Birth Stories & Related Adventures

1977

Photo by Mark Merritt

The little guy is a grandfather twice over at forty nine and his brother is fifty seven today. Just a small part of our Irish, Russian Jewish, Vietnamese, Mexican, French family. Eli, on Jonah’s shoulders.

When Eli's first boy was born we communicated by using a relay operator in pre-internet days. So when she said, "He looks like a lizard" I was taken aback by this non-euphoric description, but went with it. It wasn't until some time after getting off the phone that I realized he must have been misunderstood when he said, "He looks like an Lessard, his in law's family name.

Fifty-seven years ago I was standing crookedly to the right of the doors to the delivery room where I could look through a narrow window offset to the right. There was a sink underneath it and another window perpendicular to it, where I watched the light turn gold. 6:47.

The doctor was going out on his tractor and said "call back when the contractions are two minutes apart" which was two minutes later. When I called back he'd already gone out on his tractor and had to be chased after.

By eight years later we had progressed to home birth, delivering at the side of the road by flashlight and in Eli's case, arriving at the hospital twelve or thirteen strong, Steven claiming to be writing a magazine story so he could get in to take photographs.

Marlowe Rafelle

my second was born on the road to the hospital (for a midwife-assisted birth). fortunately, at dawn, no need for flashlight. drove back home.

David Houston

Ha pretty amazing in that setting. The phrase I remember from it was 'now I know what taking responsibility feels like'

Marlowe Rafelle

yes, it also made it clear to me what is actually needed for a birth to take place

plus, it took place on hwy 4 near the golf course underpass. it's always fun to drive past.

Viva Hoffmann

was the doctor on a farm tractor? Was he actually a farmer also?

No he was a friendly little peacock who looked like Johnny Carson and thought he was the host and star of the show. Not a jerk by the customs of the times.

In 1974 did have the pleasure of emptying the waiting room of a doctor who got snotty about the husband "holding hands" in the delivery room and went on about knocking the woman out because she loses control. I started in saying things that I knew would infuriate him, like "I didn't know that, it didn't happen at any of the home births I was at"

Very quietly six patients tip toed out of the waiting room while he continued yelling. So there we were without a doctor with a couple of weeks to go We just showed up at the emergency room in Utica; the doctor there was sweet and interested and on top of that never sent a bill.

There's Steve Horvath down in the corner. The hospital we showed up at was taken aback when twelve of us arrived for the birth. Steve told them he was doing a story for a magazine and could he come into the delivery room to take photographs.

They were also surprised that Sindi asked for chips, hopped up from the table and we all caravanned away. April 18th 1974 and there were bright Northern Lights on the drive home.

Steve was a veteran of the roadside birth of Allegra by flashlight in the back of Peter's five ton truck. We were trying to make it to Dr. Georg's house but didn't make it. Sparky went right into second stage having spent first stage weeding the vegetable garden.

I knew this but didn't say anything under the law "never argue with a pregnant woman, one of Wavy's lines I believe. She wanted to go to the doctor so out went the trash that was ready to go to the dump and Dorje lined the floor with newspaper and onions cut in half which rolled around eccentrically as we headed out.

Didn't know the truck could catch air. Peter is a good driver and the best at calmly taking. responsibility when something had to be done. No second guessing. Made it easy to surf behind.

Everything went well, Sparky a marvel of strength and courage. A loud screamer too, which lead to the revelation that in the friendly little old Upstate New York towns people pull their head in like a turtle, did you hear a scream? I didn't hear a scream.

But when it was Sindi's turn we both wanted to go to a hospital, each having an intuition that something was wrong although we didn't tell one another not wanting to make them nervous. Well, something was but we didn't find out until two years later that Sindi had had a brush with the German measles, the Rubella epidemic was on and Eli was one of the two million babies born mostly to hearing parents.

This caused a revolution in deaf culture which was stuck in the nineteenth century. The enduring mystery in my life is how Eli responded appropriately for two years such that we never suspected he was deaf. We thought he was spacey and knew you had to get his attention when you talked to him.

He was otherworldly sitting for four hours at a time staring at a light bulb on the ceiling sucking his thumb and stroking a bit of fur he gotten from somewhere, making a strobe effect with the light with his fingers.

He could draw me under the table too, spending five hours feeding ink into dots of different colors of construction paper. His socks had to be a certain way and if it took forty five minutes to get them just right, it took forty five minute.

I wanted God's home number to give him a piece of my mind even though I thought Eli was a perfect delightful baby, overnight the picture changed although he stayed the same of course. He was able to summon his little friend Heidi who was deaf by lining his hot wheels up at the threshold of the porch door. She always showed up when he did. there was plenty to ponder. Changed the trajectory of my life so that the calamity turned out to be one of the best and richest things that had ever happened.

Eli and I, Oxford New York 1974

April 2022

Eli will be 48 in a few days and is a Grandfather twice over. I'm told this makes me a Great Grandfather. That's a hat I made. We went logging that Winter. It's some kind of fur, either made to look like hyena or the real thing. We were harvesting trees planted during the Depression by the WPA, as in, by locals who needed a job. The result was that the trees were higgly piggly all over the place, no rows, seven growing out from under a rock where they had been shoved.

