1. I manage, somehow, to get started and birthed

Early Days

            For my nieces, Dana and Shari, and for their children

I’ll start at the beginning:  World War II.  In December, 1941, my father, a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Merchant Marine, was away on a run of supplies from Norfolk to Liverpool.  I do not remember this but was told about it much later.  I’ve always like that particular datum because I have a great love for the fiction and poetry of Herman Melville and his first sea voyage was from New York to that same Liverpool my father voyaged to a hundred years later.  I’ve written a lot about my father but not a lot in detail.  I’ll not do that here either except to say that he was a maverick, a victim of a severe case of wanderlust and that, when he finally was able to settle down and live in one place, he could not totally kick the habit.

He was born in northern Florida and grew up on Wakulla Bay, that small bay that was a part of Appalachee Bay which was, in turn, a part of Appalachicola Bay.  He had four brothers and five sisters.  I’ve written about a few of my uncles and aunts on my father’s side, most, I suppose about my Aunt Clifton Hall, that woman I met when she was in her sixties and still had the mind of a six-year old.  After this brief introduction, I’ll include a copy of that short essay which also appears in  Coming to Terms (Plain View Press, 2007).

Introduction

My grandmother died at age 96, nineteen years bedridden, and my Aunt Effie took over the sole care of her younger sister.  When Clifton died, the house was sold and my Aunt moved to Fort Pierce to live with her own daughter.  I still own property there on the beach and, some day, hope to build my own house, one of the few that can legally go up on that part of the St. Marks National Wildlife Preserve.  I confess to finding it quite odd that I grew up summering in one game preserve and living the res of the year on the edge of another: The Big Thicket National Preserve, the first American part of UNESCO’s “Man and the Biosphere” sites (see Hall, Big Thicket: Requiem and Redemption San Antonio: PGP, 2011).  Here’s the short essay:

It takes a family,

with the help of a village

I have been reading Terry Tempest Williams’s “The Village Watchman.” a fine tribute to her Uncle Allen, who was born with oxygen deprivation and spent many years institutionalized.  It’s a fine essay, well worth reading, and reminded me of my Aunt Clifton.  Clifton Hall was one of my father’s five sisters, most of whom lived on the beach at Wakulla Bay some miles south of Tallahassee in what is now the St. Marks Wildlife Preserve.  My grandmother had no problems with Clifton’s (we called her ‘Clippie”)  birth, but at six years old that youngest of her daughters contracted scarlet fever and remained, mentally, at that age until her death at age 86.

She was a fixture of our visits to my grandmother every summer and would wade with us through the tidal flats and estuaries made by East Goose Creek to search for blue crabs or just to wander in the clear salt water and look at sting rays, sea horses, star fish and occasional horseshoe crabs and minnows.   We would take turns pulling the dark green wooden boat along the shore, through sea weed and around oyster bars.  Clifton would sit in the boat when we had to swim out into the bay to get to one of the shell bars and would hold the croaker sacks open as we emptied the crab nets after successful scoops.

Frequently, she would go with us down to the flats at low tide to round up hundreds of fiddler crabs for bait for the older people, my grandmother, my father and the others who would fish all afternoon and late into the evenings and who would use them as bait for red fish and speckled trout.  To get a good supply of fiddler crabs, we went down to the flats at low tide where you could see them in the hundreds and chase after them, circling them like cattle until they formed a pile of shell, giant pincher claws waving in the air.  When we had them in a tight enough cluster, Clifton would hold a bucket out and we would reach down and pick up hands full of them and dump them in.

Back at my grandmother’s house a hundred yards or so up from the shore, we played countless games of Fish and Battle or stacked dominoes into towers with her.  If we stopped to read or rest, she would take a fly swatter and walk around the screened-in porch killing dirt daubers that managed to get in when we left the screen door open. 

When my grandmother fell and shattered her hip at age 77, my Aunt Effie Bankston moved back into the house and cared for both her and Clifton.  It was a primitive house with electricity from a generator and enough power to light only a couple of lamps.  Such fresh water as there was we hauled in each week; the well could be trusted for washing salt water from our bodies, but not for drinking.  The only heat in the house in winter came from the fireplaces in each bedroom.  Until I was well into my teens, we had to chop wood for the stove and for the fireplaces and we used an outhouse for a bathroom.

