Word: firstborns
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Like these memories of Rome, my birthday always reminds me of death and sainthood. Jude, my older brother, was born and died 364 days before me, baptized by the same doctor who attended my birth." I am the eldest, but not the firstborn, "I say when I sometimes speak of him. I owe my life to his death, and his assurance of sainthood reproves me and urges me to meditation. He silently reminds me to live each days as if it were my last...
...brightest star in the family firmament is Antonia. Her mother recalls that this precocious firstborn "always wrote, even before she could write -- poems, little stories. She could read before she had any idea of the meaning of the words. Frank and I called her the wonder child." Which is not to say she was candy-coated. Young Antonia was fiercely competitive, on the tennis courts with her brother Thomas and on the football team at a boys school that admitted a handful of girls on equal footing. The genesis, perhaps, of her view of woman-as-equal...
Ideologically correct couples have ways of working things out. When Skye Kerr married Deane Rynerson, they manufactured a new name: Rykerson. Some couples give the father's surname to daughters and the mother's surname to sons. For their firstborn, Pierce Barker and Carol Frost of Friendship, Md., did not bother with family at all, nor were they intimidated by the perils of hyphenating. They gave the child the surname Roth-Tubman, after the author Philip Roth and the 19th century abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Similarly, in Newton, Mass., Harry Finkelstein and Jamie Kelem junked their surnames and became the Keshets...
...French parents were distraught and desperate. Soon after their firstborn child died at seven months of a rare form of immune deficiency, they received more heartbreaking news. Their second baby, due in August of last year, was suffering from the same, nearly always fatal hereditary disorder, called bare lymphocyte syndrome. They could have aborted the child or allowed doctors to try the same kind of white-blood-cell transplant after birth that had failed with their firstborn. But the couple, who prefer to remain anonymous, chose a historic third option: to let their child receive the first ever transplant...
...connoisseurs of roughhouse local politics, there is no place like Chicago and no name like that of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. Last week it appeared that the fabled boss's firstborn son might be the next occupant of the office in city hall from which hizzoner presided for 21 years. In a Democratic primary notable for its racially polarized voting, Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley defeated Eugene Sawyer, a black who took over as mayor 16 months ago, after the death of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black chief executive. Daley...