I was born either August 24th or August 25, 1933. I have arbitrarily picked August 25 to celebrate, because that is the date on my birth certificate. All my life my birthday has been celebrated on August 25, even though my mother claimed that I was actually born on August 24. “But because your birth certificate has August twenty-fifth on it,” she once explained to me, “I figured, what the heck, we might as well go with that.”
The confusion over my birth date arose out of the circumstances of my humble debut on the stage of life. I was born in a bedroom of our old farmhouse in the Panhandle of Idaho—near the top of the handle, about where you would grab it if you had to snatch a hot pan off the stove. The more-or-less attending doctor, for some reason unknown to me, came from a town thirty-five miles away. Maybe he was running a special on home deliveries. In any case, he turned out to be no bargain.
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I was born into confusion, and confusion has been my normal state of existence ever since.
On the day in question, either the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth of August, my father, Frank, arrived home with a couple of fifths of whiskey and started celebrating my imminent arrival. The doctor frequently emerged from the birthing bedroom to chat with Dad, a handsome and entertaining Irishman. “Join me for a drink, Doc?” Dad asked.
“Don’t mind if I do,” the doctor said. “But just the one.”
They killed off the first fifth of whiskey to dull their labor pains, and started on the second just for the enjoyment of it. Naturally, I delayed being born as long as possible, with a prenatal sense that I had it pretty good where I was. The outside world was in the grip of the Great Depression. People were hungry and cold and out of work, and nobody had any money, particularly for toys and candy. Hitler had come to power in Germany, and the faint but acrid odor of war was already in the air. A baby would have to be a fool to get himself born at such a time and, no fool, I resisted with all my might. My birth was hard on my mother but, according to her, not nearly so difficult as putting up with me as a kid. By the time I finally emerged into this pail of tears, kicking and screaming all the way, my father and the doctor had seriously maimed the second bottle of whiskey, if not killed it. Dad was in jovial good spirits, and I liked him right off. He seemed like my kind of guy. The doctor, on the other hand, appeared bleary and befuddled, and I am not surprised that he took a wild guess for a date to put on my birth certificate. According to Mom, he guessed wrong.
There was even some confusion over the doctor’s fee. Mom told me once that she had paid the doctor off in home-canned preserves. She said that after seeing how I turned out, she figured she had been overcharged by at least two pints of dewberry jam and a quart of string beans.
