In the house where you were born

As I was writing my Seaway Trail blog, my trip down memory lane brought a flood of thoughts which are really insufficiently documented by the one liner in the Seaway Trail blog. 

Rochester NY was my  first training stop in my Eastward trek post medical school. It is altogether fitting that there is a lighthouse in the picture as a reminder to me of the beacon of that era in our lives.  We brought "Rogue" with us, an L class sloop  28 foot with a 36 foot mast made for racing on Lake Erie circa 1930's, sold to us by Rudy Rosales, stored in his barn way out in Olmstead Falls, Ohio, and we sailed out of the then brand new East 55th street Marina in Cleveland Ohio. We brought Rogue with us to Rochester intending to sail her on Lake Ontario. However, the rigors and the shear fatigue of an every other night internship, 36 hours on and 12 hours off for a whole year, precluded our preparing her for the water: sanding , caulking, painting, varnishing, mending her sails; so she languished in a boat yard on the Genese River. Eventually we took her to Boston, sold her there, never sailing her again. Letting her deteriorate was really like having her wrecked upon a reef; at least, that is how it still feels to me.

Bec, you were born at Strong Memorial Hospital, delivered by Dr. Joe Schibetta, attended in the delivery suite by yours truely, and brought home to 65 Valley Street, a two story townhouse in name only. The white door entrance on the right leads to a stairway up to the 2nd floor; notice the concrete stairs on the right side of the duplex leading to the kitchen. I had purchased a rocking chair for your mother in which to nurse you. That first night you cried and cried, and we new parents fussed and fussed all night. Eventually you settled in, grandparents came and went. We packed our belongings as two months from your birth, we would be in Boston and yet another starting all over again. By the way, there is another duplex to the right of 65 Valley, John something or another, won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the prisoner riot in Attica Prison in upstate NY, all this occurring while we lived in Rochester NY.

There are more vignettes for later blogs.