January Babies Quotes

The truth was I knew, after all those flat January days, that I deserved better. I deserved I love yous and kiwi fruits and warriors coming to my door, besotted with love. I deserved pictures of my face in a thousand expressions, and the warmth of a baby's kick beneath my hand. I deserved to grow, and to change, to become all the girls I could be over the course of my life, each one better than the last.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

I KNEW IT WAS OVER when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring when you used to make the sun rise when trees used to throw themselves in front of you to be paper for love letters that was how i knew i had to do it swaddle the kids we never had against january's cold slice bundle them in winter clothes they never needed so i could drop them off at my mom's even though she lives on the other side of the country and at this late west coast hour is assuredly east coast sleeping peacefully her house was lit like a candle the way homes should be warm and golden and home and the kids ran in and jumped at the bichon frise named lucky that she never had they hugged the dog it wriggled and the kids were happy yours and mine the ones we never had and my mom was grand maternal, which is to say, with style that only comes when you've seen enough to know grace like when to pretend it's christmas or a birthday so she lit her voice with tiny lights and pretended she didn't see me crying as i drove away to the hotel connected to the bar where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had just because it shares your first name because they don't make a whisky called baby and i only thought what i got was what i ordered i toasted the hangover inevitable as sun that used to rise in your name i toasted the carnivals we never went to and the things you never won for me the ferris wheels we never kissed on and all the dreams between us that sat there like balloons on a carney's board waiting to explode with passion but slowly deflated hung slave under the pin- prick of a tack hung heads down like lovers when it doesn't work, like me at last call after too many cheap too many sweet too much whisky makes me sick, like the smell of cheap, like the smell of the dead like the cheap, dead flowers you never sent that i never threw out of the window of a car i never really owned

No one really remembers their own origins. Most of us possess a kind of hazy mythology about our early childhood, a set of stories told and retold by our parents, interwoven with our blurred baby memories.

I was sixteen when, on October 23, 1998, the “… Baby One More Time” single hit stores. The next month the video premiered, and suddenly I was getting recognized everywhere I went. On January 12, 1999, the album came out and sold over ten million copies very quickly. I debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart in the US. I became the first woman to debut with a number one single and album at the same time. I was so happy.

January? The month is dumb. It is fraudulent. It does not cleanse itself. The hens lay blood-stained eggs. Do not lend your bread to anyone lest it nevermore rise. Do not eat lentils or your hair will fall out. Do not rely on February except when your cat has kittens, throbbing into the snow. Do not use knives and forks unless there is a thaw, like the yawn of a baby. The sun in this month begets a headache like an angel slapping you in the face. Earthquakes mean March. The dragon will move, and the earth will open like a wound. There will be great rain or snow so save some coal for your uncle. The sun of this month cures all. Therefore, old women say: Let the sun of March shine on my daughter, but let the sun of February shine on my daughter-in-law. However, if you go to a party dressed as the anti-Christ you will be frozen to death by morning. During the rainstorms of April the oyster rises from the sea and opens its shell — rain enters it — when it sinks the raindrops become the pearl. So take a picnic, open your body, and give birth to pearls. June and July? These are the months we call Boiling Water. There is sweat on the cat but the grape marries herself to the sun. Hesitate in August. Be shy. Let your toes tremble in their sandals. However, pick the grape and eat with confidence. The grape is the blood of God. Watch out when holding a knife or you will behead St. John the Baptist. Touch the Cross in September, knock on it three times and say aloud the name of the Lord. Put seven bowls of salt on the roof overnight and the next morning the damp one will foretell the month of rain. Do not faint in September or you will wake up in a dead city. If someone dies in October do not sweep the house for three days or the rest of you will go. Also do not step on a boy's head for the devil will enter your ears like music. November? Shave, whether you have hair or not. Hair is not good, nothing is allowed to grow, all is allowed to die. Because nothing grows you may be tempted to count the stars but beware, in November counting the stars gives you boils. Beware of tall people, they will go mad. Don't harm the turtle dove because he is a great shoe that has swallowed Christ's blood. December? On December fourth water spurts out of the mouse. Put herbs in its eyes and boil corn and put the corn away for the night so that the Lord may trample on it and bring you luck. For many days the Lord has been shut up in the oven. After that He is boiled, but He never dies, never dies.

