As the crossing lights blinked and the guard came down, Dorothy lit a cigarette as she thought how much she would rather be taking this train to San Francisco than where she was headed. Yet she knew she had an appointment that couldn’t be postponed. Her labor pains were now five minutes apart, and St. Mary’s Hospital was just blocks away.
The first snow of the year was falling in Reno that November 15, 1942, and she distracted herself by watching them light on the windshield. Her husband, Ken, a beer in one hand and steering wheel in the other, was eagerly listening to the radio. The latest updates on the naval battles of Guadalcanal were on. It would be a turning point in World War II. In nine months Ken would be in Tucson, Arizona, where he would become an aircraft gunner.
“Do you have to listen to that now?” criticized Dorothy.
Ken gave her a disgusted look and kept on listening.
I burst into the world some hours later, was scrubbed and pressed and whipped off to the nursery. There the prayerful and practical Dominican nuns hovered over me like the Holy Spirit hovering over the waters at the creation of the world. This auspicious beginning combined with my great-grandmothers prayers, destined me for a life-long search for meaning and purpose. My life was imprinted with “wanted by God” from that day, not an easy claim to live with considering the two parents I inherited whose focus was on this life and times when my eyes saw a distant reality. But the awareness of something more would only develop in my late twenties.
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