“You better cut it off” Larry Cardner warned me lugubriously, when I informed him that Amy and I were expecting our sixth child. Seeing as Larry was the owner and operator of the Cardner Shrine Circus, and I was employed by him as a clown, and we were in Polson, Montana, where the deer and the antelope might play but where there was no bus service, I refrained from telling him to go take a flying leap -- contenting myself instead with unplugging his electric cooler when he wasn’t looking so his daily Coors intake would be lukewarm.
I’m not exactly sure how this vignette ties in with the story I’m about to tell, except that I always liked making babies and enjoyed, for the most part, raising them. The birth of our first child, with its attendant hugger mugger, is an esteemed memory that I keep close to me -- like those rub on tattoos I found inside pieces of Bazooka bubblegum as a child.
In 1981 my former Mission President, Harvey Brown, missed our wedding reception in Salt Lake, so to make up for it he booked a hoity toity suite at the Hotel Utah for Amy and I at his own expense. And that is where, I firmly believe, our daughter Madelaine was conceived.
Approximately nine months later, towards the later part of May, we were living in Bottineau, North Dakota, where I was the news director at a brand new FM radio station -- KBTO. As a wedding present to Amy I had promised to give up my peregrinations with the circus for something stationary. Since the station’s broadcast area included the nearby Turtle Mountains, I began each newscast by saying “And now it’s the voice of the turtle from KBTO . . . “ I’m still cringing over that overripe piece of hokum today.
As the Memorial Day weekend approached Amy staggered through each muggy day with cheerful determination. The local pediatrician assured us the baby was in fine fettle, although we didn’t get an ultrasound, and so didn’t know the baby’s gender. The nearest ultrasound equipment was a hundred miles away, in Minot. As is the wont of pregnant women, Amy evinced some overpowering cravings, which I tried my best to assuage. She wanted red hot pickled sausages, so I stopped by one of the frowzy beer joints in Bottineau and paid an outlandish price for a half gallon bottle of Big Mama pickled sausage. She wept for a box of See’s Chocolates, made only in Salt Lake City -- so I called one of her sisters who lived in Utah to ship out a big box post haste.
And she sighed continually to go see her folks in Tioga, about 150 miles due west on Highway Two. I didn’t think it prudent to take her on such a long trip with the baby ready to bang out at any moment, but she was being such a good sport about the whole thing -- never a cross word or beetled brow -- that I told her we would leave Friday afternoon for Tioga and then come back late Sunday. The dj’s down at the station could just rip copy off the AP wire and read it for news while I was gone.
At this point I’d better make it clear that I didn’t drive. Didn’t know how. Didn’t care to learn. I walked or rode my bicycle. Or had Amy drive me. So she drove the whole way to her folk’s house in Tioga -- and then, not unnaturally, her water burst a few hours later.
Her mother and I rushed her up the street to the Tioga Hospital, where Dr. Patel was on call. It was a small rural hospital, and it had only 3 doctors. They were brothers, from India -- all named Patel. In the ensuing hubbub I could never remember which Dr. Patel had said what or done what. All I know is that Madelaine’s birth certificate shows the delivering physician to be Dr. Patel. If she wants to know which one she’ll have to hire Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe to find out.
My conception of the birthing process, gleaned from old movies and trite television sitcoms, was that there would be about twenty minutes of discomfort, and then a baby would leap out, clean as a whistle, and with a lusty cry begin nursing and making adorable faces. Amy’s mother, who had had a dozen children herself, told me I’d better go get a magazine and settle in for a long, long night.
24 hours later I began to see what she meant. Amy was extremely slow to dilate. The nurses gave her castor oil to hurry things along, but that didn’t do anything except clean her out but good. I want to describe how dead on my feet I was at the time, but then I remember that it was Amy who was having all the hellish contraction pains for the past 24 brutal hours -- so I think I’ll just shut up about my own discomforts.
Finally, at around noon, with one last wavering scream of agony, Amy managed to push out our first child. A girl. Six pound, seven ounces. And completely covered with silky black hair.
“Gosh Almighty!” I yelled at Dr. Patel (don’t ask me which one.) “it’s an orangutan!”
“Not to worry” he soothed me. “Very common for first babies. It will all shed in a few hours.”
And, by golly, it did.
We brought Amy back to her parent’s house the next day, where it was determined she would stay and recuperate for a few days. Now the question became “How do we get that dumb husband of hers back to Bottineau to go to work?” I couldn’t drive myself, since I didn’t know how to drive. So it was decided that Amy’s younger brother Casey would be my chauffeur. He dutifully drove me back home in our blue Ford station wagon, and stayed for a few days cleaning out the refrigerator down to the grease spots on the enamel.
The next weekend Casey and I drove back to Tioga to pick up Amy and the baby. She drove the 150 miles back home while I held little Madel Paddle -- as we had started to call her. That night, as Amy and I gazed lovingly at her lying in her crib, Amy turned to me, squeezed my arm, and whispered: “You are going to learn to drive or I am going to murder you.”
And, by golly, I did.
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