Such fresh water as there was we hauled in each week; the well could be trusted for washing salt water from our bodies, but not for drinking.  The only heat in the house in winter came from the fireplaces in each bedroom.  Until I was well into my teens, we had to chop wood for the stove and for the fireplaces and we used an outhouse for a bathroom.

My grandmother died at age 96, nineteen years bedridden, and my Aunt Effie took over the sole care of her younger sister.  When Clifton died, the house was sold and my Aunt moved to Fort Pierce to live with her own daughter.  I still own property there on the beach and, some day, hope to build my own house, one of the few that can legally go up on that part of the St. Marks National Wildlife Preserve.

I have not visited that stretch of beach in several years.  When I do, it will not be the same.  So much will have changed.  My father and his ten brothers and sisters, his father, and his father’s father grew up there in that same house that was so weathered by the constant wind that blew in from the bay.  When I grew older and went fishing with my father, the first sign of civilization we could see from out in the bay was the green roof of my grandmother’s house.  The first person to rush out and greet us was always my Aunt Clifton. 

The house has undoubtedly been modernized, people who do not know about my father, about Clifton, must live there now.  But when I do go back, what I will see in my mind’s eye is a six-year old girl in the body of an 80-year old woman.  She’ll wave and run for the cards or for the crab nets.

Main Blog Line

Back to my own even earlier days.

Sometime in early February, 1941, my father had enough shore leave to visit mom and my brother and sister.  His visits were fairly quick because he believed he would be drafted into the Navy if he were discovered ashore.  For whatever reason, he did visit and, nine months later, I was among the results.  I saw very little of him until the war was over.  I do know that when I was barely a year old, the whole family moved to Tallahassee, Florida, and that that did not last long.

It is not the purpose of this little blog to be a true detailed, full-length biography.  Its purpose is, really, to detail my personal recollections of my adventures in the medical trade.  But, I did want to affirm my familial distinctions.  For a poor person brought up primarily in Beaumont, Texas, that’s important.

We Do Not Belong to the DAR or to the Sons of the Confederacy

My earliest known male ancestor left England in the very early 17^th century and settled in Jamestown, Virginia, before the Mayflower had  landed on that absurd little rock.  Another of my ancestors was a captain in the Revolutionary Army (captured by the Brits, he was released in a prisoner exchange).  He continued to fight for liberty and, after the war, he and his two brothers migrated southward to wiregrass Georgia.  A generation later, the family was in north Florida, on the coastal bend.  That’s enough.  We are sons and daughters of the Revolution and of the Confederacy, but we have never been joiners, have always been Democrats (even when that meant being conservative) and have always been pro-union.  Between them, my mother (Retail Clerks) and father (Masters, Mates and Pilots and Boilermakers and Pipefitters, belonged to three unions that helped them raise a family.

At any rate, I was born.  I had always thought I was born on U.S. Highway 90 at Baptist Hospital, but my friend Ruth Willard informs me that I couldn’t have been since that hospital wasn’t put up until about 1945.  I checked this and found out that I was actually born at Hotel Dieu.  Whatever, the building doesn’t matter.

I did not see my father very often for more than a decade.  He remained a sailor, a Merchant Marine (for great information and superb writing on the Merchant Marine, see John McPhee’s Waiting for a Ship).  And, yes, my father drank and smoked too much.  He became sort of a living threat to us:  “Wait until your daddy comes home!” was a cry of retribution for some deed my brother or I had done.  We had a day of peace after he got home and then came the belt of punishment.  As I grew older, I realized he hated those moments as much as we did, probably more.  I don't consider any of that to be child abuse; it's just how things were done in most families then.  Every year or two, we would move from rental house to rental house until I was fifteen years old and ready to start high school.

When I was four years old, I went to a private school across the street from Junker Elementary in the refinery city of Beaumont, Texas.  Miss Carroll, our teacher, principal, counselor, gave me a hardback “chapter book” called The Little Lame Prince when I finished my year there and before I started elementary school in the second grade at Junker.  The only classmate I remember clearly from that first little school is my friend Helen Sample (her last name at the time).

Subsequent postings to this blog will detail my encounters with the medical profession.