Let's start at the beginning!

Memoir 1—Birth Day

The best story my Mother ever told may have been a lie, a partial fabrication or the truth as she remembered it.  It was the story of my birth, and I was 57 years old and she was pushing 90.  Within months, she died, and I would be left wondering about what stories, facts or lies would help me frame my life up to the point of her death.

We talked in a hot bright sunroom of the cottage that she and my Dad shared in an old folks’ development in South Florida. It was the end of a road, my parents’ personal Oz, which began in the Midwest during the Depression.

Mom had the air of a secret Santa giving an unexpected gift.  She was the star of the show and knew her audience of one was paying attention.

I was born at 6 a.m. Dec. 13, 1952 in Broward General Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, FL.  The doctor arrived too late to administer anesthesia.  Pain, which Mom handled with drama in later life until her death when she showed courage, was an old wives’ tale designed to keep younger women from handling the cataclysmic miracle of childbirth.  No air conditioning and window curtains moved slowly in a breeze.

“You were a gentle child,” she said with a farm wife’s practicality. (Act or truth?) “You could be knocked over with a feather.”

Within days, Dad, a pilot who stayed in the Naval Reserve after World War Two, left for a long trip to Morocco.

The stories associated with my two sisters’ births carried a different tone:  My grandmother wrote a letter to an aunt detailing the middle sister’s entrance to this world, saying that it was uneventful and babysitting me required patience.  The story is that Dad gave Mom an aquamarine ring at my birth and a dishwasher when my sister was born.

Five years later, according to family lore, my youngest sister was born on New Year’s Eve after a bumpy ride over railroad tracks to induce labor so Dad could take a tax refund for the year.

Neither sister stayed in South Florida for the 35 year walk down the yellow-brick road to the old folks’ home. Both listened to my versions of my parents’ dramas. My own fabrications, lies and truths must have reflected the increasing disorder of lives when small details that color a story—trips to the grocery store, lack of calls from old friends—became insurmountable distractions to the telling of tales.

Is it time for each of my sons to know how he entered the world?  A good storyteller needs a good ending and playing Secret Santa, telling stories, lies or truths are tidy ways to close journeys or lives.

These clean endings, of course, may satisfy the performer-- who needs a place to stop and rest--but the reader or listener, who lives between the lines, is always left with a different story