Hospitality

Editor's Note: Sampson L. Hartwig may be gone and presumed dead, his stuff long since passed around to the staff members who have gone through his desk, but the prolific Hartwig had oodles and oodles of remembrances we were never desperate enough to run. Until now. Enjoy!

I remember my first trip to the hospital. It was the birth of my sister, Stephanie, and I was only a little tyke. Me and my brother Goose were both five. Actually, Goose was three years older than me, but always wanted everything I had, so my dad made us both five. Come to think of it, Goose never did get those years back.

The hospital was a big, scary place for a little kid. Everything was white and sterile, people moved around gigantic electric equipment since back then everything was tubes and hand-cranks—thermometers took up whole rooms. And then there were the doctors, big old scary guys walking around with masks on their faces like bank robbers. As a kid I thought it was so nobody knew, even the nurses, who left the sponge in the guy after they sewed him up. Kind of like when they shoot a guy, there's four riflemen with one bullets. Though I guess you could bring your own bullets from home to make sure, no one's stopping you.

All I knew was Mom came in with a bellyache and a big fat stomach. I thought it was because Dad punched her there all the time, but he said he just did that so the baby would come out with good reflexes. You may scoff now, with your modern sensibilities, but back then it was common, the government even told you to do it. I remember a big poster of Teddy Roosevelt in our school telling us to "Punch one for the hun!" Man, that slogan rhymed.

The doctor tried to tell me exactly what was happening. Mom and Dad had decided to have a baby together, and they laid down in a bed, and nine months later came along a baby, which would be a little boy or girl. He said "the stork" was just a myth, and that baby's come out because of complicated biology.

Well, obviously, Goose and I beat the hell out of him, held him down, and threatened to cut out his tongue with a broken bottle if he started telling people such lies. Our Mom and Dad never laid down in a bed together in their lives. That was something foreigners did maybe, but not Mom and Dad.

Come to think of it, I never did really figure out how Mom got the baby out. You'd think I'd have picked that up over the years by now. I always just assumed it ripped its way out of the front of her stomach and that's why Mom never wore a two-piece bathing suit.

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