Grampa tells me as we drive the snow brushed back roads of North Idaho, how he took my mother
on a drive along the same unpainted asphalt paths, the night before she married her first husband, so he could explain to her it wasn?t too late to back out,
that it would be ok, and even preferable for her to call it off, better to give the marriage an abortion, than to shove paper vows in a shredder, to erase her name from the pledge. She felt
she owed it to the mystery man, the man I have only met once on a visitation in Portland, when I was six...so she spoke the words before the Bishop, slashed her name, placed her future
on the contract line. If she hadn?t, he would never have donated his sperm, his genes. I would never have been thrust, screaming into this world, in that hospital by the Kootenai River.