Still digging through my dad’s “stuff”, photos, notes, letters, fragments of things past, some potentially meaningful, while the significance of others is gone with his memory of them.

Yesterday I got a shock.

Tucked in an envelope was a handwritten letter in my mother’s meticulous hand, dated Saturday, August 23, 1947. Six days after I was born. My mother was still in the hospital. The letter is addressed to my dad’s parents in California. It begins:

Our little boy is almost a week old but neither of us has seen him. I don’t know whether John has written you yet, but will give you the details just for the record. The baby was premature–barely seven months–and weighed 4# 8-1/2 oz. The doctors are very optimistic. The weight was good, that is, he was close to the weight of a good many full term but undersized infants. But, as the pediatrician says, they “had a little difficulty getting him working.”

The left lobe of his lung collapsed and he stopped breathing. But Dr. Simpson, one of those in attendance is a premature expert and lost no time in sucking out the mucus causing the trouble and in one minute he was wailing his head off….

We haven’t named him yet because he is not really out of danger and if anything should happen, I would feel better if he would just be an anonymous being rather than a definite person with a name.

There’s more, but those are the parts that I got caught up in.

I knew all of this, of course, from family tellings of the story. But seeing this contemporary account, when it still wasn’t at all clear whether I would be more than “an anonymous being”, feels different. It’s much more “real”, somehow, than the stories told many times.

So should I blame my world view on the month-long stay in a hospital incubator before I got to go home with my parents?