I must confess, I was born at a very early age.
Groucho Marx, 1890-1977
Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970
My Birth
Written on : June 2023
Edited last: March 2024
I was born nineteen months after the USA entered the second world war. In those days, mothers gave birth in their own home with the assistance of an "experienced" woman, who was normally a neighbour, trained at the "school of hard knocks". There were a few in our community, and they were called "Mammine", that is, "Little Mothers".
My brother likes to recount that the day that I was born, my father was tilling a field not too far from our home with several of our neighbours who had joined him to help. In those days, neighbours would team up to till each-other fields to get the soil ready to seed or plant crops. These were the days before tractors , and tilling of the fields had to be done by hand using a "vanga". A typical vanga is shown below in Figure Exp 1. The men would line up across a field about two feet apart, and would turn the soil moving backwards in a coordinated manner.
My father was not expecting my arrival for a couple more days and my grandmother was staying with us to help my mother with house chores. When she realized that I was arriving, she rushed to get the "mammina" next door and soon after I was born. Right after, my brother went to tell my father.
My father was so happy at my arrival, and happy that the delivery had occurred without complications, that he stopped the work, unsealed a demijohn of wine from our cellars, and started celebrating with the men that were helping him. Attracted by the merry making, a neighbour going by stopped to congratulate my father, and joined the celebrations. After he had stayed some ten minutes or so, while all the others were enjoying the free wine, he stole a vanga and sneaked away.
The theft did not go unnoticed for too long. But long enough that by the time the men realized that a vanga had been stolen, everyone was pretty drunk. Just the same, they started running all over the countryside trying to find the thief. For reasons that my brother could not remember, frustrated that the thief had got away, they started having disagreements and started fighting with each other. And the fighting went on until it got too dark to continue!
So, in my brother's and my sister's words, my birth was memorable. And even today, when I see my brother, often the conversation goes back to that memorable day full of merry-making and of fighting!
My brother is six years older than me and at the beginning of March 2024 completed his 90th birthday. I am very happy to be able to say that he is in good health! He doesn't believe in pills, eats always good food cooked by his wife in their own kitchen, and he believes in riding his bike every day when weather permits. And he still grows quite a large vegetable garden in his backyard during the summer!
Unfortunately, I don't see my sister anymore. She died of cancer of the uterus at the age of 59, after two surgeries and two bouts of radiation and chemotherapy. I will always remember when she took her last chemotherapy pills which her doctor described to her has nothing short of miraculous! She came home from visiting with her doctor with a small container with yellow oval pills. She took the first dose of four as soon as she got back ... and that was the last time she was able to swallow and keep down anything any more. After those four pills, she was not able to eat anything anymore, and died of starvation four months later. And we were never able to find the name of the pills ... her doctor always found excuses for not telling us.
In passing, it is of interest to mention that I did not see the light of day until about two weeks after I was born. Yes, it is true! In those days in our area babies were born with their eyes closed, and they would not open them until about two weeks later. I will never forget one of the first letters that my sister wrote to us after she emigrated to Canada. " This is an amazing country!" she wrote. "Here the babies are born with their eyes open!".