From Hippy to Hedonist to Heaven Bound

This was our apartment kitchen when we moved into University City in Philly. This is after we cleaned it up and my wife painted the cabinets.
It was a one room, first floor apartment with a small kitchen, a bath and a kind of dressing room closet.

It was between 41st and 42nd Street in West Philly up the street from Clark Park. (If you read any of my Philly Stories (Six Stories of the Sixties) you can easily guess that "Claire Square" is a stand-in for Clark Park. The statue in the center of the real Clark Park is of Charles Dickens, who once spoke there on his visit to America. (Friends of Clark Park)

We lived not far off the University of Pennsylvania campus and my wife would walk to her job as a private secretary to the Chairman and co-Chairman of the Chemistry Department where she would type books and papers full of odd symbols and formulas. I think it must have been very difficult to type things when you couldn't understand what you read. She had a very similar situation when she later worked for the Franklin Institute.

By this time we had left any pretense of interest in religeon behind. I had become an Athiest, despite the fact that one of the articles I had published in "The Communicator" was an argument against the "God is Dead" movement that was prevelent at the time. (God Resurrected 1966) I considered myself a mercenary writer, a typewriter for hire so to speak. Since "The Communicator" was a paper for college students my pieces always took a contrary view from the convential wisdom of the student trends of the times. Thus I wrote a pro-Vietnam War piece, a pro-God piece (sort of) and an anti-Drug piece. I liked to stir the pot and rile things up. It didn't matter what my personal views were, I always took the least popular side. (I also wrote under the pen name of "Loop" because as a non-student I wasn't supposed to write for this publication.)

We had asimilated a Hippy lifestyle, as I explained previously, but it was to deteriorate to something else just as the Love and Peace Generation was already beginning to deteriorate in delusion after the Rolling Stones concert at Altamost and the Kent State Massacre. For us you might say Love and Peace became Sex and Drink. We became Hedonists, especially me.

"Dirty Pictures" had hooked me in junior high. My only case of criminal activity had been stealing men's magazines at the local newstand (where I picked up the papers for my paper route). I got caught stuffing three such rags in my shirt one day, was told by the owner exactly and precisely where he was going to stuff those magazines if he ever caught me stealing again, and I never stole anything anywhere anytime after that.

However, a few years later a used book and magazine stand opened at the Farmer's Market just east of town. There was a section hidden behind a curtain with a sign saying, "No one under 21 allowed". I would edge to the side of this barrier and peek in and there were all these nudie magazines. One day the proprietor, a man who looked like Ratso Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy" sidled up to me as I peered through the crack in the curtain.

"Hey kid," he says and I jumped a foot. "Interesting, eh?"

I didn't know what to do. I just shook my head or perhaps I was just shaking.

"Look," he says, "I can see you ain't 21. (No, I was more like 14 or 15.) "But you look like a good kid, like somebody who wouldn't tell anyone if I sold them to you."

And so I began buying my pornographic fix from a sleazy stall at a Farmer's Market. The magazines behind the curtain were basically two kinds. There was "Sunshine and Health", a Naturlist Publication that promoted Nudism and had a lot of pictures of ordinary people in the buff playing volleyball. The other kind had titles such as "Artist and Models". These other magazines came mostly from Sweden and each page consisted of a nude woman in some pose. The blurb of text in the beginning claimed these were for the use of "serious artists" interested in "painting the human form". Yeah, right, I ran home and got my sketch pad at the ready.

Eventually this guy and his bookstall disappeared and my supply was cut off, so I was reduced to buying "Playboy" to hide in a secret crevice back in my bedroom. (Hmm, interesting now that I think of it. Although the Farmer Market guy had a sign banning anyone under twenty-one, the regular newsstands would sell "Playboy" and other men's magazines to you if you were 16 or older.  Of course, much of what the Farmer's Market guy sold was more raw than early "Playboys".)

It wasn't easy to get hardcore pornography in those days. There were no legal outlets (what the Farmer's Market guy sold was borderline pornography, not the real thing so to speak) and no Internet.

