This is what I remember of that night. I hope Karen can add to it. We were in bed in the middle of the night when she woke me up to inform me that her water had broke. The bed and everything was wet. I think we were prepared for this and so I remember us both going to the car and driving the lonely empty streets of New Orleans to Baptist Hospital which is where we were to report for the birth. There was hardly anyone on the street, so I drove pretty fast. I was hoping a cop would pull me over and try to give me a ticket. I really wanted to opportunity to tell him “This is an emergency. My wife is in labor.” But, alas, it was not to be. The whole trip, I didn’t see one single policeman. I even ran a couple red lights so we could get to the hospital as soon as possible.
Karen can probably tell you all how long the labor was. I don’t remember, but I don’t think it was too long. Matthew was the only child of mine that I did not see born. They invited me into the delivery room for all the others, but in 1967, they weren’t as enlightened as they are today. I waited in the waiting room and after a time, the doctor brought me this funny looking little person. He was about 10 minutes old. He was all purple and his head was misshapen a little from his trip down the birth canal. And, the main thing you noticed about Matthew was his full head of black hair. It was like he needed a haircut even before he was born.
We named him Matthew James Hoag. Karen and I had kind of had an unwritten agreement that she would name any girls that were born and I would name the boys. Both of us had to come up with a name that the other could accept and agree on. So I named Matt and David. She named Kim, Katy and Kristy. This would probably be a good place to tell the “Mithuan” story. It’s out of order, but I might forget it later. When Kim was born, Karen was the one to name her. Well, Karen had a friend in high school named Susan Smith. If you switch the names around and remove all the “S’s”, then you get Mithuan. She wanted to name Kim, Mithuan. Well, since I had veto power, I told her I wanted a regular name and not a made up one. I guess Kim can decide if she would have preferred to go through life as Mithuan.
We gave Matthew a name and a blessing in the New Orleans chapel a few weeks after he was born. This was not significant except that he screamed through the whole thing. I don’t know how anyone heard a thing. But, I think Karen wrote down some of it. Maybe, she still has those notes, I don’t know.
Matthew was named what he was because during the pregnancy, I was reading a book by James Michener called “The Source”. In the book is a character named Matthew and Michener explains that the name means “God’s Gift”. I thought that was really appropriate for our first born. His middle name had to be my first name. So, he became Matthew James. My middle name was my father’s first name “Lewis” and Lewis’s middle name was Truman which was my grandfather’s first name. I’m happy to say that Matthew continued the tradition with Nathan when he named him Nathan Matthew Hoag. Will it continue? Only time will tell.
Dad
Jim you need to check your knowledge of female anatamy. The baby is not born through the fillopean tube.
Well, I wasn’t there, so you couldn’t prove it by me. Being a guy, we don’t know about important things like that. However he did it, Matthew managed to come into the world, for which we are all very grateful.