Today Is My Birthday

Yes, I was born on this day forty-seven years ago.  I know this because it says so on all my official documents.  I don't have any memories of the day itself.  So of course everything I say about that day should be taken with a grain of salt, which is an odd idiom meaning "with healthy skepticism."

So these are the facts (or "facts"):

I was my mother's sixth child.  She was thirty-nine years old when I was born, & it had been around seventeen or eighteen years since her first child was born.  What a weirdo.

According to my oldest sister, my mother kept her pregnancy a secret, beginning what would be a lifelong embarrassment of me.  How does one keep a pregnancy in its seventh month a secret?  Baggy clothes I guess.  Ancient German deception.  When my mother went to a nearby clinic for a check-up or because she wasn't feeling right, my sister told all my other siblings that she was going to give have a baby.  She probably should have wagered on it; no one believed her.

I was born in a little clinic on the corner of Shiloh Road & Miller Road in Garland, Texas, at 9:30am.  January 20, 1968, was a Saturday.  The little clinic actually stood there, a glaring reminder of those responsible for my existence, until only a few years ago, when it was torn down & replaced by a more appropriate landmark: a giant gas station/convenience store.  I confess I have stopped there since & bought a soda.

(There's a picture of the clinic that I took in the nineties, but it's in a box somewhere & I'll never be able to find it right now.)

I was two months premature, but I've never heard anyone talk about my early moments on this earth being touch & go.  I had assumed I spent some time in an incubator or other contraption that preemies are kept in safety, but my mother tells me she took me home as soon as she could.  Again, I have no memories of that time.

Forty-seven years later, it just feels like another day.  Not nearly as dramatic as a secret pregnancy, a premature birth, a brand new gas station/convenience store!

But I'll try to enjoy it nonetheless.