The big three television companies (CBS, ABC, and NBC) measured their audiences in tens of millions: when CBS broadcast the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy had a baby to coincide with the actress who played Lucy, Lucille Ball, also having a baby, on January 19, 1953, 68.8 percent of the country’s television sets were tuned in, a far higher proportion than were tuned in to Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following day.

In a windowless nook of a downtown Roanoke funeral parlor, not far from where Tess once roamed the streets, Patricia caressed the back of the scar, as if cupping a baby's head, and told her poet goodbye. It was January 2, Tess's birthday. She would have been twenty-nine. Patricia tucked the treasures of her daughter's life inside the vest--a picture of her boy and one of his cotton onesies that was Tess's favorite, some strands of Koda's hair, and a sand dollar.

Their daughter was born just before sunrise. She had skin the color of cedarwood and eyes like wheat. They named her for an old, half-forgotten god from Ade's own world, whom Yule had studied once in an ancient text preserved in Nin's archives. He was a strange god, depicted in the faded manuscript with two faces staring both backward and forward. He presided not over once particular domain but over the places between- past and present, here and there, endings and beginnings- over doorways, in short. But Ade thought Janus sounded too much like Jane, and she'd be damned if any daughter of hers would be named Jane. They named her after the god's own month instead: January. Oh, my sweet daughter, my perfect January, I would beg for your forgiveness, but I lack the courage. All I can ask for is your belief. Believe in doors and worlds and the Written. Believe most of all in our love for you- even if the only evidence we've left you is contained in the book you now hold.

West Country novelist Thomas Hardy almost did not survive his birth in 1840 because everyone thought he was stillborn. He did not appear to be breathing and was put to one side for dead. The nurse attending the birth only by chance noticed a slight movement that showed the baby was in fact alive. He lived to be 87 and gave the world 18 novels, including some of the most widely read in English literature. When he did die, there was controversy over where he should be laid to rest. Public opinion felt him too famous to lie anywhere other than in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, the national shrine. He, however, had left clear instructions to be buried in Stinsford, near his birthplace and next to his parents, grandparents, first wife and sister. A compromise was brokered. His ashes were interred in the Abbey. His heart would be buried in his beloved home county. The plan agreed, his heart was taken to his sister’s house ready for burial. Shortly before, as it lay ready on the kitchen table, the family cat grabbed it and disappeared with it into the woods. Although, simultaneously with the national funeral in Westminster Abbey, a burial ceremony took place on 16 January 1928, at Stinsford, there is uncertainty to this day as to what was in the casket: some say it was buried empty; others that it contained the captured cat which had consumed the heart.

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking 'Is this the one I am too appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar? Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules. Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!' But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button. I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident. I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains, The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory! It must be a tusk there, a ghost column. Can you not see I do not mind what it is. Can you not give it to me? Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small. Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity. Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam, The glaze, the mirrory variety of it. Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate. I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield, A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so. I will only take it and go aside quietly. You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle, No falling ribbons, no scream at the end. I do not think you credit me with this discretion. If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air. But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide. Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine----- Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece purple, Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me. It stands at my window, big as the sky. It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it. Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side.

What’s the date?” “September 8, 1998. Where you from?” “Next July.” We sit down at the table. Kimy is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. “What’s going on, next July?” “It’s been a very cool summer, your garden’s looking good. All the tech stocks are up. You should buy some Apple stock in January.” She makes a note on a piece of brown paper bag. “Okay. And you? How are you doing? How’s Clare? You guys got a baby yet?

Early morning rays start to peek through the tree limbs and cast a splatter of color on the ground around us. And I wonder if the sun ever watches us during its ascent and marvels at us and the beautiful splendor that we are. Every day, we rise and fight for ourselves. Every day, strangers become friends, and friends become lovers. Every day, babies are born, and families are formed. Every day, we live, and we love. We love and we love and we love. -Quietly Making Noise, releasing January 24, 2017

The police will want particulars, since you are the divorced husband, but I’ll leave that to them. One more question, a hypothetical one. If Carol Mardus had a baby by Richard Valdon, conceived in April of last year and born last January, four months after Valdon’s death; and if X knew about it, helped her dispose of it, and later, moved by pique or jealousy or spite, took it and left it in Mrs. Valdon’s vestibule, who is X? Of the men in Carol Mardus’s orbit, which one fits the specifications? I don’t ask you to accuse, merely to suggest.

