Another Day in the Country: Happy birthday to me!
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
It's my birthday Aug. 16!
My aunt Naomi loves telling me about the day I was born. She'd come on the train all the way from Ramona to Lodi, Calif. Her mother packed a lunch basket full of goodies so she wouldn't be hungry, they bought her ticket, took her to the train, and waved goodbye. "I'd never been anywhere before," my aunt said. This was her first time out of state and here she was, going all the way to California to attend my birth.
"When your mother went into labor, I really didn't know what to do," Naomi recalls. "I just went outside and sat on the front step of their little house and waited for the doctor to come." Later, the doctor called her inside to help, probably to heat water or something, like you see them do in the movies.
My mother recalls that day when I came into the world without a lot of details. People didn't talk about that kind of thing in her day. They barely said the word pregnant. "It was an easy birth," she says furrowing her brow. The birth she will never forget is my sister's 12 years later. "Now that was something!" she shakes her head. "You know I almost died!" I do know. I was there. It put the fear of the Lord into me just hearing the women talk about it. I wasn't sure that I ever wanted to go through that experience myself.
My father remembered the day I was born. He remembered their uncertainty about the future, the financial woes of the Depression, their trek to California to work in the grape harvest, their wanting to get ahead so they could make a life that was successful. "When I saw the agony your mother was going through," Dad told me years and years later, "I wasn't sure that I ever wanted to be sexual again!"
My Grandmother Schubert remembered the day I was born. I was the first of her grandchildren to be born so far away from home. Phyllis, Johnny, Bud, Glenn, and James were all born in Marion County. Who would have thought that a grandchild of hers would be born so far away? Her young daughter was out there in California. It seemed like the end of the earth, so far from home, so far from a mother's comforting ministrations.
My great-grandmother sat for a picture with me, my grandmother, and my mother, shortly after I was born. Four generations posing in the front yard at the farm. "Vas is her namen?" my great-grandmother wanted to know in her mixture of German and English. For a woman who had given her children names straight out of the Bible, my name was something to stumble over, Patricia.
"Pitty?" she said (meaning Patty) with her heavy German accent. "What kind of a name is that?"
My own children were born before I remember questioning my mother about my birth. I'd never heard much about that eventful day. My parents weren't exactly story-tellers unless there was a moral attached. "You were born at home," my mother recited the address of the little house on Pine Street as if it happened yesterday. "I remember your dad and I were so proud of you. We walked downtown in Lodi, carrying you in the evening — we didn't have a lot of money for gas so we walked. We stopped under a street light, pulled back the blanket and just looked at you." Two young sojourners in life, marveling at what they had created.
Meanwhile, the world turned on its axis, tipped a tad more precariously some nth of a degree perhaps because I was born, waiting for me to set a tiny foot on Kansas soil which would become the place of my beginnings even more than California. And though my great aunt Phoebe talked regularly to fortune-tellers, I don't believe a one of them predicted that all these years later little Pitty would be spending another day in the country.
