David Lincoln Blankenship

My father said yesterday that he has trouble keeping secrets, and he doesn't understand why anyone would tell him a secret.

I have the same problem. Secrets cause stress, stress causes strokes.

On the first day of school, I keep thinking about the children who never where, who didn't get born. My wife is prone to miscarriages, and we've been trying to have another child since well before the stroke. We came close once.

Robin was pregnant. The child even had a name, David Lincoln Blankenship. My father's name is David but he doesn't have a middle name. Lincoln would let us call the kid Link, like the protagonist in Legend of Zelda.

That was my plan, anyway. It might have changed after the child arrived. We named Grace Beatrix because we were going to call her Trixie.

She doesn't like to be called Trixie.

We aren't even allowed to call her Gracie or my grandmother will hit us. She's surprisingly strong for an 88 year old woman.

Anyway, the child never arrived at least he wasn't viable when he did. One day I was cleaning the toilet and there it was, a fetus, about the size of my big toe and discolored. It's the single most traumatic moment of my life and I never told anyone, except maybe Robin. But it would have been months later when I was in the hospital, and had the Fountain of Truth pouring like a spigot from my lips.

The funny thing was, I had come so close to death that everyone in my family started to load me up with secrets, I guess so I wouldn't go to the grave without knowing?

It makes for a horrible family get together when you know things you aren't supposed to know. At my grandmother's birthday party I was sitting right between two people and I knew something about each of them that I shouldn't have. It made for a very unsettling dinner.

But back to the third kid. We're still trying, but we've officially retired the name David Lincoln. We're planning on Dorothy (my other grandmother) and Katherine (with a K, because Robin wants to call her Kat). I said that would be good because we could call her DK, and Robin said, emphatically, no video game names.

To which I frowned, emphatically.