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By Root 444 0

apartment upstairs over Kelly’s Cleaners, a dry-cleaning establishment in downtown Davison, Michigan. Davison was a small town, five and a half miles from the city limits of Flint. My mother’s family had lived in the Davison area since Andrew Jackson was president—in other words, since pretty much before anyone, save the native people. Hers was one of the first families that founded the local Catholic parish. My father, who came from an Irish-American family on the east side of Flint, enjoyed the quiet, homespun nature of Davison, a far cry from the hardscrabble existence he was used to in the city. His only prior experience with the town of Davison was when his Flint St. Mary’s High School basketball team came out to play the Davison High School Cardinals, and the crowd started taunting the players with anti-Catholic slurs (“Hey, fish-eaters!” was the main insult being hurled by the Davison fans). That was enough for Father Soest, St. Mary’s pastor. He stood up, pronounced the game over, and hauled his team out of the gym and back to Flint. Other than that, my dad liked Davison.

The store that housed our apartment was owned by my mother’s father, my grandfather Doc Wall, who, for a half century, was known as the “town doctor” of Davison. Doc Wall, and his wife, Bess, lived in the two-story white house that my mother was born in, just two doors down from us. Every day the good doctor would climb the twenty-one stairs up to our apartment to see how his grandson was doing. I think he was also intrigued by the new device sitting in our living room: a Westinghouse nineteen-inch television set, and he would spend the occasional hour or two watching it. My grandmother would comment that I was already taking after him, and he liked that. He even had his own name for me—“Malcolm”—and he would make up songs and sing them to me (“He’s a nice little fellow, and a fine little lad, and we fixed up his buggy, with a nice little pad”). He would pass away before my third birthday, and I have only two vivid, but wonderful, memories of him: him building me a tent made of blankets in his living room, and the lively music he played for me on his Irish fiddle while I was perched precariously on his bouncing knee.

It has been reported that my first few hours in my new home were uneventful. But as the evening wore on, so did I, and thus began a nonstop crying jag that, despite the best intentions of my mother to comfort me, did not cease. After an hour or so of this, she became worried that something might be wrong and phoned over to her parents for advice. Grandmother Bess came right over and, after inspecting the crying baby with the adult-sized head, she asked, “When was the last time you fed him?”

“At the hospital,” my mother replied.

“Why, that was hours ago! This baby is hungry!”

Thank you, Grandma Bess, for saying the words I did not yet possess in my vocabulary.

My mother found the baby bag they gave her at the hospital and looked inside for the bottle—but there was none to be found. No bottle, no formula. But, wait a minute… isn’t there a breast in the room?! Helllooo!

My mother must have heard me, and so she attempted, with her own mother’s instruction, to breast-feed me. But either the plumbing wasn’t working, or I was already hooked on the Carnation Sugared Milk-Like Fatty Liquid Yum-Yum Substance, because I was having none of it. The crying continued, and Bess instructed her daughter to wake up my dad (who was already asleep; first shift at the factory began at 6:00 a.m.) and send him into Flint to get some formula at the only all-night drugstore.

As for me—I was convinced these people were trying to starve me to death! And I didn’t know why! The wailing continued. Dutifully, my dad put on his clothes and took the two-lane road into Flint to buy some formula and a bottle. He returned an hour later, and they quickly prepared it and gave it to me. I grabbed at it with what little strength was left in me. And I didn’t stop gulping until it was all gone.

For some reason, I never found my way to the path called “normal,” and