5012 I think I'll title all posts "Rambles"

Monday, September 21, 2015

"Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them."

 – Robertson Davies –

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Since last spring, Daughter had been looking forward to visiting my sister in Florida this fall. 

Well, Daughter checked on flights, I guess in late spring, and, I don't know what she was looking at, but she said the tickets were a bazillion dollars each.  So Hercules decided no, they couldn't afford it.  Badda boom.  End of story.

When I asked her a few weeks ago when they were planning to go and she told me they weren't going, and why, I was devastated.  I hadn't realized until then that I was so excited about the idea, too.  I haven't been keeping in touch (no reason, I'm just a clod), and hadn't seen sweet Sister in years, and the thought of my daughter and Nugget visiting thrilled me in some way I can't explain.  

I was crushed.

So, I went online and checked on tickets myself.  Maybe the drop in gas prices has something to do with it, but all the flights were a hair over $200.  So I told her pish on Hercules -- I'll pay for Daughter and Nugget to go.  I'll even pay for a rental car.

Well, with that news, Hercules decided he'd go, too.  (I'm not paying for his ticket.  Pish on him.  I'm betting he's all excited about geocaching opportunities, not about Daughter seeing her aunt and Nugget meeting her great-aunt.  Pish on him!)

They leave next Thursday.  I'll drive them to the Newark airport and pick them up after.

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A random reference to TMI, and what it used to mean.  

Things have changed.  In 1975 when I was pregnant with Daughter, proper maternity clothes were circus tents.  You weren't supposed to even hint at an outline, like you were supposed to pretend it was a secret or something.  I wore the proper tents to the office, but rebelled outside work.  With the hippie influence, flower power, Woodstock, things were changing. 

I had found a T-shirt with BABY in big letters across the bust, and a wide arrow pointing down, and it wasn't even a tent.  It hugged my belly.  I loved that thing and wore it everywhere.  At that time and place, it was original, unique.

And everywhere I went, I got frowns, sneers, and whispers behind hands from women, and averted eyes from men.  The shirt was absolutely disgusting to many, and they let me know.  This was, by the way, in the mid-west.  I suspect that on either coast, folks may have found it more amusing.  But St. Louis was definitely NOT amused!

I asked a friend why there was such a strong response, and she said it was because the shirt was saying that I'd had sex.

Um, yeah, all pregnant women had.  Just being pregnant says that.  Besides, I'm married, so it's ok, isn't it?

Well, yeah, it's ok, but you're not supposed to talk about it, she said.  You're supposed to hide it.  That shirt not only literally points out that you've had sex, and points out where, but it BRAGS about it.  So when people see that, it makes them think about sex, and that disgusts them.

Oh.

Forty years later, I wonder what they'd think of pregnant women in bikinis?
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4001 Strange baby

January 12, 2015

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about

human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive.

We've created life in our own image."

 --Stephen Hawking--

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I recently read an article about a woman who went to the emergency room with back and abdominal pain, and one hour after discovering that she was pregnant, she gave birth to a full-term baby.

It happens occasionally.  Especially if you are very heavy you don't notice the belly getting bigger, and large women frequently have irregular periods because fat flattens out hormones.

It reminded me of something that happened when I was very young, probably 10 or less.  It was when we lived in a tiny Pennsylvania village, you know, four blocks by five blocks big.  We're talking mid-'50s ish.  In those days, kids my age knew literally nothing about sex (if you didn't live on a farm).  Babies appeared magically.  Couples on TV slept in twin beds.

There was a shopkeeper - I believe he was the town baker, whose one-man shop was in the first floor of a converted house on the main street.  He owned the house, and rented out the second floor apartment.  Big middle-aged man.  Married.  Lived with his wife and children outside the village.

He rented the apartment over the shop to a youngish woman.  Single.  She didn't seem to have a job.  I don't know what she lived on (although my mother had her suspicions).  Anyway, she was very large.  Had to be pushing 400 lbs, maybe.  I'm not good at weight estimates.

One day I came home from playing and my mother was hopping with excitement.  She was overloaded with juicy gossip, and just had to spill it.  It seems that the woman had been stricken with horrible stomach cramps, and an ambulance had come and taken her to the little hospital in the town 20 miles up the road.  She had been anesthetized in her hospital bed, and a few hours later awoke in the same bed with a baby in a bassinet next to her.  (Remember, this was the '50s.  Women were put to sleep through labor and birth.  No muss, no fuss.  (Also no DNA tests.))  The nurses told her it was her baby, and she refused to believe it.  Flatly.  Insisted that it was impossible.  Screamed until they took the baby to the nursery.  Her theory was that some rich bitch'd had the baby and didn't want it, so the hospital was trying to fob it off on her.  She was no fool, by damn!  Last heard, she refused to take the baby home and was going to sue the hospital.

Everybody in town was laughing.  Everyone knew exactly where that baby came from.  Everyone who bought bread, anyway, and everyone they talked to, which was everybody else.

It seemed that sometimes when you went to the bakery, it was closed.  Temporarily.  When it was supposed to be open.  This being the '50s, air conditioners were rare, so when it was hot, you had windows open.  If you stood on the stoop of the shop, you were right under the open windows of the woman's apartment.  Her bedroom must have been in the front, because as you stood on the stoop of the closed shop, you could often hear interesting and unmistakeable sounds coming from the window just 8 feet or so up.

Snork!

That's as much as my mother told me that day.  I never heard anything more, and there's no way I was going to ask.  Here it is 60 years later, and I still occasionally wonder what happened to that baby.

I hope the woman wasn't bullied into taking it.  I can't imagine her ever having been a good mother to it.  I can't imagine her ever having accepted it.
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