CHICAGO JAZZ RECOMMENDED LISTENING Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer, “I’m Coming Virginia,” May 13, 1927 Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer, “Singin’ the Blues,” February 4, 1927 Bing Crosby and Bix Beiderbecke, “Mississippi Mud,” January 20, 1928 Chicago Rhythm Kings, “I’ve Found a New Baby,” April 4, 1928 Eddie Condon and Frank Teschemacher, “Indiana,” July 28, 1928 Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti, “Stringin’ the Blues,” November 8, 1926 McKenzie and Condon Chicagoans, “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” December 16, 1927 Pee Wee Russell and Jack Teagarden, “Basin Street Blues,” June 11, 1929

On a Sunday this January, probably of whatever year it is when you read this (at least as long as I’m living), I will probably be preaching somewhere in a church on “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.” Here’s a confession: I hate it. Don’t get me wrong. I love to preach the Bible. And I love to talk about the image of God and the protection of all human life. I hate this Sunday not because of what we have to say, but that we have to say it at all. The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday” ought to be as unnecessary as a “Reality of Gravity Sunday.” We shouldn’t have to say that parents shouldn’t abort their children, or their fathers shouldn’t abandon the mothers of their babies, or that no human life is worthless regardless of age, skin color, disability, or economic status. Part of my thinking here is, I hope, a sign of God’s grace, a groaning by the Spirit at this world of abortion clinics and torture chambers (Rom. 8:22–23). But part of it is my own inability to see the spiritual combat zone that the world is, and has been from Eden onward. This dark present reality didn’t begin with the antebellum South or with the modern warfare state, and it certainly didn’t begin with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Human dignity is about the kingdom of God, and that means that in every place and every culture human dignity is contested.

Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in mid-December and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too. In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker's Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.

Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you. PSALM 9:10 SEPTEMBER 29 A missionary’s wife in central China during World War II knew the Japanese were approaching her city. She was with her baby girl, two months old, and her son, just over a year old. Her husband had been taken to a hospital, himself ill. He was one hundred and fifteen miles away and would not be back for perhaps a month. The poor woman was filled with fear—she was alone and unprotected, in bitter January weather. When morning came, she realized that she was without food for her children. She pulled off the calendar page. That day’s verse stated simply: “So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children” (Genesis 50:21). There was a rap at the door. “We knew you would be hungry,” said a longtime neighbor, “and you didn’t know how to milk the goats. So I have milked your goats. Here is milk for your children.” Will you try to explain this away, handle it on an intellectual basis as just pure coincidence? When you come right down to it, what is coincidence? It is an act of God in the midst of time.

The power of the big fish in general to regroup is hardly restricted to banking. When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the immediate effect was to replace a national monopoly with a number of regional monopolies controlled by many of the same Wall Street interests. Ultimately, the regional monopolies regrouped: In 1999 Exxon (formerly Standard Oil Company of New Jersey) and Mobil (formerly Standard Oil Company of New York) reconvened in one of the largest mergers in US history. In 1961 Kyso (formerly Standard Oil of Kentucky) was purchased by Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California); and in the 1960s and 1970s Sohio (formerly Standard Oil of Ohio) was bought by British Petroleum (BP), which then, in 1998, merged with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana). The tale of AT&T is similar. As the result of an antitrust settlement with the government, on January 1, 1984, AT&T spun off its local operations so as to create seven so-called Baby Bells. But the Baby Bells quickly began to merge and regroup. By 2006 four of the Baby Bells were reunited with their parent company AT&T, and two others (Bell Atlantic and NYNEX) merged to form Verizon. So the hope that you can make a banking breakup stick (even if it were to be achieved) flies in the face of some pretty daunting experience. Also, note carefully a major political fact: The time when traditional reformers had enough power to make tough banking regulation really work was the time when progressive politics still had the powerful institutional backing of strong labor unions. But as we have seen, that time is long ago and far away.

