Prelude to inheriting your mother's burnt pots
Emmy Alison Spangler slipped out into an empty bathtub two weeks early in the middle of the worst snow storm New Jersey had seen in over twenty years. Her father, Bob Raymond Spangler, was on the phone with the dispatch booming into the receiver at the poor woman on the other end who was telling him over and over to �please remain calm sir.� Meanwhile, her mother, Margaret Sarah Spangler- Maggie, pushed and cried out in pain all alone.
The ambulance simply wasn�t going to arrive in time with all the snow and Bob was utterly useless, so Maggie piled the contents of their linen closet into the big master suite bathtub and awkwardly climbed on in to weather the storm. A little under an hour later, out Emmy came, purple and red onto the blue towels. Ten fingers and ten little toes� the baby was quiet and still, Maggie checked to make sure the little ball of goop and blood was in fact breathing and sure enough Emmy was chugging along. Maggie tied off the umbilical cord with dental floss and yelled out, utterly exhausted, for Bob who was still on the phone with the poor dispatch; the ambulance wouldn�t arrive for another hour.
Years later as a freshman at the prestigious, but often forgotten Ivy League institution, U Penn, she would describe her entrance into the world as such� �Um yeah, I was born in a bathtub during a blizzard. My dad was too freaked out to help and the ambulance wasn�t going to make it, so my uber control freak mom just did it herself!� I�m from a little hellhole New Jersey town that my mom still lives in, she probably still has those same nasty stained blue towels too.�
It�s true, Belmar isn�t the kind of town you want to grow up in. It�s one of those shore towns that can be found up and down the Atlantic coast whose sole inhabitants during the winter months are the wrinkled up old people with tattered American flags hanging halfheartedly from their paint chipped screened in porches. Holed up in their little duplexes that they sublet every summer, trying to pass them off as bed and breakfasts, to middle class inlanders with their whole extended Italian families in tow. The rest of the town is deserted, gone with the tourists and their cash leaving empty diners, drug stores, ice cream shops and bungalows in their wake. Three or four little stores stay open year round; the mangy grocers, the �all American 24 hour diner� with the neon N missing from the sign and the apothecary tucked in behind the pizzeria owned by Emmy�s best and only friend Kristen�s family, the Coridetties.
It�s the kind of place where there is really nothing to do once you hit puberty other than loose your virginity at 13 and start smoking yourself silly in the basement of the duplex belonging to the boy you are fooling around with by the time you are 15. There was one school on the strip, k through 12, and both the Spangler girls would end up graduating at the head of their respective classes being that their mother wouldn�t let them within a foot of the teenage boys. Emmy and her little sister Lauren who was born benignly in the ten bed Shore Side Hospital nine years after her sister�s amazing bathtub debut, would each invent their own ways of rebelling against their mother�s short leash and Belmar�s oppressive winters.
I am not sure which rachel left the comment, but there is another sporradic part to the story a couple entries back called inheriting my mother's burnt pots...