Jiggity Jig

Back from another first-Sunday-in-May trip to the old patch. Given that next month is ten years since the old man passed, you’d think I would have been in a much darker mood – and that even before the layover that lasted four extra hours because United Airlines momentarily forgot that an airplane needs a crew to fly. And yet I made it mostly OK.

Part of that came from getting to spend the afternoon Sunday with my double-second-cousin and his lovely bride. (His grandfather and mine were two brothers who married a pair of sisters from up the holler, thus the double.) I suspect that this is going to be a recurring feature of spring: drinks on the veranda somewhere in Southside coupled with a rousing game of “Can You Top This,” embarrassing Southern family edition. He won this year, hands down, on a matter of elective biology too heinous to repeat here.

And then, today, after packing up a lot of stuff that should have been much more emotionally trying (my dad’s class rings, my mom’s original wedding bands, $270 worth of the family silver coinage and just try sliding THAT past airport security), I was actually glancing through my baby books. You know, the ones with all my test scores and early report cards and first cut hair and first lost tooth and medical history and blah blah blah.

And apparently – no wonder I forgot this – I seem to have left a trail of urine in every mattress from here to South Carolina for the first six years of my life. To the point that they had me on two kinds of drugs – one for the wee problem and one for “nerves.”

Now, I think doctoring was different back then. I was born on the 1st and didn’t come home ’til the 6th. I cannot FATHOM any hospital keeping mother and child for five days when it was a regular uneventful birth with no complications and nothing gone awry. I mean, that’s longer than my first niece stayed in the hospital and she was at least five or six weeks premature. When I had my tonsils out in January of ’76, in an attempt to do something about my chronic rhinitis, I was in the hospital for TWELVE DAYS. I’ve had family members laid up for REAL medical issues – serious lighting candles at Mass stuff – that were in and out of the hospital in half that. Medicine has changed, kids, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, the older I get, the better I was. I say this because I saw various test scores, report cards, the original letter that gravely informed my parents that I was eligible for special education services at a different elementary school than I had been slated to attend. And apparently, I peaked around age 6 in terms of being light-years smarter than my peers. There was stuff written in those evaluations that was just embarrassing to read (and I’m not talking about the “He especially enjoys Gilligan’s Island” comment).

So I guess the moral of the story is this: if you want to be the kind of superstar that would make Kanye West weep with humility, you can’t bother yourself about getting up to have a piss.

I don’t think I’m going to be let to try this at home.