My First Ride in an Antique Car

When my mom was pregnant with me she had a gall bladder attack that required surgery for the removal of it. Every time as a kid, when I was a being a little jerk, she’d tell me "I’m not sure they removed my gall bladder.". I still don’t know if she meant I was a gall bladder and she had an unintentional abortion, or she wanted to keep the gall bladder and intentionally abort me. Even at that age I knew I wasn’t an internal organ with feet.
So I survived a gall bladder operation, and got to see a little preview of the world while my mom was cut open. A couple of months later I was born and my parents had another crack at getting rid of me. My family had just moved to Tinley Park in 1949 and my dad bought a cheap old Ford Model A to get to and from work in Chicago. According to my mom, my dad didn’t know how to drive it very well and the brakes were not good. (Model A’s had inefficient mechanical brakes, not hydraulic like on cars of the later nineteen-thirties.)

Late December 1949 my mom and dad left the hospital in Chicago in a twenty year old car, with sub-standard brakes, no seatbelts, and newborn me, headed out to the newly minted Parkside sub-division in Tinley Park. Somewhere out past the Chicago city limits, where the street lights end, and the curbs and sidewalks melt away, out where all that was left to drive on were two lane roads with ditches on either side, my dad drove off the road into one of them. I flew from my mothers arms and as she says "bounced your head off of the floorboards". My mom says I cried for a long time. No ambulance was called as far as I know and I didn’t see a doctor right away either, that was how it was done way back in the olden days. Yes I started life with a probable concussion and I know what you all are thinking, you bastards. At least I can say I have an excuse for any brain damage or weird behavior on my part.