Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [33]
Hawaii was beautiful. They were given time to travel, and in a sense it was a second honeymoon. Then came a surprise. “They told us women the shift to Hawaii would bollix up our menstrual cycles,” Mom told me recently. “And sure enough, I missed one. Then, being an O.B. nurse, I noticed some other things. So I got a med tech friend to give me a pregnancy test.”
And there I was.
And that was the end of the Peace Corps. They informed their group leader, and someone called Washington. Can’t go if you’re pregnant, said Washington. When Mom and Dad left home they said their good-byes, not expecting to see their friends and relatives for two years. They were back in four months.
Some nights in the farmhouse after the cows were milked and the dishes drained, Mom and Dad would gather us in the dark and show slides of their abbreviated Peace Corps stint. For a rural Wisconsin kid, the images from Hawaii were tantalizing—volcanoes, gargantuan flowers, fields of sugarcane ablaze. Whereas all I remember of the Illinois photos was a handful of images showing tree limbs and power lines laden with ice. Mom said the ice storm was really something—it paralyzed De Kalb for days—but I’d witnessed the same thing in my own backyard and wasn’t very impressed.
Then too, I came of age during a time when the finest thing your average frostbitten Midwesterner could imagine was a trip to Hawaii. How we envied those who ventured out pale from between the snow-banks only to return a week later looking like scorched beets in pineapple shirts. “We were in Hawaii,” they’d say, fishing a tin can from the depths of a Naugahyde Aloha! travel bag. “Have a macadamia nut!” Down at the café or the tavern or at family reunions, whenever conversation turned to wintertime vacation plans, Hawaii was sure to pop up. You always envied the ones who had made the trip. So over the years I worked up this bit: if someone asked me if I had ever been to Hawaii, I’d say not only have I been there, I was conceived there. I told the story many times, often in the presence of my mother. In all my life I have never heard my mother indulge in even the most innocent double entendre or off-color comment (the fact that she says “bollix” doesn’t count, as I can assure you she is utterly oblivious of the fact that it is derivative of the mild English expletive bollocks, and when she reads this she will be mortified). Whenever I delivered the Hawaii punch line she would avert her gaze or pat her legs the way she does when she’s uneasy. And then one day when I was well into my thirties, we were at a family get-together. Hawaii came up, and I reprised the bit yet another time. Mom motioned me into the hall.
“I know you enjoy telling that story,” she said, patting her legs. “But it’s not right.”
Pat, pat, pat.
“I don’t think it was Hawaii.”
Pat, pat.
“I’m pretty sure it was during an ice storm in Illinois.”
Back in Wisconsin, Mom and Dad bought a house and forty acres just outside the small town of Nekoosa, and Dad hired on at the Port Edwards paper mill. I was born at Riverview Hospital in Wisconsin Rapids at 1:42 a.m. on December 16, 1964. Before Mom returned from the hospital, Dad grabbed a swath of paper from the mill and made a sign that read WELCOME HOME MAMA AND MIKE. Right next to the word HOME he did a pen-and-ink sketch of our house—a log cabin that had been tacked over with off-brown faux-brick tarpaper. Dad taped the welcome sign to the old upright piano in the living room and placed a couple of baby gifts on the bench. Mom took a snapshot of the arrangement and glued the photo into my baby book. Just to the right of the piano is the rocking chair where Mom nursed me and Dad lullabied me to sleep. Two Bibles are visible