
He dropped Mama off at the hospital and went back to work. In the world of women talk, at least at that time, this is one of the most heinous crimes a husband could commit. Getting drunk and gambling the paycheck away can be forgiven, even flirting and dancing with an old girl friend can be forgiven, but dropping a wife off, who’s in labor and going back to work—that’s inexcusable.
“You didn’t even stay when I was having the baby,” Mama would wind up every argument with Daddy. And of course weep with that forlorn, “I now have proof you didn’t love me.”
“I’m sorry! I’m Sorry! I didn’t know!” Daddy would kneel before Mama and try to allay her sadness.
“It’s too late. It’s already done.”
“So, am I never to be forgiven?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try. But I don’t know if I can.”
And of course, when he came back to the hospital, that evening after work, shortly before my birth, with Grandma D and Mama was in late labor, Grandma D would (much to her lifetime regret) make that remark that Mama overheard about how Daddy shouldn’t worry, as Mama wasn’t suffering all that much, it cleaned both their clocks.
Of course, he never made that mistake again when my brothers were born, but that one goof was the important one and would shadow him the rest of his life.
“How
could you?”
“I was dumb.”
“Didn’t
you care anything about what happened to me.”
“Of course I did.”
“What if I’d died having the baby? You’d just go on laughing with the guys and eating your lunch and not even care. I can tell you wouldn’t have cared if I had died. Women do die during childbirth, you know.”
“I would suffer forever. I’d never get over it.”
“Oh, pooh! I don’t believe you.”
“What can I do to prove it?”
“Nothing. I want to go to the cemetery.”
“Why?”
“I just do.”
We were a sentimental family. As an expression of our deeper feelings and great love for our ancestors, we often visited graves. Mama brought flower, usually lilacs off our lilac bushes. It was vital that we keep the graves of relatives nice.
“Look at how those graves have been neglected. It’s a shame.” Mama would shake her head at the selfishness of people.
“Why Mama, the people in them don’t care,” I’d reply. I never got sentimental over graves. A block and tackle couldn’t drag a cemetery tear out of me, although my family always cried over graves.
But I enjoyed looking at the dates. “Hey look Brother, at this one—born 1789. Wow! That was just after the American Revolution. I wonder what it was like back then?”
And once I saw a grave I’d never forget, with a poem on it that read something like this:
As you’re walking now, so once I walked.
And where I lie now, so soon you will lie.
I remember thinking—that’s not true. I’m not going to die.
How did talk about my birth and the cemetery visits merge-- but why they always did –was a stumper, or maybe it was Mama’s reminder to Daddy of the fragility of life—as if he didn’t know.