Citlin and Dylan are Born

During my last year at Hiram, Anne became pregnant. She had decided that Sean needed a playmate. Twins should not have been surprising. There were twins on both Anne’s and my sides of the family. Hers were cousins. Mine were an aunt and uncle. But it still caught us by surprise.

The pregnancy and their birth wrought even more havoc in our lifes for that last semester at Hiram. Anne needed to go to the doctor for prenatal care frequently. I was taking 15 credit hours (most of that was ‘student teaching’), as a full-time student, plus 10 hrs in the weekend college. The plan was to graduate that June, which I did. But, that tainted our marriage from that point on. So, I didn’t sleep much for a few months. Night time was the only time I had to do my homework and study.

We collaborated on the names again. We both liked the poet Dylan Thomas, whose wife’s name had been Caitlin. So, we used them both, hoping they would be good artistic influences on them. So we ended up with Caitlin Lee and Dylan Micheal, though Dylan was about 6 or 7 minutes ahead of Caitlin, making her my youngest, expanding our family from 5 to 7 members.

Since I was so involved with finishing school, our friend Myles S., who was the caretaker/janitor in our building, agreed to take Anne to her doctor visits when I was student teaching and couldn’t miss class. I’m not sure what happened. She never said for sure, but by the time she had the twins, she couldn’t stand to be around Myles anymore. Our friendship disintegrated pretty quickly thereafter. And a few months after Caitlin and Dylan were born, we moved to Little Italy to a house next door to the parents of one of Anne’s good Buddhist friends, Phillis M. Phillis coordinated our rental of it, got us in touch with the owner, and facilitated the deal. Phillis’s parents were older but loved having little ones next door. They visited, and we reciprocated from time to time. We also kept an eye on them for Phillis.

The house was anywhere from a quarter to a half-mile from University Circle and Cleveland School of the Arts. We stayed there until Ian graduated from the School of the Arts. Then we move back into Cleveland Hts. We moved to a two story house on Washington BLVD. But, I’m getting ahead of myself again…

To be Continued

–LE