No-knock entries are dangerous for everyone involved—cops, suspects, bystanders. The raids usually occur before dawn; the residents are usually asleep, and then disoriented by the sudden intrusion. There is no warning, and sleepy residents may not always understand that the men breaking down their door are police. At the same time, police procedures allow terribly little room for error. Stan Goff, a retired Special Forces sergeant and SWAT trainer, says that he teaches cops to “Look at hands. If there’s a weapon in their hands during a dynamic entry, it does not matter what that weapon is doing. If there’s a weapon in their hands, that person dies. It’s automatic.” On September 13, 2000, the DEA, FBI, and local police conducted a series of raids throughout Modesto, California. By the end of the day, they had shot and killed an eleven-year-old boy, Alberto Sepulveda, as he was lying facedown on the floor with his arms outstretched, as ordered by police. In January 2011, police in Farmington, Massachusetts similarly shot Eurie Stamp, a sixty-eight-year-old grandfather, as he lay motionless on the floor according to police instructions. In the course of a May 2014 raid in Cornelia, Georgia, a flash-bang grenade landed in the crib of a nineteen-month-old infant. The explosion blew a hole in the face and chest of Bounkham Phonesavanh (“Baby Bou Bou”), covering his body with third degree burns, and exposing part of his ribcage. No guns or drugs were found in the house, and no arrests were made. Sometimes these raids go wrong before they even begin. Walter and Rose Martin, a perfectly innocent couple, both in their eighties, had their home raided by New York Police more than fifty times between 2002 and 2010. It turned out that their address had been entered as the default in the police database.

Barrons.

You first learn not to let your own concern come through in your voice, then not to frown, and then to smile when a baby has croup and a young, frightened mother calls at three in the morning, panicked and seeking your help. You watch the seasons and wait for the burning heat of August to turn gradually to cool autumn, the the gray, clipped afternoons of January, slowly, in tiny steps, giving way to the first pale green buds of spring. You learn to let this old earth turn on its hinges, and you realize you are a mere passenger. You learn to let things run their course. You come to understand time and its meanings. You learn there really isn't much difference between minutes and hours, days and weeks. When you do try to move things faster than their natural gait, it is all to easy to become frustrated and then disappointed. When you rush things you may lose their meaning. I suppose God wants us to notice things and learn. I suppose He gives us experiences that we might sort through them, retain what we should, discard what we don't need, and inch along toward what we are destined to be in the eternities.

Some nose-diving share prices do not bounce at all, but merely hurtle straight into commercial oblivion causing widespread mess on the trading room floor; these are known as ‘dead cat splats’. Other stocks are obviously doomed, but decline slowly in value before settling at their final point of worthlessness. These are known as ‘unwanted Christmas kittens’, after the trajectory of a bag containing four baby tabbies and a brick when dropped into a canal in late January.

a baby boy was born on January 30, 1882. “At a quarter to nine

All of those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death. Look, this happened. A thing happened, and now it will never un happen. Here it is in a photograph: a baby putting its tiny hand in the wrinkled palm of an octogenarian. A fox running across a woodland path and a man raising a gun to shoot it. A plane crash. A comet smeared across a morning sky. A prime minister wiping his brow. The Beatles, sitting at a cafe table on the Champs-Elysees on a cold January day in 1964, John Lennon's pale face under the brim of a fisherman's cap. all these things happened, and my father committed them to a memory that wasn't just his own, but the world's. My father's life wasn't about disappearance. His was a life that worked against it.

January 23: Joe Wolhandler of Rogers & Cowan, public relations, writes to tell Marilyn he has denied several rumors, including the report that she is—or is not—adopting a baby, and that she is entering a clinic in Houston, Texas. In a postscript, he adds, “I AM IN THE BUSINESS 20 YEARS AND I STILL DON’T KNOW HOW THESE THINGS HAPPEN.

January 24: Stella Yusko writes to Arthur Miller asking if he and Marilyn might be interested in adopting a “healthy and beautiful baby, and the mother feels that you people would really make a good happy home for her, which she cannot do because of her other problems.

January 30: In the Los Angeles Times, Fox promotes the story that Marilyn had been discovered while babysitting for a casting director. She is shown diapering a baby and reading to a child. The article makes her two years younger than her actual age and says she is an orphan.

twenty-two-year-old Malaysia Goodson, a Black mother who, in January 2019, fell while trying to carry her stroller and baby down the subway stairs because there was no working elevator at her station and died (her official cause of death listed cardiac hypertrophy, which can lead to sudden death after physical stress, and hyperthyroidism as factors16).

