1. That's It! (cont.)

I arrived early in the morning and quickly. A neighbor, seeing the doctor come and go, said, “Well, I guess that was a false alarm.” But it was neither false nor an alarm. It was me. A family story says that my father took one look at me and said, “That’s it. No more kids!”

The story always amused me, because I knew what it meant, despite the way it was told. Our mother loved babies. She wanted babies. Lots of them. Dad, having been deeply burned by the depression of the 1930’s, worried about money. He always worried about money. Especially he worried about how much money babies cost. I was “it,” the last one, because I was a girl. Mommy had one of each, a boy and a girl, and as far as Daddy was concerned, anyway, she had no further excuse for wanting more.

Another family story, less often repeated, told that just-two-year-old Willis, when he awoke on the morning of my birth and, wonder of wonders, found his beloved mommy still in bed, ran into the room, jumped onto the bed and threw himself into her arms. Our father snatched him up and away and spanked him.