May 17, 1959 Sunday
Today began at 2:00am. You guess it. Charlie Mike and I were left to fend for ourselves. I kept busy all day to keep from worrying. Charlie Mike was real good. About 4:00 pm dad arrived with the news that we had a new 6# 12 oz red headed boy in the family. Mama and baby are doing fine. Isn’t that nice? I rather enjoyed being the ‘Lady of the house.’ It will take a little work but I am capable. I even got to see Maverick tonight. It was a real good show. Helps to get away from your troubles for an hour. Thank God for everything.
So this is what happened on that day, 62 years ago. I was sixteen and twenty days and Charlie Mike,who became the big brother that day, was seven and a half. Back in those days there was nothing such as ultra sound pictures and gender reveals. You did not know what the stork was bringing until that first cry when the doctor held up the newborn and said, "It's a baby." (ha ha). We had known there would be a sibling since the previous fall and possible names had been discussed but whether we'd have a sister or brother was to be a surprise. Turns out it was a brother and he was named Robert Alexander. A sister might have been Robin, Roberta or perhaps Ruth and maybe Alexandria. (Maternal grandpa was a Robert.)
In some ways, Alex was a typical baby-of-the-family but in other ways, since we were spread out so much, each of us had some only child traits. We were oddly very alike and yet also different. Alex and I being both Taurus people ended up more similar than Charlie with either of us since he is a total Scorpio person.
Alex was very bright, learned to read at about 3 1/2 to 4 and before he had started school had become a virtual encyclopdia of geograpic facts--all the states and their capitols, the highest point in each and things like that. He had a mind for facts and never seemed to get to a point of 'insufficient memory.' A bit like his sister, if he enjoyed a subject he did well in it but some he was not interested in and just blew off. Eventually he started college very late and was valedictorian of his AA degree class, Summa Cum Laud in his BA (poly sci) and did well in law school, passing the bar his first try. What he might have accomplished as a legal scholar and very skilled legal writer is anyone's guess. However he had an underdeveloped aorta that was surgically mended when he was nineteen and at age 46 developed an aneurysm at the site of the stint and bled to death internally before the medical folk could determine what was wrong. It was shatteringly sudden--okay in the afternoon and dead by early morning.
Mom was thirty niine when he was born and the pregnancy and birth were a bit hard on her. She also breast fed him for a year, the only one of us she was able to do that for. I took over a lot of the household work for awhile, kind of learning by doing,and was a bit stressed to do that, keep up my school work and continue with my 'cowboy girl' duties which were becoming pretty taxing by this point.
Alex and I got to be friends mostly after Dad and then mMm were gone in 1989 and 1996 resectively. He was finishing his legal education and then worked in Phoenix for awhile and next came to Sierra Vista and worked at Cardinal and Stachel. Together we sorted things out at the folks' old home in Duncan and got to know each other as adults. It fell to us since Charlie as working in Colorado and often could not get away. That was all very special to me and he helped me greatly when my usband died suddenly in November 2003. Then, not quite two years later, he too was gone. That gap cannot be filled. All the memories are precious now.
The photos: Baby Alex, summer 1959. There is a similar shot of Charlie and they do look a lot alike at that age. Next, Alex the attorney, about 2004. High school senior in Silver City, NM, 1977. And Clarkdale, about age 2. Not sure what the dressed up look was for as that was not typical!.
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