My Birthday

One of my daughters recently suggested that I should start writing a blog.  She thought it would give me something to do in my retirement years.  Since I had never before heard the word “blog”, I imagined that this was a new word describing a blocked sewer line.  Why would I want to write about that? The daughter quickly explained that a blog was an analysis of some kind or a story or an opinion or a joke or just about any subject that someone would like to share with the world and could do so by publishing it as a blog on the internet. 

                                                                 

Well, I thought I could do that.  I’m chock full of jokes (some of them are acceptable in public) and opinions.  (My dear wife thinks that most of my opinions are incorrect).  I’m also chock full of suggestions (mainly for the Congress and the President). These have all been ignored.  Perhaps a blog will provide me with a method for forcing the President and Congress to at lease read some of my good opinions and suggestions.

However, I will start this blog with an account of my birth which occurred on 4 July 1930, almost 83 years ago.

I was born in the family home located in a small town in Eastern Utah.  Women didn’t go to the hospital to have babies in those days.  In fact, I don’t think this town even had a hospital.  When my mother began labor, a messenger was sent to request the family doctor come to our home.  He never arrived.  The birth was quickly reaching a crisis stage and my uncle, who lived across the street from us, said he would find  the doctor.  My uncle told me later in life that he had found the doctor in the back yard of his home with several of his cronies.  They were celebrating the July 4^th holiday and were all totally drunk.  When my uncle had delivered the emergency message, the doctor mumbled: “I don’t deliver babies on holidays.” 

My uncle, being a large man, grabbed the doctor by the nape of his neck and said, “You’re going to deliver this baby even if I have to drag you by your heels.  He made the doctor walk to our home hoping that the walk would help sober him.

Well, I have always been a bit embarrassed when friends (?) hear this story.  Their typical comment was, “now we understand why you’re so strange.”  I have to keep reminding them, and myself, that the whole nation celebrates my birth.