Somewhere between the Civil Rights Riots and the Anti-War Rallies, Peepshows opened in Philadelphia, the first volleys of the "sexual revolution". The first I remember and which I frequented a lot was above some stores on Walnut right across from Rittenhouse Square. There were Retail Stores in the basement of the building and you went up these steps between them to the Peepshow place. If you stood on those steps, the scene on the right is what you would be looking at.

Inside, the rooms were empty except for old time Nicheloldeon machines in the center. there were two such rooms. In one corner was a cage with a cashier who would exchange your dollar bills for quarters. You dropped a quarter in a slot, leaned forward to press your eyes against the viewer and a little movie would come on of a woman dancing about striping. She would remove a couple peices of clothing and the screen would go dark. You drop another quarter and the movie would restart where it left off. After four quarters had been dropped the dancer would remove her last vistage of covering and for a brief moment be nude, then the screen would darken again.

I heard this place or at least the first peepshows in Philly, true or not I do not know, were started by Ira Einhorn. He was the man who took credit for starting the first Earth Day and later became imfamous as "the Unicorn Killer".  Einhorn was a big deal counterculture guru in the sixties and early seventies, until he killed his mistress and kept the body in a trunk in his apartment. He later fled the country for France. (Senator Gaylord Nelson also claims to be the founder of Earth Day, but as far as I know never stored any bodies in his trunks. Being a politician he might have had some skeletons in his closet, however.)

My wife and I took an active part in that first Earth Day. ( Pollution Trail: Where is Man? ) It wasn't the first or last activism we took part in during those years. But by the 'Seventies we had become more interested in the "earthy" than the Earth.

On the dirty heels of the peepshows came the Adult Bookstores. Funny how when they stick "Adult" in front of something it usually means it is pretty immature and at least slightly depraved. There were Adult Bookstores, Adult Films, Adult beverages and Adult Language, hardly any of which represents very adult behavior.

I hate to think how much money I spent in Adult Bookstores. But there they were, popping up like pimples all over the face of Philly. Eventually, they seemed to concentrate, whether by choice or coercion, on Arch Street between Juniper and 13th Street just before the Old Reading Terminal, which became the Philadelphia Convention Center.  This was only a block away from the publisher I worked for on Cherry Street. How convenient.

There were a number of movie theaters in the city called Art Houses, another misnomer. They sounded like they showed European films by Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky or Pontecorvo, but no, they leaned toward directors such as Russ Meyer and Joseph Mawra, with films with title like "The Immoral Mr. Teas", "Olga's House of Shame" and an unending string of grainy black and whites of those Nudists playing volleyball.

My wife and I use to go to the Art Holiday and Art Walton together. We also went to the Globe Theater in Atlantic City, which did old time burlesque back before the casinos came and took over the town. It was kind of funny. At "Art" houses such as the Holiday and Walton, my wife was a rare woman in the audience; at the Globe it was almost all couples. I guess people figured they were out of town at a tourist trap and no one back home would know. The Globe seemed racy at the time, but you can see much worse on TV these days.

There were also two or three little theaters grouped together on East Market Street, I believe on the corner of 17th Street that showed stripper and nudie movies. By the late sixties they added live shows that went further than anything at the Globe. The women in these shows went to full nudity and then some.

If you are seeing something of a downward progression here, you are. Almost like a drug, pornography can demand stronger fixes. As a teen I was thrilled by a nude model in a static pose. By my late twenties I was seeking more and more stronger stimulates, more and more weird stuff. And my wife and I were becoming ever more daring in our own actions.

One day we were at a large mall and my wife went into a lingeree shop. She took some back to the dressing area and I waited, the ever stoic husband holding his wife's purse, as was another fellow nearby.  We nodded to each other, both sharing this kind of moment, when suddenly this medium tall blond woman came out of the dressing area wearing nothing but a fishnet body stocking. This was the other fellow's wife. About then my wife called to me to see what she had on and so I told her to just come out. She did and a kind of contest began between the women of stepping out in brief or transparent items. The other man and I exchanged telephone number. When my wife and I left the store, there was a large crowd of gawkers in front of the broad display windows who applauded as we left.

