Two Pounds, Twelve Ounces

George and I were born in Caldwell, Idaho, on May 13, 1938, two months before we were expected. He weighed two pounds ten ounces, and I weighed two pounds twelve. The place where we were born was closer to a nursing home than the hospitals families know today. The doctor asked my father whether he wanted to try to raise us. Of course he did.^[1]

The staff fashioned incubators from long wooden orange crates. Pillows went in the bottom, and light bulbs above us supplied warmth. It sounds impossibly primitive now, but those boxes gave two very small boys a chance. At larger hospitals, premature babies were being exposed to oxygen concentrations that later left many of them blind. Our improvised beginning may have protected us from a danger no one there understood.^[2]

George and I began life together and remained connected by the odd intimacy of being twins. We shared school years, friends, summer work, the voyage to Australia, and the long process of growing into separate lives. I grew to five feet five and three-quarters and later joked about shrinking, but I stayed grateful for a body that let me study, work, travel, and take part in nearly everything life placed before me.^[3]