Raising Cubby Read Online Free PDF

Little Bear in recognition of her shape, disposition, and pugnacity. She was used to that. How could she object when I called her offspring Bear Cub? So that’s what he became. The Bear Cub.
    I took him everywhere and held him up in people’s faces. “Look,” I would exclaim. “Bear Cub!” They would generally nod and smile without any prompting, but if they didn’t, I would repeat myself, louder, until they got the idea. By the time he was one year old, he was known far and wide—or at least in every good restaurant, bookstore, and auto parts wholesaler in western Massachusetts—as Bear Cub. Cubby for short.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I could take him places and show him off, he had to be born, and that’s what happened next.…

Hatching time arrived just before midnight on April 11, 1990. When Little Bear told me it was time, I loaded her into our gray Jaguar sedan and headed for Cooley Dickinson Hospital, half an hour away in Northampton.
    Some people would have doubted the reliability of an old British car at a time like that, but I was confident. How could I be otherwise? I had staked everything on my ability to rebuild and resell vintage British and German motorcars. If I couldn’t trust my handiwork to deliver my own wife to the hospital, where would I be? Walking a newborn baby to the hospital and sending an ambulance to pick up his mom by the roadside, I guess. In any event, the car came through and my ability to deliver my own baby by the roadside was not tested. It was usually a thirty-minute drive, but I made it in twenty, traveling at a briskly illegal but not felonious rate of speed. It was the time of night when solid citizens are all in bed and the bars have not yet closed, filling the road with drunks, and the streets were virtually empty the whole way there.
    I had called the hospital before leaving home, and two nurses were waiting at the emergency-room door when we arrived. “Let’sget you into this chair and off to delivery,” they said. They had the door open and Little Bear in a wheelchair before she could blink. Then they turned and rolled her out of sight, jogging fast.
They take this baby stuff seriously
, I thought. I stayed behind a few minutes to park the car properly and sign the admission and insurance papers.
    Now that the financial future of the hospital had been secured, another nurse led me to the delivery room. It was past midnight by then. They made me wash up and put on a clean gown. I wondered what would happen.
Would there be lots of blood? Would the baby emerge with three arms or two heads?
Luckily, I did not have much time to ruminate and worry. Some baby deliveries drag on for hours, but this wasn’t one of them.
    Cubby was born less than twenty minutes later. Unlike me, he came out in the normal way, with no need for scalpels or pliers. When I was born the doctor had grabbed my head with forceps and squashed it hard as he pulled me out. According to my mother, I emerged looking like an early Conehead. Seeing my misshapen skull, she thought I must have brain damage. The doctor told her I’d be fine, but she always thought that was why I ended up kind of different. Nothing like that happened to Cubby. The doctor dangled him by the feet, and he made a little yell of protest. Everyone smiled except for Cubby, though he wasn’t called Cubby yet. He just frowned and made squally noises.
    One of the first things they did was put Cubby onto the scale. Six pounds, six-tenths of an ounce, or half the weight of Small Animal, our pet cat. I’d caught bigger bass when I was fourteen. He was a little bit shorter than my forearm, wet, and red. He was also bald, and roaring steadily. Everyone had smiled at the first howl, and his mom still looked happy, but after a few minutes of steady roar some of the hospital staff looked like they were starting to wonder where the off switch was located.
    They swaddled our newborn son in a blanket and handed him to Little Bear,