Kansas’ stifling summer heat and humidity fade to fall by the second weekend of November, when birdhunters traverse field and pasture in sunglasses and shirtsleeves as often as not. Thanksgiving is typically sunny and mild across the prairie; Christmas might well be white or something nearly balmy. Kansas features all four seasons, the joke goes, and often in the same day.
Sometime around the New Year, winter appears in earnest and hunkers down. The truly bitter cold takes its leave of the prairie by mid-March. The skies gray for a chilly and windy fortnight that feels eternal. During this interlude of foggy mornings and overcast afternoons, enough sunlight peeks through the clouds to light the fuse on spring.
Which smolders — sometimes for weeks — until the new season finally bounds in like a joyous Labrador with a tennis ball. The daffodils pop, the long-dormant fruit trees bud, the forsythia explodes and a million acres of hard, red winter wheat begin to turn from faint green lines into lush fields the color of billiard-table felt. The prairie, too, leaps into life, and by May the new growth overtakes the remains of last year’s stand. Spring means towering thunderstorms and usually a little hail, and, yes, the occasional tornado. The rain invigorates the alfalfa, the honeysuckle and lilacs bloom and the whole place teems with life.
Life: The prairie thrums by the Ides of May. It’s as good a time as any to be born. And in the spring of 1976, as the republic marked the onset of its third century, I was.
I knew, then, neither of the changing seasons of weather nor of life. I wish I could claim I’d exercised prescient judgment in the selection of such a pleasant and promising moment to make my arrival. But I did not. My appearance, like anyone else’s, was ordained by some alchemy of biology, gravity and happenstance.
My folks took me home to their tidy farm in the country, where things should have been perfect. Certainly they looked idyllic. But something was clearly and seriously wrong with me.
I was my father’s first child but hardly his first rodeo: Dad was a farm kid who’d tended to newborn calves and horses in 4H, to family members’ and neighbor’s children. He knew well what to expect from a seven-pound newborn human infant, as did my mother, who had my older sister. So when I stopped eating and started vomiting, theatrically, I’m told, Dad and Mom took me directly back to the hospital. The diagnosis was pyloric stenosis, which presents in one or two infants per thousand: My stomach and small intestine had grown together, a condition that then, could only be corrected surgically. (Today, drugs can address pyloric stenosis, or it can be fixed laparoscopically.)
I was less than a week old.
The doctors calmed my frantic parents, situated my little self on a steel operating table, put me under and opened the lower-right side of my abdomen. The scar remains. They snipped what needed to be snipped — it’s a simple surgery, for a surgeon — and sent me home for a second chance to grow up, an outcome I wouldn’t have had if I’d been born a few generations earlier. (The first pyloromyotomy was performed in 1912.) My little tummy now able to empty properly into my duodenum, I perked up, started eating and grew, Dad later recounted, “like pigweed.” I was fine by my next checkup.
But the ordeal foretold a dire trend. This was not to be my last brush with medical theater.