We began to get together with this other couple, either at their apartment or ours. We would stay over night, play sex games, take poliroid photos of each other. I want you to understand, my wife and I never got into "swinging" or "wife-swapping', we never had any interest in that, but doing it in front of others, yes, that wasn't a problem. As we had transitioned from the Hippy culture, I was back into office jobs. I changed jobs several times and each time I made more money. We were able to move to better apartments than that one in University City. The one we lived it at this time had a closed cuircuit TV channel. If someone rang your buzzer, you could change to channel two and see who it was before letting them in. You could also talk with the caller on an intercom. When they would come to our place, she would show up wearing only a coat, which she would fling open when we answered their ring. Obviously anyone in the building who happened to turn to channel two at the time would have seen her show, would have seen her everything.

As with such things, again their was a progression. However, there were some things about the guy I didn't particularly like, thing he would say that were more perverted than I felt I was and after a while we also began to suspect they wanted to take that step toward wife-swapping. That was when we dropped them.

But we had another couple we were good friends with, even better friends. They lived in the same apartment building and we began getting together with them regularily. There was no nudity, no sexual games involved, just some smutty talk sometimes. He was the very jealous type and prone to violence, so  that kind of stuff didn't fly. We would get together and play cards and drink.

Now, I am some kind of freak. I don't know why, but I could consume great quanities of alcohol and not get drunk. I have never really like alcohol very much actually. I didn't really begin drinking any until well into my twenties, but drinking was very much a social thing in the groups or with friends we had and so I drank. I could drink any of them under the table. My wife certainly didn't have my capacity. I almost killed her one night.

We were in the apartment, still in Philly at the time, and she asked me to make her a Manhattan. I didn't know anything about mixing drinks. I had a book. It said mix 1 part Vermouth to four parts Whiskey. I decided to make her a double, so I took a shot glass and put eight shots of whiskey and two shots of dry vermouth in the shaker. Added a couple dashes of bitters and shook it up.  My wife gulped it down, lost any idea where she was, felt sick and made it to the bathroom before collapsing. She fell striking her head on the toilet so hard she cracked the tank. Thankfully she didn't also crack open her noggin.

Usually it wasn't us passing out. It was out friend. Most nights we got together, he would eventually drift off to oblivion on beer, which is all he drank usually, but he drank a lot of it. Evenings would end with me carrying him to his bed. He wasn't a big man. He was perhaps an inch or two shorter than I, but very thin. But a dead drunk is nothing but dead weight.

He also had seventy-six tattoos and this was long before getting tattoo became the fad it is today. The song from the "Music Man" always came to mind, "Seventy-six tattoos led the big parade..."

Going out with our friends could be an adventure. It wasn't unusual for his wife to stash silverwear and salt and pepper shakers into her pocket when we left restaurants.  There were times I had to pull him out of bars before the fists flew and on at least one occasion grab him and push him into our car to escape arrest. This occured one drunken evening when he decided to join some kids playing street hockey. He always claimed he had played semi-pro hockey at one time. He butted into their game and one of the mothers called the police.

What purpose did life have? I was making enough money we could "enjoy" it. It was just us living in a series of apartments. We had no children encumbering us, no great obligations. I was an Atheist, so there was no higher power to worry about, I only answered to me and what I desired. I worked hard, I was still going to evening college, I was still writing, even selling some stories. This was as good as it gets, wasn't it? Nobody was getting hurt, were they?

Oh, sure, I didn't ever feel satisfied. I always seemed to find something irritating about my jobs. And my wife kept falling into these deep depressions, sometimes talking about suicide. She would cry for no reason (in my opinion) and often complain because she hadn't been able to have children. But she would get over it I was sure, and at last it seemed she had accepted the fact she never would be able to have children. After we lost the sixth one she had her tubes tied.

We no possibility of children, just the two of us, it seemed reasonable not to worry too much about the future.  When we reached 40, say, we could begin putting away for a rainy day. We were still young, so we could just go on trying to have fun for some more years. More parties, more travel, more nights out and ever more darker pornography. The pornography I was buying at this point was so dark I was even hiding it from my wife, although she had never objected to me reading the stuff.

Although, our closest friends were our drinking buddies, we did have other friends who were pretty main line suburbanites. I had made good friends with a fellow at my latest job, one I did enjoy and would hold for six years. He and I played tennis most of our lunch hours and we went golfing on the weekends. He had some parties at his place. There was some drinking, but not heavy and no one was putting on lampshades or doing anything foolish. These other friends were never aware of the sex and drink life we had engaged in so often for so long.

