Suddenly I became aware that the baby they were talking about was me. I looked up from where I was playing on the floor to find my mother and grandmother smiling at me.

“I looked at those beautiful sparkling blue eyes and knew that sweet boy was going to be fine,” my grandmother said. Then she leaned forward with her needle point gathered to her, looked right down at me, and said in a hushed tone: “That’s exactly what I said. I knew you were going to be alright.”

My mother was nodding her head, as she smoked a cigarette and drank a cup of coffee. She grinned and leaned her head back a bit to blow the smoke upward.

My father was bent over a jig saw puzzle at the card table set up near the heater in the living room. He smiled broadly and nodded his head gently.

What in the world were they talking about? I looked at my grandmother quizzically.

When her eyes came up from her needle point, she caught my gaze and cocked her head a little to the side. “I don’t believe Charlsie has any idea what we are talking about.” Then she looked at my mother and waited.

“Well, I guess he doesn’t,” Mother said. She was silent for a moment, gathering herself. “When you were born, you were okay at first, but then you got real sick. You had diarrhea. You couldn’t hold anything down. You were just wasting away.”

She got somber. “The doctor said if you couldn’t keep your formula down and some water….”

Grandmother Vinnie watched her daughter’s face grow dark, and pitched in.

“But we weren’t going to let that happen,” she said with a smile at me. “We set in to doing everything we knew to try and get you comfortable. You would take a little of your bottle, but you would start crying directly and then…..Well, you would just burp it back up and what little you kept down came out pretty quick like dirty water from an old drain pipe right there in your diapers.

We didn’t really know what we were going to do. We had a lot of prayers going up but nothing was coming down. And then,” she said with a smile, “one came right on down.” And she looked at Bill.

My dad continued to examine pieces for his puzzle. He put a piece in place. Then, he smiled quietly, almost to himself, and said, “Yep.”

Now I was looking back and forth between Grandmother and my dad. “What came down?” I asked.

“The answer to our prayers,” Mother inserted.

“It’s like this,” Grandmother said. “You were just crying like a banshee.  We would hold you and rock you and sing to you and walk the floor with you and nothing would help. Then one of us, I don’t remember, either me or Martha Lois, put you back in the crib. We were just exhausted.

Your daddy tried to comfort you. He took his hand and reached into your crib and gently rubbed your little chest as you lay there looking up squalling and so distressed. And that’s when it happened.”

“What?” I cried, the drama getting to me by now.

“Well,” she said, “you reached up that little hand of yours (and here she demonstrated with her right hand going up in the air) and you grabbed hold of his finger.”

At that moment my dad held up the index finger on his right hand and waved it in the air gently for a moment or two.

Grandma continued: “You grabbed that finger, and the second you did, you took a deep breath, closed your eyes and went right to sleep.”

My dad was almost imperceptibly nodding his head up and down again.

“Martha Lois thought you had died.”

My mother got stirred up and seemed offended. “Well! He hadn’t been quiet for one second in days. What was I to think, him just suddenly closing his eyes and getting quiet as church during prayer time?”

Grandmother ignored her. “We just stood there amazed as could be. I whispered, ‘Thank you Jesus’.”

She stopped talking and the living room was as quiet as could be except for the sound of the heater motor pushing some warm air into the room.

Eventually I couldn’t take the silence. “What happened next?”

Everyone grinned, and Grandmother kept telling the story. “What happened was you hung on to your daddy’s finger as tight as could be for three days. You would wake up a little every once in awhile and we would feed you and you would slip right back to sleep.”

“And I hung on to his finger the whole time?”

“The whole time,” she affirmed. “I mean a couple of times we had to get old Bill repositioned and had to pry your little fingers off for a second, but you would start to tune up instantly. We got that finger back in your little paw right smart quick,” she finished with a chuckle.

“Sure did,” Martha said.

“Yep,” my dad said.

“Right, smart quick” Grandmother said again. “You were getting some good old sleep and keeping your food down and in.”

“But then,” Mother said, “we had two boys to take care of.”

They all chuckled together, leaving me to say “Huh?”

“We had to get pillows and blankets and a chair there for your dad to set in. He couldn’t move very far what with you having his finger tight as if it were in a bear trap,” mom started the story this time.

“We practically fed him like we did you. He was a one-armed man,” Grandma jumped in. “And then there was the issue of having to get the two of you into the bathroom. You wouldn’t let go of that finger,” and here grandma’s eyes flew open for dramatic effect, “so we could work things out for Bill to use the toilet.”

Martha added, “It took both of us helping your daddy, holding you and helping Bill.”

“Well, enough said about that,” said Grandma with a wink to Martha, and then she chastised us: “You two boys were a handful.”

They went on joking about how much trouble men were whether they were big or small, old or young.

My dad looked at me while they went on giggling and complaining. He smiled at me, and then he winked.

“What finally happened?” I asked him.

“Well,” grandmother said dramatically, pulling my attention to her. She put her needlepoint down in her lap and lifted both her hands out and open. “I guess you got rested up enough and got enough food in your little belly to stick to your ribs.”

Mother interrupted here. “You just let go of your daddy’s finger and opened your eyes. Grandmother looked down into your eyes and announced they were bright and clear and that you were going to be alright.”

Grandmother was looking at me real steady. “And you were.”

“You took a little bit of your bottle and went right to sleep,” said Mother.

“And your daddy got his finger back,” said Grandmother.

“Did you go to sleep then, Daddy?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “I had to go to work.”

Grandmother started chuckling again. “He was so tired his eyes just looked like two charcoal smudges.”

More laughter all around.

“I gave him a pair of my sun glasses to wear,” said Martha. “The sun hurt his eyes so, and lord he looked awful. Tired and wearing women’s sunglasses!”

“Downtown, they thought I was a movie star from Hollywood,” my dad defended.