A glance at the clock makes a gal wonder
Trending
At 5:35 a.m. Thursday, I glanced at the clock.
I had officially turned 64, so the birth certificate notes the arrival time back in 1958.
It was a Monday, a day of the week I've always kind of liked, not dreaded, and maybe that's why.
I couldn't help but wonder as I was getting ready for work about that scenario decades ago when another baby chick had come to roost in the Ruth and "Pidge" Hout nest.
Those weren't exactly the days when fathers were in the delivery room helping mothers-to-be with breathing techniques and offering words of encouragement.
If it were even remotely the case, I could just picture my mother the Spanish teacher giving "Wendell" a good scolding, along with a huff and an eye roll or two and a gruff order -- probably in a foreign tongue -- to vacate the premises, Senor.
Adios!!!
Poor Pidge.
And, of course, such were not the days for gender-reveal announcements so many months into a pregnancy.
I'm imagining another Ruth Ann eye-roll as I write this.
You get what you get when you get it, would have been the school of thought and sound reasoning in the no-nonsense household in which I was raised.
I was child No. 5, the grand finale to youngest-to-eldest siblings David, Jay, Cathy and Linda. I was the tie-breaker over whether there would be more girls or more boys in the "Hout House."
Girl power won out.
The picture with today's column shows me -- aptly nicknamed Baby Bird with some wild hair still unmanageable to this day -- being held by my sister Linda, 11 years older.
When your parents die, there goes that foundation of information and stories from the two people who knew you and your circumstances of arriving in the world and your adaptation to it, their version of your growing-up years (or in some cases, never growing up or wanting to.)
It's a duty that then falls to your siblings if you're blessed as I am to have them.
I came across a birthday card I'd saved that Linda had sent me a few years ago in which she'd reminisced about some of my childhood, including the memory of seeing me in the blue crib that everyone else had had a turn in.
I guess birthdays should be a special occasion although the older I get, I'm more inclined to accept Better Half's spin on his own, that it's not a mandate for a lot of celebration and fanfare.
There's a lot of pressure, though, to mark a birthday, but I think aside from having a built-in column topic for this weekend's edition, it's pretty much just another day.
I could have been content with a jog trying out my new running shoes, which have remained in the box for months because I'm a cold-weather wimp with the only "running" lately involving errands.
In my final pre-Medicare year, I'm amazed at how incredibly juvenile I still am.
And glad my siblings can affirm that reality.