Sunday night at North Town

Tuesday's child is supposedly full of grace.

I was born on a Tuesday, but my entry to the world was anything but graceful.

Allow me to explain...

In addition to being a Tuesday, my birth also was on the 13th of that particular month, so the number should tell you a little something about the progression of my life in the days that followed.

It happened in a Catholic hospital. My birth, I mean. Schumpert Medical Center was its name, but it's since been bought and sold and is now part of a giant medical conglomerate that owns and operates huge portions of the south, including my home town: Shreveport, Louisiana.

Mom said she didn't even know she was in labor. She went in to see her doctor for her scheduled check at his office and he told her she was about to have her baby. She went to the hospital and the nurses called her husband — Dad — and he went to meet her, but she said they didn't have the big birthing rooms in the very, very, very late 1970s so dad wasn't allowed in with her while she was pushing.

She also said had I been her first, I would've been her last because she thought she was having a telephone pole. I had a really big head, she said — some things haven't changed all that much.

So she pushed and they gave her some gas to ease the pain of expelling a telephone pole from her body and at 11:47 a.m. on February 13, 1979, I was born.

The funny part — the part that really puts the whole grace thing into perspective — happened a few days later when Mom and Dad got ready to take me home, to the house at 3737 Parkway Drive.

When parents left the Catholic hospital with newborns in those days, little baby boys were wrapped in blue blankets and little baby girls were wrapped in pink blankets for their first car trips in the outside world.

As fate would have it, though, the nuns were all out of baby boy blue blankets on this particular day and they put into my mother's arms a telephone pole swathed in pink.

Those darn nuns are so resourceful.

Well, Dad apparently hit the roof (as he sometimes did), raising his already loud voice in that way he was known to raise it when angry and he shouted that no goddamn son of his was getting taken out of that hospital in a goddamn pink blanket.

Oh, Dad...

So what's this have to do with grace?

To this very day — nearly 39 years later — when my mother regales me with the story of my birth and the pink blanket debacle, she always asks "...do you think that had anything to do with it?"

Yeah, Mom. It was the pink blanket.

Totally.

But it kinda makes sense. That's how my grace happens, at least.