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A lucky person might be born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Or a wooden spoon to stir up trouble (I made that one up). Some are said to have printer's ink in their blood. Some have blue blood.
Myself, I was born to a sound. I didn't hear it immediately upon being born. Christmas Day in 1936 was on a Friday (oh, Google, you never fail me). So from Friday until the following Tuesday, I lived my tiny life in peace and quiet. We lived at the time in the apartment above the Delphi Citizen office. The apartment was long and narrow, running from its front on Franklin Street all the way back to the alley that divided the block. We lived there, my brother who was exactly two and a half on the day I was born, and my two parents, until I was just under a year, when we moved to the first of our two houses on the hill.
The defining feature of living "above the office" was the printing press. I don't know whether you've ever seen (or heard) a real newspaper printing press. It has the footprint of, say, a small room and is about ten feet tall. The operator (for ours, at least, needed an operator at every moment) sat at the very top in order to separate and flick the giant sheets of newsprint so they didn't jam as they slipped between the rollers.
But what I'm getting to is the sound of my life. The press roars. It roars endlessly as it prints its papers. In my case it roared all Tuesday afternoon every week, for the first run of the paper, and then all day Wednesday (the second run)—an unmistakable, inescapable rhythm that deafened everyone in the backroom. Or, in my case, anyone lying in a crib directly above the press.
I have to wonder what that new baby—after five days of quiet—felt when the press started up on that first Tuesday. Did my mind conjure up lions from a previous existence? Did I imagine terrifying beasts? Earthquakes? Or was I simply overwhelmed? Did I learn to sleep through it?
A family story: I was a "difficult" baby who cried when she was put to bed at night. So Eileen and Myron would take little toddler Dinty and go for a long family walk, leaving me to cry myself to sleep.
Did the noise of the press in my earliest days so disturb my sleep that I then became a "difficult" baby?
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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