a long-ago birth story

Some months ago, my grandmother told me the story of her youngest brother's birth. Today, while doing the bills, I came across the paper on which I had feverishly jotted down notes during our conversation.

December 1941 in a farmhouse outside of Topeka, my great-grandma Bessie was laboring to bring forth her 8th child.  Dorothy, my grandmother, was 11 and paying close attention.  All of the other babies had been born at home, but it was becoming obvious that this baby had a different plan.  "Something wasn't quite right.  She was having problems," Grandma Dorothy told me.  Of course, being a home-birth midwife, I probed for more details, but 70 years of time passed plus her 11 year-old perspective meant that this simple story was all the detail she had to offer. "She needed to go to the hospital but there was snow up the yin-yang.  It was much too deep for the truck." The "driveway" such as it was (a 3/4 mile dirt road)  was impassable so they had to use the tractor. Great-grandpa hitched up a trailer to that tractor, put a mattress on it and covered Bessie as well as he could before driving off into the night.  Snow covered fields and intense cold, in labor on a trailer pulled by a tractor: I can't imagine that traveling to the hospital was a journey that Bessie ever forgot.  Phil Jean was born, safely, December 21, 1941 and came home, to his family's great joy on Christmas Day.

bedpan commando

Too many family stories die with their tellers.  I want to preserve as many as I can by writing them down and sharing them here.  I encourage you to do the same.  Oh, you needn't blog them, but write them down; write them down!  

My grandfather, James Wilkinson, enlisted in the army towards the end of WWII.  He was stationed near Ogden, UT as a "bedpan commando" and worked at a hospital that treated injured soldiers returning from the frontlines. (My research suggests that he worked at Bushnell General Military Hospital*.)

The story, at least the way he told it, was relatively short. 

The first surgery he attended as a young medic was an amputation. The sights and smells were new and overwhelming. So, he was already pretty green when they handed him the still-warm arm and asked him to dispose of it. He always laughed at his listener's involuntary shudder and then admitted his own feeling of shock as he stood there holding someone's arm, not quite sure what to do. Towards the end of his tale, he would gleefully confess, that he had been sick to his stomach- although now I can't remember if it was before or after he took the arm to be incinerated.

If it had been my story, embarrassment might have prevented me from sharing that particular memory.  Maybe Grandpa Jim was embarrassed, too- at first.  But he obviously learned that sometimes the best stories are the ones that are uncomfortable for the teller.

Now that I think about it, his story may have influenced one of my mottos: 

If you are going to laugh about this in 5 years, you might as well laugh about it now.

*Bushnell General Military Hospital was one of 5 amputation centers in the US during WWII and treated soldiers who had lived in the mountain states when they returned injured from the war. 

http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1160&context=etd

where shall I set?

Yesterday, friends and family gathered to remember my Grandpa Jim, who crossed into eternity February 14, 2010.

The service opened with "The Lodge of Sorrows" ceremony by the Elks. After which my dad and my aunt shared. Before the closing slideshow, they opened the floor to anyone who wanted to share a memory. There were stories about hunting, stories about storms, many stories about working on cars and one extra special story about walking to school. Violet, grandpa's older sister, took the mike and shared this story:

"When Jim was just two-years old, he got diphtheria and was very sick. Afterwards, the doctor told us that he had developed a heart murmur. Mother worried for him. In time, we moved from the city to the country. Now, in the country, children didn't get driven to school, they had to walk. Our walk was a mile and a half. On Jim's first day of school, Mother was worried that the walk might tire him and told me to let him rest along the way. As we were walking, Jim needed to stop and rest. "Where shall I set, Violet?" he asked. I looked around and then answered, "On my feet." So I put my feet together, and he sat down on my shoes. After a while, he was ready to go on and walked the rest of the way to school. And that," she said, in true big sister fashion, "is why I have big feet!"