My wife and I were not involved with any other couple in sexual activities anymore, but that didn't mean we weren't misbehaving.  We were risk takers and we were probably fortunate we never got caught. I'm telling you nothing more, except the things we did would not be acceptable to you I'm certain.

So there I was and where do you think I was headed? There really didn't seem anything would change my mind about God. I was laying down a nice fast road to Hell, except I didn't believe in Hell. So that was no worry for me.

And then my wife got pregnant.

Yes, for the seventh time. Perhaps this was Lucky number.

It's a miracle, right, cause she had her tubes tied.

She lied.

She was determined to have a child of her own.

And now we were five months along and my wife was lying in a hospital room and the child was doomed.

Number seven, the number of completeness. Like a never-ending slow march to completeness. A wait in a death chamber accompanied by the constant beat of a drum.  Beat         Beat        Beat         Beat

I sat in that room every day for a week with the beat of a drum.    Beat      Beat       Beat         Beat

But it wasn't the beat of a drum, was it?

It was the beat of a heart that didn't know it should stop.

It was the throb of a life trying to be and wouldn't.

And somewhere in the deep dark night, watching my wife sleep, I heard   Beat       Beat      Believe    Believe

There is a God. There must be a God.  I can hear his breath in every beat.  Believe      Believe      Beat      Beat     Beat

But the baby had to be born. They could not delay longer for the sake of my wife the baby had to be born now.


Amy was born in July 1976 and Amy died in July 1976.

This is Good Friday a day itself marked by a death, the death of one as innocent, even more innocent than Amy. An unfair death that seemed to mark the end for so many. Those who saw him nailed to the cross ran and hid and wondered, "What now?"

When Amy died, my wife sunk in depression as close to death as possible while still alive.

What now?

But Easter is not the season of death. It is the season of Resurrection, the season of hope, a season of salvation for those who will only reach out and embrace it. Like the seed planted that must die to flower, so it was that year. Here at the end of all, at the number seven, at the completeness of things past I turned to belief I had denied and fought. I rose by dropping to my knees in the silence of my room.

He didn't say, "Go away you're filthy." He didn't say, "Go away and come back when you've changed."
Like Mister Rogers he said, "I love you just the way you are."

Out of death came life. Our friends left us, not because we ignored them or shunned them, but because we had changed and I suppose, to them, we weren't fun anymore. Our old ways ended, but what we didn't realize was so had the impossible.

We had went from Hippy to Hedonist to Heaven Bound.

And very real miracles lay ahead on this brand new road. He makes the impossible possible.

May you have a blessed Resurrection Sunday.




All photos by the author, except the photo of the Peepshow viewers, which is from Wikipedia.

Miracles in New Jersey and Beyond

In 1967 I became seriously ill, probably with the Flu. I lay in the darkened bedroom for several days growing worse. I was convinced one night I was going to die before morning. I rolled over and on the wall was a cross. Not a physical one that was hung there as decoration. That section of wall was just bare paint. This cross was formed by light.


My fever broke that night and in a couple days I was up and back to work.


I was also confused by that cross. I was an Atheist and crosses did not magically appear on your wall to cure you. It had to be how the moonlight or something came through the window.


But I had never seen it before. I had never seen any kind of light on that wall before. Every night for weeks afterward I lay in bed before going to sleep watching that wall to see if it would appear again so I could find the source. It never did and I forgot about it, at least consciously I told myself I forgot, but obviously I didn't or I couldn't tell you about it now. No, I didn't forget, I just pushed it aside where every once in a while it poked at me.


The statements that follow are quotes from correspondences I had with various ministers between the time I had that illness and 1970. You will see I was not converted by my vision:

I have come to a decision about your question of my spiritual comfort and to which church or religious interpretation I entrust my allegiance. I conclude none; that is; if I don’t claim out and out atheism, I certainly admit to a deep-seated agnosticism.

Disbelief in an inviolable god is not a popular course. A person is questioned and berated if they swim a stream outside the main river. It is necessary to give an explanation of my decision, not because it is anyone else’s business, but because it isn’t.

