![a story about my uncle rule 34 a story about my uncle rule 34](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/uncle-grandpa/images/2/28/Uncle_Grandpa%2C_Belly_Bag%2C_and_Nubert_Nimbo_in_The_Fan_11.png)
“If I hadn’t seen you change a diaper, I’d swear this was a boy, ‘cause this is one goddamn ugly little thing!” He tugged down the pink patchwork quilt that covered his daughter and examined her. “I’ll tell ya Billie,” Otto said, and he laughed at what he was about to say. Otto stood outside the car, his head tilted as he looked at the baby. Then she sat in the front seat without glancing back again. Billie told me that she remembers looking down at Bonnie for a second, noting with distaste the way she pursed her lips as if she’d just bitten into a lemon. Otto placed baby Bonnie, nestled in her white wicker basinet, on the opera seat of the Buick. Otto, like most people, considered the almanac a solid prophecy of the weather, certainly more reliable than the old Pennsylvania Dutch women who thought they could tell you anything by simply scraping their claws along the bark of an elm. Otto had read the almanac that morning-it was sitting next to the toilet where Billie had left it for him-and it said there’d be no more snow in Pennsylvania until next December. It was cold out, about forty degrees, with a sky as clear as glass. Instead of taking the truck, Otto took the convertible Buick Century with the top folded down like a giant accordion into the nook behind the opera seat. My grandfather liked to say that Billie was as unbreakable as an iron rod.Ī month and a half after my mother was born, while Billie was still recovering from the delivery, Otto decided that he and Billie needed to go out for a drink. She had a delicate, simple face, but her backbone was as rigid as her temperament. Billie wore slacks at a time most women were in dresses. Otto had little use for girls and women, although he had always been fond of Billie who was female but not frilly in any way. And the last thing my grandfather, Otto, had wanted was a child who was not a boy. The last thing Billie had wanted was a spoiled child. Never kiss the child and never talk to it in anything other than a voice as flat and firm as a sheet of aluminum. You feed it one bottle every four hours for six weeks, at which point you drop the night feedings. The rule in the house was that you don’t pick up a kid and cuddle it. The dogs watched her tiny limbs as if they were humming birds, and often Billie wondered how many minutes she’d have to leave the room before a dog snatched one of those humming birds in his mouth. Sometimes she’d give a whistling holler and whir her arms and legs like rotors.
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She was content to loll on the braided rug with the dogs, two liver-colored pointers who would lick the dried formula off her face. Bonnie was a fine baby: round head, wide green eyes, an inscrutable gaze. My grandmother, Billie, was twenty when Bonnie was born. And for my mother, Bonnie Gandstetter, it was almost a short story-a life six-weeks long, coming to a near-end in a snow shower outside a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania. That’s the usual way, the only way, really. It starts with a birth and finishes with a death.