DAve, Part One

Partly because I haven’t found any inspiration in current events and partly because I have found inspiration in David Sedaris’s fantastic book Naked, I’ve decided to blog about the only thing I really know a lot about, and that’s me.

I was born on Thanksgiving Day, November 27th, 1975. As much as I’d like to believe a holy chorus of angels announced my entrance into this world, I have now come to accept that this just isn’t true. More likely, my arrival was announced by my mother complaining to the doctors that the temperature in the delivery room was too hot and was causing her makeup to run. Most mothers would have undoubtedly been screaming for Jesus to get this 8 and a half bound thing out of me!, but since I was the fourth live, kicking and screaming human being my mother had passed through her nether regions, this birthing thing was old hat.

Being the fourth child, the more intelligent of you will have probably figured out by now that I have three older siblings. And you’d be right. There’s Alan, the first, born in 1959. He was followed by Brian in 1961, and not three years later, Charles in 1964. Again, I was born in 1975. Understandably, one might assume I was, for lack of a better term, a mistake. But you’d be wrong.

I think.

Last Thanksgiving I was at my parents’ house, mainly because my mother has made it abundantly clear that she’d kill me or at least remove a limb if I dared not join my blood-brethren for one of our numerous holiday get-togethers. At some point my mom gazed out the window, let loose with one of her patented motherly sighs, and said, “And just think, 29 years and nine months ago your father and I were having a quiet dinner out alone when I announced we’d be having another baby.”

My father, who was in his usual place on the couch, desperately trying not to fall asleep, remarked, “I nearly fell out of my chair.”

Long pause.

“With excitement, of course. Ahem.”

And with that he leapt from the couch with a dexterity I hadn’t seen since, well, ever, and headed into the kitchen.

Nevertheless, my parents have both insisted that I was not a mistake (although “You were our blessing from God!” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of that fact), nor was I adopted. When I dared to suggest this once, my mother replied, “David, there were so many people standing around watching you come out of me there’s no way you were adopted.” That’s a mental image I could do without.

I didn’t have the typical relationship with my brothers, mainly because by the time I was at that prime-for-getting-beaten-up age, Alan was off to college, Brian was off doing… stuff, and Charles treated me more like a son than a brother. Speaking of, that reminds me: when the doctor finished delivering me, he came out to the waiting room where my family (no doubt praying that I not come out retarded) sat, walked right up to Alan, shook his hand and said, “Congratulations, it’s a boy.”

Just six years later, I’d be Alan’s ring bearer and very nearly almost kinda potty-trained.

I started reading when I was two, and no offense to my parents, but this is one of the reasons I still don’t buy the whole You’re Not Adopted story. My mother was so proud. Proud enough to stick a newspaper in my face at dinner parties and call all her friends over to watch me read about how President Carter did such-and-such in the Middle East (I never could get “Yasir Arafat” right), simply for the purpose, I am convinced, of making her friends feel like shit. Some of these women had discovered the hard way that they’d never again have children, and the ones that did have them didn’t want to see someone else’s kid reading at an unusually young age. Watching me analyze the day’s Dow Jones fluctuations and break down the day’s box scores couldn’t have made them happy. It would have depressed the crap out of them. It depresses the crap out of me just thinking about it. I think I picked up on this rather quickly, so any time my mom would put me on stage to read in front of her bridge group, I’d just mumble, spit, fart, and fall over. At age two, I was that damn WB frog, and I wasn’t about to break into “Michigan Rag”.

to be continued…