The Grimm Family

I have been writing memoirs as part of some writing circles i belong to here in Charleston, SC. i have threatened to send them out into the internet flow to people i know. i have been dared to do so by one relative who feels sorry for me and promises to actually read the epoch and keep his/her dam mouth shut if he/she don't like it. I also hope to encourage others to do the same if for no other reason than to show me how it is really done. What follows is the true story of my birth. I can vouch for it personally. After all, i was there.

NEW BOY ON THE FARM (Get out a kid size hoe)

I was born between midnight and dawn during a raging snow storm in Fayette County. Ohio. It was December 14. l921, and if i do say so myself, it was one of those memorable events that come along only once in a lifetime The weather was horrendous that night. It was near zero. A swirling snowstorm was adding more to the six inches already on the ground. Snow was drifting high along the fence rows outside. It piled against the hen house in the back and the chickens inside huddled against the cold, their rustling noises often being punctured by a few cackles in answer to a burst of wind. Snow had long since obliterated the path to the two holer in the outhouse out back.

Gathered inside the small family farm home in Mom's support were my father, two older brothers and two older sisters. I was to be number five, not half way through Mom & Pop's final count of 13 possible hands on the farm. Pop really thought I was to be to be their last, however, and had arranged to to call the little bugger after him. In this, of course, he was a full 8 short of the total. After all, these two were passionate Protestants, still in their thirties, and the early l920's were times when raising kids and corn was simply the thing to do. Their next child, my little brother Charles, was probably already fermenting in Pop's gene pool.

Flanking Mom's bed were Pop and my older sister, Mildred, who had been number two in the birth order, had already had a hand in helping with the births, and subsequent raising of number three, Doris Evelyn, and number four, Robert Wilson. She said, at the time, that she was eager to hang me on her hip and later proclaimed to one and all that i was "The prettiest baby she had ever seen." The same words she had probably used at the births of Doris and Robert before me, not to mention others as they came along.

Meanwhile, older brothers Gordon and Robert, and sister Doris, were sitting in the kitchen lighted by a kerosene lamp and warmed by a pot bellied stove. Electricity was still to come to the farm for a few more years. A large pan of water was being kept warm on the coal fired kitchen stove.

Mom was probably the calmest person in the adjacent bedroom. She was sitting up chatting with the midwife like the old friends they had become during the births of the first four.

The midwife had stationed herself like a catcher in a baseball game, awaiting a pitch. Would it be a fast ball? A slow curve? A knuckle ball? A changeup? A fastball would not be too good, they say. A curveball, sliding along slowly, dipping in and out, would be good. A knuckler? Maybe. A changeup? No.

She got the curve, edging me slowly into the world. Mom was happy that she had once again moved through the rhythms of birth without trouble.

Pop was happy. And since he had sworn that I was to be the last, named me Arthur Earl Grimm, Jr.And, since i had come in the midst of a major snow storm in the middle of the night, he was the first to use a phrase in telling of my birth that has become used time and time again in American literature. You have probably read it in mystery novels, and you are certain to have seen it used in the comic strip Peanuts. The dog in the strip reuses Pop's phrase as nit sits at a typewriter atop his dog house.

The phrase that Pop was the first to use in literary history was this: "It was" roared Pop. ' A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT............"

*END*

Warning: Stay close to the delete key. There are more of these coming. Meanwhile, dream up your own stories and send 'em out. Art.

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