Cheap Baby!

November 25th, 2009 - Uncategorized

My father kept everything. Old magazines, skis from the 1960s, a box of keys carefully labeled Unknown. But above all he kept paper: my fingerpaintings from kindergarten, hundreds of boring letters from his parents when he was a young man working in New York, clippings from magazines and newspapers, research he’d done. He must have put a lot of time into it—though as a kid I was oblivious, I never noticed him filing anything.

But I’m glad he did. Especially glad this morning, as I have discovered again the bill he kept from the LeRoy Sanitarium, a Manhattan hospital on East 61st Street, for my mother’s stay from Nov 6th (the day I was born) through Nov 20th, 1942. Two weeks of room, board and nursing care, plus charges for the delivery room, anaesthesia, circumcision and medications.

The total charge: $348.04. (For that money today, I don’t think you could cough inside a hospital, much less give birth.) Here’s the beakdown:

Room and diet for two weeks 225
Board of day nurse 30
Board of night nurse 8
Operating room 25
Delivery room and circumcision 10
Nursery 15
Anaesthesia 20
Medications 10.75
Telephone 4.29

Total: $348.04

I’ve long tried to figure out the connection between my father’s compulsive gathering of facts, artifacts, dates and stories, and the fact that all this fled from his mind once Alzheimer’s set in. My conclusion: there is no connection. Nothing one could measure or be sure of. He was a guy who loved words and history, and a guy from whom all that was taken away.

But I do have the papers.