1974 Upstate New York

I was playing piano in the barn when I saw two car loads of guys driving by the house unusually slowly. Something told me I needed to monitor the situation and before I knew it I found myself on the front lawn, explaining to twelve guys, some with bats and lengths of wood in their hand, that we hadn't seen the girl who disappeared. "We came to search the house" ahhh "the Sheriff's on the way" AHH come right in, Please BEFORE the Sheriff. (In the event the Sheriff was very nice, even apologetic).

Overnight Charles Manson had changed the public view that hippies were dirty, lazy and hard to tell the boys from the girls, to hippies were insane drug addled murderers out to mame and kill indiscriminately.

In sleepy Oxford New York anyone who had the idea to grow their hair had prudently left town first so we were local curiosities who fortunately kept to ourselves with the exception of the Ryan brothers who had an old dairy farm over the hill and took pity on the, to them, obvious city slickers making up the answers to country ways out of thin air. True we didn’t know that if the sub-zero weather froze the water line, the solution was to hook up the arc welder to either end of the pipe, which being buried, didn’t cause a massive short but rather set up a noticeable buzzing and just enough resultant friction to produce and ice machine effect on one end after a bunch of hours.

No we hadn’t butchered a cow before. The Ryans would call us over when one of theirs had to be put down. They were sentimentally attached to the beasts and would shoot them, hoist them up with the front end loader and slit their belly producing a cascade of cow guts that piled up knee high, but didn’t want to then cut them to pieces.

No we hadn’t been hunting, well I hadn’t, in fact I went out the first time wondering if this was one of Peter and Steve’s bad ideas, only to go running down shouting “You got it, you got it!” in amazement.

This became an instant watchword against having strong opinions about things I hadn’t actually done. I was a lousy hunter. I gave off some signal deer were sensitive to that warned them off long before I approached or if I did get within range caused them to stand there and watch me miss.

The only hope was to get up in a stand but even then I made a poor shot and had to scramble down, then missing over and over as the poor beast wagged its head from side to side until I was out of ammo and Sindi who had been driving the woods had to rush to the car for a machete so I could finish the job with two stroke to its neck. Ordinarily there was something solemn even sacred when the deer seemed to relax in slow motion and fall to the ground. Not this time, although there was something about taking more responsibility by doing it by direct contact.

The house was one hundred and fifty years old so we went from doing art to a years long practicum of a long list of crafts and skills as first timers, starting with wood gathering, which it being September when we started meant the wood had no time to season so half the energy went to sizzling off the sap in every log. The house had so insulation, snow wouldn’t stay on the roof and we went through thirteen cords of wood that first Winter.

Sindi, Peter, Dorje, Allegra in the hammock with Sparky and Jackson and a can of Bugler

We went logging one Winter in a pine patch planted by WPA workers in the Thirties. The Works Progress Administration wasn’t picky who they rounded up for the job so instead of rows like you would expect in a pine plantation, the trees were everywhere, sometimes seven growing out from under a rock where a worker just wanted to get rid of them. Peter and Steve cut them down and I hauled them out to the road and piled them up dragging them with a poor old Farmall that was more at home in a vegetable patch with it wee front tires pigeon toed together. I loved it. Definitely the most raucous driving I’ve ever done with the all important caveat to KEEP YOUR THUMBS OUTSIDE THE WHEEL. If the front tires fetched on a knot they didn’t like the wheel would snap to lock so fast it could break your thumb.

The coda as we worked toward evening was the ghostly visit of the snowy owl whose woods they were. I hadn’t thought of birds making noise when they flew until this one made none appearing as if out of nowhere every twilight.

An Amanita tale.

When we came across the field to the Milk house, taking turns with the field dressed deer on our backs, warm, and ducking when cars went by, hunting season long past, and when we came to the little creek where the ground was still soft we all went in up to our knees and you with the carcass on your back the heaviest, could make no progress at all and laughing fell forward embracing the soft earth and crackling ice.

Down that same hill to the creek I once saw a deer drunkenly dancing showing off for his mate taking great slap-happy leaps in the air, his hind legs rotating woozily in mid-air to regain balance. We would see neat little chomps out of the Amanita mushrooms, the Fairie mushrooms of witches flight legend, which do indeed make a blast of aether go through one for hours, me by then clutching a pillow in the attic.

Over the hill and half a mile away you could hear the bell by the back door, the one made from a welding tank sending its columns of notes marching up the hill. We were caught out past twilight so it was comforting to have the direction marked for us

[Brueghel the Elder, Winter scene]

The Heidi Story

Florida 1976: We Always Knew When Heidi Was Coming to Visit. Eli, who was two and a half, would line his Hot Wheels up on the threshold of the screen porch. This was an extremely painstaking operation that could go on for forty-five minutes or more as each cars was metered perfectly to compensate for every speck of sand and the worn-out grain in the wood. We weren't that close with Heidi's mother so the visits were sometimes months apart and at Heidi's request. Heidi had lived in the house before us. Heidi was deaf, we didn't yet know Eli was deaf; he was somehow able to psych things out enough so that our theories about his 'spaceiness" never verged on deafness.

How he could guess what we were saying accurately enough, I'll never know. It was certainly with a kind of spooky joy that we recognized that that was really what was happening; he never lined the cars up at other times, she never failed to show when he did.