If you would not ask why, would not care, would not debate such a profession by a fellow human, then you would be guilty of dereliction of your faith and calling. Whereas I reject the legendary and mythological ideal of Judea-Christianity and am free to show no concern for anyone but myself , you by tradition and expectation must be immediately involved with your fellow man. If this was not so, then you would do far more damage to your church and faith than any atheist or critic can ever do.

You are certainly right in saying you find it hard to accept I would lean toward Catholicism. That was a passing island that I clung to as I attempted to claim some finger hold on religion. But like the other shaky grasps I have held in the past, a man of the cloth stepped upon my hand and loosened me.

I cannot readily accept your suggestion about a loosely constructed church and free experience within some meaningless dogma, for as a man of the collar, you are not free to make such a proposal. As an ordained minister you must accept the word of the Bible, you must take it as final authority. And you know it rejects what you said. And it goes further in destroying the present tradition of the Protestant Church concerning faith.

As the churches rejected me, I am rejecting them you see. It is deeper than that, of course, but that is what most people will adopt as my reasoning, and so be it. I was forgotten by Bethel, ignored by the Lutherans, Episcopalians and Catholics and repulsed by the Ethics. Besides I no longer believe any man knows anything about God. If we did know once, then it was before weak churches or their opposite who subverted God. Anyway, I think, like the scripture indicates, God will give support to he who supports himself.

I don’t think God is dead: I think he is sealed in some church pledge envelope somewhere buried beneath the gold and silver.

The most interesting fact I ever learned in Sunday school was one of the teachers had a dog that was over twenty years old. Don’t you find that remarkable? 

If someone had told me in 1967 that in ten years I would be a Youth Pastor in a Fundamentalist Christian Church I would have laughed and laughed and laughed and called them nuts.

Yet that is exactly what happened. The picture at the beginning of this post is with part of our youth group. (My wife and I are in the back to the left. I have on dark glasses and she is leaning her head on my shoulder.) We were setting out to do a Christian Service, washing car windows in a super market parking lot, not fund raising. We never did fund raising or any service for a donation. We refused tips. We did it as a gift and we left a tract on how to receive God's Gift.

After becoming a Christian I came to accept we would never have children. (My wife is another story as you will see.) As a thirty-something childless couple we had time, so why not give that time to helping other people's children come to and learn about Christ. So with two other couples, we became youth ministers at that brand new church down the road.

It was not a lightly taken task. It involved hours of planning and work every week. Our group were teens of Junior High age. They were at the age when their bodies, ideas and loyalties were in flux. They needed people who cared. One of the leaders expressed one day a disappointment none of the kids ever thanked us. It wasn't about us being thanked. My hope was someday these kids would remember something we had done or said when they needed it and perhaps then they would thank us, yet we would never know this on this earth.


In the follow up examinations after my wife lose Amy at birth, the Doctor told us this: "Your wife can never have a child of her own. Her history has shown this. It would be impossible for her to carry a baby long enough to be viable outside the womb and her previous loses have totally weakened her to a point she would endanger her own health, and possibly, life if she tried."


So we had put such a thing away and moved on, or so I thought.

"Honey, I'm pregnant."

"But you said you definitely had your tubes tied this last time."

"I lied again."

I was angry, but mostly I was frightened. Why couldn't my wife give up this hope of having a child of her own? Her cervix had not been strong enough to hold the baby in the womb beyond five months before and now it had been further weakened and damaged by her seven pregnancies and losses. (And keep in mind, this is over thirty years ago when babies born before a certain point or underweight premature births had little chance of survival. Today babies born much earlier and much lighter have a far greater chance at living than then, a fact which argues strongly against abortion for convenience.)


We went back to her gynecologist, but he would not take her as a patient again and scolded her for her folly.


We tried obtaining the services of other doctors.

"I'm sorry, we can't accept you as a patient with your history..."

"No, I'm sorry..."

"Your wife is putting herself at great risk, you should be ashamed..."

"The only thing I can recommend is an abortion..."

"No, no abortion. I want to have this baby."

When the church learned of our predicament, a Doctor who attended there came and told us he would treat my wife, but he couldn't guarantee success. He didn't need to, he was really just an assistant to God.

