The Fact of My Birth

Why Me? The Woes of a Middle Child
And the Fact of My Birth and the Prospect of Eternity

An essay by Joseph Hester

I really can’t prove that I was born. I know, I know, you think I’m crazy or silly, but I’m telling you the truth.

I asked my mother before her death about it and she said the doctor had put her under during the delivering of her middle child and that she just had no remembrance of it at all. I said to mom that “I’m your middle child.” She kinda looked me over and said “Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t; I really don’t remember.”

Well, I don’t remember either. I don’t remember what happened just before I popped into this world and I can’t remember the immaculate event either. You would think that a person would remember something as important as his birth wouldn’t you? I tried; really I did. I thought and thought and thought about it, but I could get no nearer to my birth than a memory of my sister’s little brown and white pony. I remember it quite vividly. We lived at Shady Grove with my grandmother and we had a barn and a pasture. She used to ride her pony around the yard, but I wasn’t allowed to get near it. I don’t know why, but I just wasn’t. There were a lot of things a younger brother wasn’t able to do or touch. This made be curiouser and curiouser.

Over my life time, having been called a horse’s rear-end on a number of occasions, I thought maybe my sister’s little pony had something to do with my origins. I’m just not sure. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t allowed near it. Later on, even when the picture man came around with his pinto pony, my brother, who arrived on the scene when I was three, got to sit on the pony but I just stood by and was asked to grin, and grin I did. I looked at that picture the other day then thought to myself that maybe they knew something that I didn’t because I really looked strange with my hand on that horses rear-end and a big-o grin on my face.

I once asked my dad about my birth, but at that time I was the only person in my family to attend college and graduate. He was hesitant about it. I thought maybe he’d been in the white liquor again, but he was quite clear-headed when he spoke. He said that he wasn’t sure who I was and where I came from. He pointed out that any son of his would have been an electrician or at least work with his hands. Because I was a “college-boy,” he wasn’t sure of my connection to the family. He then asked if I had ever worked in the cotton mill up on Ashe Avenue, behind the Lutheran Church. I told him that that mill had closed before I started to school. He just rubbed his head and said, “Ohm.”

Well, there you have it! No proof! No birth! I guess I just don’t exist.

My grandmother died way back in 1960. She was a good Methodist but I always thought she was messing around with the choir director and that’s why we went to church all the time. I once asked her if she could remember the day when I was born. She was kinda old at the time, about 55 or maybe a little older, and said she didn’t know if day or night was when I came into the world. She did point out that I looked like some members of her family and could be related, but said she didn’t want to say who it was for fear of getting into trouble.

It seems my family has been in denial about my birth from the beginning. No one—not even me—can remember. Well just last Sunday the preacher hugged my wife’s neck and ignored me like I wasn’t even there. I suppose my email about his sermon the week before kinda upset him. He was preaching from the Old Testament and about the Hebrews and called them “the chosen people.” All I said to him was they weren’t any more chosen than me. Anyway, anybody can call themselves “chosen” even when they’re not. I figured he wasn’t quite sure about my birth either.

Given the facts that I have just brought to light, I can’t rightly say that I was even born. But I’m here, I guess.

A long time ago a famous man said “know thyself.” How can you know thyself when you aren’t sure you are a thyself? I’ve tried but how can you know something that didn’t happen; something that just isn’t? To me this is a real mystery.

Some years back a young student said, “I am a thing that thinks.” He wasn’t convinced he had a physical body, just a mind that thinks – I wonder what he was seeing with. I guess no one remembered his birth either.

Someone said later that this young student was talking about a ghost of some sort; that he had invented himself by putting a ghost in his machine. Now, I’m not sure what all this means but I think that since he couldn’t see what it was that was doing the thinking, that what was doing the thinking didn’t really exist, even though it was thinking about what was doing the thinking. I hope you understood that because I’m thoroughly confused!

I don’t rightly understand all that but it does remind me of a story told to me by a teacher in eastern North Carolina. She said that when she was a little girl she used to spend some nights with her cousins. The house being kinda small, the kids slept in the same room, two to a bed. One night, about midnight, the door to the outside flung itself open real wide and this wind came whooshing through the room. Inside this wind they could see a face looking right at them glowing in the dark as it passed by. The wind went right through the wall and the face with it. They all screamed and one cousin said, “That looked like grandpa.” They learned the next day that their grandpa had been killed at that very moment in a car crash about five miles away. They figured that that was his ghost coming back home to check on everybody before it check out…you know what I mean.

I am reminded too of my cousin who died about five years ago in Summerville, SC. My wife and I went down to stay with his wife for a few days. We slept in the downstairs bedroom where he had been sleeping due to his failing health. That night, I heard voices and sat right up in bed and there was Jerry Boy with a stranger walking through the house – through the walls and everything. He was telling the stranger all about his life and where he lived. That ghost was alive!

I got to thinking about these happenings and about the young man who said we are just ghosts a thinking capacity. I also got to thinking about Isaac Newton and his apple – you know, he was the scientist who said that the only things that are, are what we can see, taste, touch, or smell. Of course, there was another guy who said that that might not be true because all our physical sensations are just impressions in the mind or ideas caused by these impressions...cogito ergo sum, my man!

That gave me an idea and it helped be solve the riddle of my birth. It doesn’t make any difference if anyone witnessed it or even if I sense my self right now, which I do quite frequently when I don’t take a bath. No, no, none of this matters. All I have to have is an idea of who I am even though I can’t prove that I was born or even now have a physical body, I have an idea or at least an impression of an idea that I am who I think I am which proves what the young thinker said earlier – I am a thing that thinks. It also proves that that teacher’s grandpa was still alive even though he was killed and my cousin is alive walking around even though they planted his body in the ground.

These events tell me, that we are more than what meets the eye and that all life has the prospect of eternity.