Anticlimax

March 26, 2010
Friday, 5:57 P.M.
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To most baseball fans, October 3, 1951 was the day Bobby Thompson, of the New York Giants, hit the "shot heard round the world" against the Brooklyn Dodgers to win the World Series. To one diehard Giants fan, it was the best thing that ever happened in her life. To hear her often tell it, over the course of the years, the birth of her first child one month later, on November 3, 1951, was an anticlimax to the Thompson homerun. So marks my entrance into this world on a stormy fall morning. It took some time to pick a name. My mother was torn between the name, Gail, because of the raging storm outside and the name, Dawn, the alias of a prostitute she had met years earlier. So enamored of the name, she planned that one day, should she have a daughter, then Dawn she would be. This resulted in, I found out many years later, my Birth Certificate reading Dawn Gale Slattery rather than my christened name and the one I use to this day, Dawn Kathleen. There would be many things I would find out many years later, another of them being that I was the daughter of an unwed couple. For most of my childhood, till I was around sixteen or seventeen, we had all been told my parents had married on October 13, 1950, but in truth, it was 1951.