Since my wife had what is known as an incompetent cervix, he performed a procedure my wife had had previously, which of course had failed. It was a form of cerclage called a Shirodkar (obviously the modified form since she was not required to have a Cesarian Section.)




He then ordered her to bed for her term. She was allowed to walk a few steps, so she could go from the bedroom to the living room or to the bathroom as needed, but she was not to be on her feet otherwise or to do any kind of household work. I took over those tasks. I set up a cooler by the living room sofa so she could have some refreshments and food while I was at work. I did all the cleaning, laundry and shopping when I was home.




The church formed a prayer group, who met weekly and prayed for my wife and the child. Women from the church would come by and bring us meals, so all the cooking didn't fall on me.




But then on a snowy late February day the same pattern returned as it always had before, the pains, the spotting and the water breaking all too early, way too early. I took her to the hospital through the snow storm and she was taken to a labor room. They hooked up an IV with a drip to retard the labor. They hoped to stall it off perhaps long enough to save the baby, but during the week they became concerned about lung development.




The doctor came to see us in the room and said, "We feel the lungs are too underdeveloped. What we would like to try is a new experimental drug called steroids to see if that will strengthen the babies lungs. It is experimental, so there is some risk. We are not certain what the long term effect will be."




We took the risk.




A couple days later, "We fear the baby's lungs are still too underdeveloped to sustain life, but we can't continue to forestall labor any longer. The risk to your wife is too great. We really have to induce labor now."




It looked like Number Eight on the miss parade was about to be played.

 Meet Laurel Christine a few hours old and lungs working just fine. 

Because my name is Larry, people assume Laurel is named for me because both names have the same root and mean Victory. Well, that may be so and it certainly was a victory, but she is named for the church that prayed for her becoming, Laurel Hill Bible Church. We gave her the middle name Christine (meaning Little Christian or Follower of Christ) because Christ is central in our lives.




Laurel was premature and so small. Her weight dropped, but not far and it quickly went back up to five pounds so we were allowed to bring her home. We had to bring some clothes and dress her before they would let us leave. The nurses stood to the side and giggled as the two of us struggled to fit this tiny, wiggling child into the smallest size baby clothes we were able to find. They hung on her like an old man's coveralls.

If it were a movie the credits would roll now over the happy ending. But life isn't a movie. It simply continues and there was to be more to our little drama.




Shortly after her birth my employer announced he was moving the business to Chicago. I got a new job at a medical center in Darby, Pa and we moved from New Jersey  back to Pennsylvania, but not to Philly. We moved to Springfield. Both my living in and working in Philadelphia had come to an end. We were now in the official Post-Philadelphia period of our life.




Laurel got whooping cough a few months later. She had to go into Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, where my wife could stay with her. It was scary because her lungs were still a question mark. But she made it.

A couple of years went by. I had just been told I was out of a job at the medical center. I hadn't quit. I wasn't fired. The nuns who ran the hospital simply wanted one of there own to be the Budget Director. "So if I'm not being fired," I asked the Personnel Director (It still hadn't become Human Resources) "what am I being?"




"Well, we call it..." and he was stymied. He just kind of stared with his mouth open and shrugged. "It's just not a firing is all," he said.




Call it what you will, I was out of a job. Not immediately, but I'll talk about that some other time. The non-firing firing came in July.  I did land another job in September, but in the meantime I lost my Health Insurance.




Then in November deja vu.




 "Honey, I'm pregnant."

"But you said you definitely had your tubes tied this last time."

"I lied again."

Haven't I had this same conversation about three or four times now?

"How long?"

"I think I'm about two months."

"Have you been to a doctor?"

"No."

She never did go to a Doctor.

In early December she woke me. "I'm spotting. I think I'm having a miscarriage. Can you take me to the hospital?"

We rounded up an emergency babysitter for Laurel and I took my wife to the county hospital. They rolled her away out of site and I sat down in the waiting room and waited for the inevitable bad news while I worried. I worried about my wife and I worried about the cost.  I had new hospital insurance with my new job, but it did not cover pregnancy during the first year of the policy.




A doctor came to me and called my name.




"Congratulations", he said, "you are the father of a girl."




