And Her Baby Brother . . .

When Julie was born, I had just gotten divorced and been accepted back in college. I was broke. So, Julie wore Richard's hand-me downs. For babies that age, pants that allow them to crawl around and not get their knees dirty or cold are a good thing, anyway. However, they didn't correctly identify her gender at all.


Added to the masculine look of her clothes, she was bald, bald, bald. She was born early and they had to feed her intravenously, and since babies move around a lot and can dislodge needles, that meant shaving her head, using a vein in the scalp to feed her, and tying her little hands down. It was the saddest thing to look at that I ever saw -- trapped in an isolet, tied down, with tubes in her head. And then, as her hair grew in, she rubbed it off, as babies often do. The upshot of this was that Richard had this lovely head of red hair and long lashes and Julie was this bald baby in boy's clothes.

People would stop me on the street and say, "What a lovely little girl you have! And her baby brother is cute, too!" I tried scotch taping bows on her head, but somehow that wasn't very satisfactory.

And so, I skipped my coffee on campus for a week, bought supplies at the bead shop, made a number of pair of bead ear rings which I put out on consignment in a Telegraph Avenue shop, and used the profit to buy Julie two real dresses.

And then I took her picture in them both, just for the satisfaction of it all. You can see how startled she was to be wearing dresses. This happened in the winter, as evidenced by her chapped cheeks.