Since I started these letters, I've been a million different things, some good and some ugly. But today, on your twenty-eighth birthday, I feel like the same man I was all those years ago. Staring at you. Counting your fingers. Wondering what it is that makes you so different from the rest of the world. I don't know when it happened, but I'm happy again. I think, even if things don't stay like this, I will always carry this moment in me. How could I ever be sad, having watched my baby grow into the woman she is? January, you are twenty-eight, and today I am your father.

Pearl blinked. The bitternut was talking to her. She adored these woods. The trees talked to her. On the boiling August days, when air was thick as gravy, the trees told her about the secret places in Battle Park that held on to the cool. In January, when leaves underfoot made Rice Krispies sounds, the trees told her where to find sunbeams. Once when I was sleepless at 3 a.m., I heard her whispering prayers in her sleep. In bed beside her, I listened. Later, when I asked her about what I observed, she said the trees visited her in her dreams and taught her prayers. As she told me this, she reached out and touched my right cheek with the back of her right hand. I felt electricity in my bones.

To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root. So goes the year. First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, and chard (here, that’s April and May). Then more mature heads of leaves and flower heads cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May–June). Then tender young fruit-set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June), followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes (July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July–August). Then the large, hard-shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August–September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade. Plainly these don’t all come from the same plant, but each comes from a plant, that’s the point—a plant predestined to begin its life in the spring and die in the fall. (A few, like onions and carrots, are attempting to be biennials, but we’ll ignore that for now.) Each plant part we eat must come in its turn—leaves, buds, flowers, green fruits, ripe fruits, hard fruits—because that is the necessary order of things for an annual plant. For the life of them, they can’t do it differently. Some minor deviations and a bit of overlap are allowed, but in general, picturing an imaginary vegetannual plant is a pretty reliable guide to what will be in season, wherever you live. If you find yourself eating a watermelon in April, you can count back three months and imagine a place warm enough in January for this plant to have launched its destiny.

God ’s Joyful Love The Lord your God is in the midst of you, a Mighty One, a Savior [Who saves]! He will rejoice over you with joy; He will rest [in silent satisfaction] and in His love He will be silent and make no mention [of past sins, or even recall them]; He will exult over you with singing. ZEPHANIAH 3:17 AMP The first time a mom holds her newborn, a grandmother holds her grandchild, or an aunt holds her newborn niece or nephew, their hearts fill up with overwhelming love for that child. You look into the baby’s eyes, check all the fingers and toes, and marvel over the perfection of this child. You can’t imagine anything they do or say as the child grows up will lessen the love you have for him or her. This scenario is just a tiny glimpse into how much God loves His children. Paul wrote in Romans 8: “I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv. 38–39 NLT). Zephaniah says that God’s love for His child is so overwhelming that He breaks into singing. Music is a spontaneous expression of many emotions, but especially love. Father, thank You for Your arms of love holding me close to Your heart.

Walter’s fortunes fluctuated wildly, but the Brennans did not wait to have a family. Arthur, “Mike,” was born on January 6, 1922, Walter Jr., “Andy,” on July 21, 1923, and baby Ruth “Ruthie” on September 22, 1924. By 1924, Walter’s mother and father had also moved to California, settling in Pasadena. With three children to feed, Ruth supplemented the family’s meager budget by growing her own vegetables and raising chickens. All three children would quickly learn two fundamental facts about their father: He worked almost all the time, and he expected them to carry their own weight. No Brennan child would be out on the road in a delivery wagon at the age of eleven, but every Brennan child would—certainly by the age of eleven—know what it cost to obtain the things he or she wanted.

After a rainstorm on a brilliant Sunday morning, 17 January 1960, at Lucerne’s Municipal Maternity Clinic, Audrey gave birth to a sturdy, well-made son. He weighed nine and a half pounds, and they called him Sean. The Christian name was chosen because it was the Irish version of Audrey’s half-brother’s name, Ian, and because it meant ‘Gift of God’, the significance of which was not lost on all who knew the baby’s mother.

Abt. 2,000 b.c. – 25 January 1788: Dingo introduced to Australia. Unexplained increase in missing baby reports. 26 January 1788 – present day: White man introduced to Australia. Explained increase in missing baby reports.