My older sister was born in a big city hospital in New Orleans and lived the rest of her life with brain damage caused by bungling doctors and hospital workers.  When it came time for me to be born five years later, my mother refused to go into town to a hospital.  I was born in a two room house on my grandpa's farm in Webster County, Mississippi, a little home my grandpa and father built  - a place for a struggling baptist minister and a school teacher wife to last out the remaining years of the Great Depression.  Sometime in the early morning of July 5, 1941, my head popped into this world for the first time.  My dad said I came in kicking and screaming, pissed in the doctor's face, and raised hell until they got me cleaned and stuck a tit in my mouth. 

My dad used to tell that story often, even repeaded it not long before he died.  "Yeah, you came in raising hell, and I figure you'll go out that way," he said.  I think the old man might be right.  My son came here just the opposite, composed and not at all impressed with his new surroundings.  The kid stared at everything, didn't smile until he was nearly a year old.  Like me, he's always been curious about the world around him, but he goes about it in a completely different way.  My grandson is like his old grandad - me, which means he's going to strain and struggle against the sides of the box around him.

Yeah, the box - that's the way I see life.  We all live in a box, and it's of our own creation so we shouldn't fuss too much about it.  Some people like a nice little box that's all comfy and easy to keep clean, while others like a big one that's well furnished but easy to move around in.  Then you have a few like me who don't want to see walls at all.  We know it's a box, but we don't want walls reminding us of that fact of life.  And if the walls crowd in on us, or if somebody tries to put a lid on our box, we start screaming and kicking . . . and raising hell. 

Now if you're thinking I don't like boxes because they're closed in and dark, you're wrong.  I don't mind the shade.  I was born in the shade, in a dimly lit bedroom of a country farmhouse.  Bright lights piss me off - always have, always will.  All I need is enough light to find what I'm looking for, and once that happens, I drag it into the shade where I can examine it more closely.  Some things, most of them in fact, reveal more in the shade than in the glare of bright lights.  Intense light may show more of the details of what is being examined, but it tends to dim the wit of the examiner.

I'm not trying to make a point here that people born in darn rooms end up having more focus than people born under bright lights.  You'd never be able to research such a contention, and even if you did, it would gain you little.  During the birthing of a child, it's far more important for the people working the delivery to see well than it is for the baby to see what's going on.  I've never met anyone who remembered their birth . . . and that's good.  My guess is that it's not something we'd want to remember.  I tried witnessing my daughter's birth . . . didn't make it.  I watched until the head started coming out, then my knees started going away on me.  I barely made it into the hall before passing out.  From that moment on, I never thought of my role in child production as being noteworthy at all.

I was born into a different world than was my grandson, that's for sure, and that means the box he'll have to build for himself can't be the same as mine.  He was born in a birthing center, a fancy well-lighted room with folks all around him expert at bringing kids into the world.  I was delivered by a country doctor who'd stay up all night to deliver a kid, then go to his office and work a regular day.  Have you seen any doctors like that running around lately?  And my getting here cost pennies, not the ten or twelve thousand bucks an average birth costs these days.  A few months after I got here, my country was plunged into a world war.  Was my world better than then one my grandson got?  I don't think so, just different.

When it gets right down to it, we're all born in the shade of situations and circumstances set in motion before we get here.  They are not of our choosing, but we must deal with them.  I was born male, white, to well educated parents, in the rural south.  My upbringing wasn't spectacular, but it was safe and productive.  My start in life was a rough one . . . but a good one.  Some of those situational/conditional factors pushed me steadily toward a good education and a well respected profession.  I suffered some disappointments, had some failures, but the successes and accomplishments overshadowed them.

Yeah, it's a whole lot better to be born in the shade.  Maybe some of the situations and conditions worked against me, but one very important one did not.  I was born in the shade of a lot of love . . . yes, a lot of love.  And given my special condition of being born restless and frustrated with the world around me, I needed all the love I could get.  We all need a place of belonging, a place to come back to . . . and that's more often than not the place we started.  It's the place we first knew the shelter of love.

These days my box is roomy.  I make sure it's that way by keeping the walls pushed back, but I do it to make sure the people I'm responsible for know where safe shelter can be found.  Maybe life didn't teach me much, but it did teach me how to create some shade.

PHM, 1/8/08