How could that be? I brought her in for a miscarriage. My wife hadn't been pregnant long enough.




No, it was true, she had a baby, a tiny baby, but a baby. Then came the bad news.

"We are moving your baby to another hospital; although we do not expect her to live through the night..."

The other hospital was one where I had been budget director. It was the only hospital in the area at that time that had a neonatal ICU unit. 


The doctor at County explained that was the reason they were sending her there, but he also said we should not get out hopes up.

"If she lives she will be blind and extremely mentally impeded..."

This is not what you want to hear. Oh Lord, please, maybe it would be better if she doesn't live the night...

She was put in this glass box called an incubator. it looked like a fish tank. She was hooked up with all these tubes and wires running from her body. She was so small you could barely see her for all that stuff. Every hour some one came and pricked her heel with a needle. For the first week, we couldn't even touch her or hold her. She got jaundice and turned yellow and had to be under special lights. Then she turned blue and they had to exchange her blood, because we had a negative-positive Ph Factor conflict. She wasn't gaining weight. She wouldn't have a chance until she weighted at least five pounds. She weighted 3 pounds 6 ounces.

After the first week we were allowed in to hold her for about a half hour at a time. We had to scrub up and don green gowns and elastic caps and latex gloves. The ICU nurses were very worried about her. 

My wife called her a plucked chicken. I said she looks like Alfred Hitchcock. She had a bald head, puffed out cheeks and a protruding lower lip. Her tongue must have been two big for her tiny mouth because it was always sticking out. 

After nearly a month in Neonatal ICU, Noelle Suzanne came home on New Year's Day in a big red Christmas Stocking. She had made her five pounds.

A few months later she was back in a hospital, this time it was Will's Eye Hospital in Philadelphia for an operation on something behind her eyes. I forget the details, but it involved removing her eyeballs from the sockets, doing what ever they did and replacing the eyeballs back into place. My second daughter is not blind.

What about the mental handicap? Noelle, like her sister Laurel, was an honor student in high school. Noelle was twice listed in Who's Who Among High School Students. She was awarded the Presidential Citation for Academic Excellence. She joined the Armed Forces while a student, doing her basic training between her Junior and Senior Years and served eight years in the Army with two deployments, one year in Iraq during the first year of the war, where she was awarded two Army Commendation Metals. She volunteered and served another year with the Joint Task Force Against Terrorist in the Horn of Africa doing medical and veterinarian humanitarian missions for the peoples of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya.  She was awarded a third Commendation Metal for that service signed by the Marine Commandant, since she was under Marine command.

 Noelle was an impossibility. Lois had not had any medical care prior to her birth, had not even seen a doctor. There was no Shirodkar, no bed rest for term, no medication. She was working and caring for a two year old. She never even showed, not even The Bump. 

God was saying, "Hey maybe you think that Shirodkar did the trick last time. Maybe you think laying in bed for months was the secret? Maybe you think those steroids worked wonders? Naw. I am the worker of wonders, the maker of miracles.  Even after, when she was placed in the care of those Physicians and Nurses to whom I gave knowledge, they didn't believe she could be saved, they though she would die and they thought she would be less than she is. What you have is by my Grace."

Since she was totally unexpected, we had no name prepared. She came in the same month as Christmas, so we picked Noelle. Since that is French, we decided to use a French middle name if it went with the other names and thus, Noelle Suzanne.

As far as my fears of the costs because of the loss of my health insurance pregnancy coverage? The doctors at the county hospital waived their fees. I had some hospital costs for that evening of service. Although the policy didn't cover pregnancy in the first year, it did cover any child upon birth. To this day, I have no idea what the cost of that three weeks of Neonatal ICU treatment was. I never saw a bill or any other statement. 

And then a little over a year and a half later:

"Honey, I think I'm pregnant."

"Oh...come...on!"

Oh yes she was.

This time she had a Doctors care and all the precautions were taken. When it came time, again too early, she was delivered by C Section. Our son was a whopper (to us), the biggest baby we ever had at 5 pounds 10 ounces. A strapping young man, indeed, until the hospital placed him in a bassinet next to a baby who came into this world at 10 pound two ounces.

Darryl William may have been small then, but he's six foot two today.

