Bernie's Arrival Just After Midnight

The first son. The second child.

EVERYONE calls me Bernie. I came into this world in the upstairs bedroom of the rented house occupied by my mother and my father, Ethel and Floyd Guild, at 1015 29th Street in Moline, Illinois. The time was fifteen minutes after midnight on the morning of April 11th. The year was 1936. Mom was twenty-five years old and Dad was thirty-two. My eyes were treated with silver by the attending doctor. I tipped the baby scale at ten pounds even. Four days later I was circumcised. I was a colicky baby who cried a lot, but after that, I was a very healthy, very happy, very talkative boy, or so Mom told me. I spoke my first word at age eight months. Appropriately for an Aries child, that word was “Bernie.” My very first memory of life on this planet, possible at around age three, was playing with the rubber buttons on my sun suit. In some distant corner of my mind, I feel myself being bounced on Grampa’s Williams’ knee. I hear the harmonic hum of a red top as it spins on the cool linoleum floor. I see a wooden duck on a stick and wheels with wings flapping and squawking ferociously. But these are only vague, distant memories. I do not remember that house where I was born, but I do have many fragmented memories of my life at our second house at 127 35th Street down by River Drive. So impressionistic are they, in fact, that a poem might be the only possible way to express them. It’s not a good poem, but it tells what I remember. THE