A Look Farther Back

A child is not a child alone.  One must consider the branches that brought the child into existence and perhaps even further down the roots.

The story of my mother and father is nothing short of interesting.  My mother and father had a whirlwind courtship that took many by surprise.  My mother was young and my father had been around the world, literally.  It seems that my grand parents were not big fans of this relationship and yet the relationship went on.  I suppose that my grandparents were always protective of their little girls who were nothing short of a miracle.

My mother was a twin, who never should have lived at her tiny birth weight.  She and her twin weighed just 2.5 pounds each, fitting in to a shoe box as their shared crib.  They were born in the 1930s and many families did not have an automobile at that time and I suppose most babies came without a doctor's attention at all.  However, in this case, the doctor was called and luckily he had an automobile.

The twins arrived in the small town of Cope, Colorado, far from the big city of Denver.  Once they arrived, no one expected them to live.  The doctor packed them up in a shoe box and whisked them away to Denver in his automobile.  By today's standards the trip would take an hour and 55 minutes; I can't imagine how long it took way back then.

When the doctor took off with the tiny twins it would be the last time my grandmother saw her babies for six months.  As she explained to me, it was a very long time before they got a letter from the hospital in Denver with news of the babies.  What a miracle that they both had lived!  The babies were whisked away so quickly to receive the life saving medical care that they needed that not a single thought was given to naming them.

These tiny babies grew to know the care givers that worked with them day after day, but the care givers only knew them as baby one and baby two.  The nurses decided that they had to call the babies something and so began to call them Mary and Margie.  The first time that Grandma saw them she intended to give them the names she had chosen.  However, she could see that they responded to the names the nurses gave them and felt it would be too confusing for them if she changed their names.  And so it was that Margie and Mary got their miraculous start in life.

Grandma and Grandpa Packer, parents of Mary and Margie

Margie and Mary as little girls

All grown up...