Again the name. Again people think we named Darryl as some kind of semi-anagram of my name. To tell the truth, I hadn't even thought of the similarity until much later. Because my father's ancestors were Welsh, I wanted a Welsh name for my son.

I had a couple "What to Name the Baby" books. They said Daryl was a Welsh name meaning "dearly loved". So I settled on it. My wife suggested we give him the middle name William after my father. So we gave the hospital the name, Daryl William. Someone, somewhere added the extra "R" making his officially recorded name Darryl William.


And now when I look up the name, all the sources seem to say the name isn't Welsh, but French from d'Airelle meaning from the town of Airelle.

He settles the barren woman in her home 
as a happy mother of children. Praise the LORD. Psalm 113:9

Indeed, he does.

But what of the others who didn't make it? Have I forgotten them?  Did having these children take away the pain? Is that how you get over a child's death?


No, no and no.


I could never forget those who died either in the womb or shortly after birth. They were human beings with souls, too. They were part of my wife and of me. They were a lose for us. It is my belief that the unborn and young children are precious to God and receive special Grace from Our father and go to Heaven to be with him and will be there waiting for us. And I believe Scripture supports this belief and that should be a comfort to anyone who has lost a young child or baby or fetus. (Click here to read my supports for my belief in this: "Tuff Stuff; Suffer the Little Children"


Is it having these children that took away the pain? Or does time erase the pain?


Pain is a symptom. Whether it is physical pain or emotional pain, it is not the problem. In is expected when we are injured, whether we cut our finger with a knife or whether it is the inner pain of losing a loved one. If that pain does not go away or is not cured, then there is something wrong that must be dealt with. Clinging to our sufferings of the past, no matter what they may be, only turns pain to a bitter infection of our heart.


No decent and/or sane person wishes to inflict constant unending pain on another, especially a loved one. When you hold onto the hurt of what you have suffered you push out love. You may not know it, but clinging to grief too long hurts other people even if you never realize it does. Living the rest of your life weeping over your losses make those losses your idol and your god, and he's a mean one. Everyone who is living is one more person who is going to die and every single one of us who lives a long life is going to see some one we love meet death.


When I die I have no desire to take my wife and my children's joy of life to the grave with me. That would be cruel to them and that would be the ultimate cruelty to me.


When some one dies, you never forget them, but after a period of grief in their honor you live your live with all the joy and happiness life offers to be grasped, because when you do you share that joy and happiness with their Spirit. That doesn't mean you don't ever visit their grave or look at their pictures. It doesn't mean you can't have occasions when you grieve a bit again, like their birthday or perhaps the anniversary of an event such as a wedding.


It simply means you put them in the memory book with all your other memories that on occasion you sit down with and remember. You just don't build a shrine that you sit before every single day for the rest of your life and weep.


And the only god you should have is God, and He has promised to wipe away our tears if we do.

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? 
Where, O death, is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:54-57

On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. 
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth. 
The LORD has spoken

In that day they will say, "Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. 
This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation. "Isaiah 25:7-9

A final note: Some people may ask why I didn't get a vasectomy, didn't I care about my wife's well-being?


First of all, it was my wife's greatest dream was to have a child. When we had lost several even after trying everything science had to offer, she claimed repeatedly that she had her tubes tied . (After the birth of Darryl she actually did. She was almost 41 when he was born.) But she lied repeatedly as well.


I don't think I had heard of a vasectomy back then and no one ever suggested such a thing to me. I think that procedure might have become more known and popular after 1985 when the first no-scalpel vasectomy was done in the United States.


In all honesty, even if it had been suggested, I can't say for sure I would have done it. But it wasn't suggested, I didn't have one, and I am extremely glad every Father's Day that I did not.

My children are adults now. Laurel is 32, Noelle will be 30 this December and Darryl will be 28 in August.

For those who think becoming a Christian is the road to Easy Street rather than a narrow road of potholes and bumps you might want to read:  Born Again: A Fairy-Tale-Ending and Born Again: Attacks Scale Upward. They will dispel any thought that Christianity is some magic potion that will bring nothing but prosperity. remember, God shows sunshine on the good and the evil and also the rain on both. These to earlier Posts cover a little bit of the same ground as here, but have a different focus.