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<\/p>\nOn this day in 1972 (Richard Nixon’s first administration, gentle reader–basically pre-history), I was born eight weeks early and weighed four pounds, four ounces. Which was about too small to survive in that era. The doctors gave me a 50\/50 shot of surviving the first night.<\/p>\n
Ah, but, gentle reader, an even more statistically improbable event occurred 25 years later.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A poet in Columbia, Missouri, read a poem I posted on a newsgroup and asked me where you could read in St. Louis. Which was right in my wheelhouse because I knew all the places, which nights of the week they were, and what kind of crowds to expect. I would later quote an Iron Maiden<\/a> poster to her, she would come to St. Louis to read on a Sunday night (on the very day that Brandt’s turned their weekly open mike to a bi-monthly)–so we walked around St. Charles and the Central West End for a while, and I was greeted by name by two different groups, so I must have seemed like quite the poetry big cheese at the time (and she had to come back the next week, too), and then I would recite the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to her mother the first time I met her. <\/p>\n At any rate, my oldest is currently in a “girls are icky” phase. He’s dated semi-seriously a couple of times and has had many “appointments” with young ladies his age, but he’s starting to think modern girls aren’t all that.<\/p>\n I thought that, too, in the middle 1990s. I thought you had to pick either a smart girl or a moral girl, but that modern (1990s) girls had little overlap. But, as the philosopher says, out of the blue one appeared who was also hot.<\/p>\n