Although it occurred 71 years ago tomorrow, I remember my birth as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.^[1]

I recall grooving in the womb, the temperature a comfortable 98.6, the background music the soothing backbeat of my mother’s twenty-one-year-old heart of gold, womb service delivered umbilically in the amniotic Eden of pre-Natal bliss.

But, alas, on the fourteenth of December, an earthquake, a rupture, unwanted spasms, an excruciating expulsion through an opening not nearly large enough to accommodate the partially deflated soccer ball of my head, which, as it turned out, was covered with Hemoglobins. 

Hour after hour of torture. Then I feel the ice cold clamp of forceps on my head, depressing and denting it, as Dr. Snyder yanks me out of the vice of a constricted passageway into the freezing but blinding bright light of Dorchester County Hospital’s delivery room.

To add insult to injury, he grabs me by the ankles and slaps the tiny target of my ass as I let out a hellish, ear-shattering scream.

Welcome to the third planet from the sun, little one.

I was not a pretty sight. Both parents agreed that I was the ugliest baby they’d ever seen. They’d sometimes tell the story to dinner guests in my presence. The punch line was that Daddy had to ride back to Clemson right after the not-so-blessed event, and some lady on the Greyhound asked him why he looked so distraught, and he replied, “Because my wife has just given birth to a seven pound, four ounce monkey.”

After the laughter subsided, my mother would add, “But a week later he was the most beautiful baby you’d ever seen. When I would stroll him around Colonial Lake, strangers would stop and marvel at his beauty.”

Yeah, right.  No wonder I’m so messed up.

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^[1] Of course, at my age, remembering what happened yesterday clearly is not a given.