Memoir. Birth

urbs antiqua fuit studisque asperima belli

It was an ancient city well versed in the arts of war. 

Limerick, Ireland 1958 is of interest to me, as that is when i was born and although i must have been present on the occasion i have  to rely on the account of others to affirm that the woman that i came to ordinarily know as mammy was there. It is said that every person knows his mother but who his father might be, is an act of faith. Although neither of these propositions is an absolute truth, I suppose there is a sliding scale  merit of claim to truth in both of these statements.
So also in this story there will emerge a  picture of a man that i came to know as daddy whether he was there not on the night in question was never related to me. We as in daddy and I never discussed that point.
Who else, if anyone, was there is a matter of speculation or a point of research, but since we cannot because of constraints of time and energy research everything, this point is not of enough interest to me unless i happen to stumble on further information or maybe this blog will prompt comment.
I didn't bother to check the latin in the title of this piece as it stands as a testimony of some truths that i hope willcome into the light later. I know enough to point to the origin of the phrase as a piece lifted from Virgil's Anaeid, although i have a feeling that is misspelt and have no inclination to check that either. Spelling was never my forte.
But into this well versed city the universe placed me and there were two significant others that became known to me as Mammy in an ordinary moment... Mam casually... Maaaaaam from the bathroom or in the dark...or Maamie if i fell down and hurt me knees before I was five or yet to save the life of one of my siblings from me or any other vicious animal thereafter.  and then there was Daddy if you were really stuck and had wrung the last penny or sop of patience out of the eternal well of generosity from which i had sprung.
If you are having issues with the punctuation or construction in this piece or anywhere else on this blog please feel free to comment, criticise or complain in the place thoughtfully supplied by Google for that purpose. It will arise later in the story and is here foreshadowed here, that my teachers spared no efforts over a period of more than ten of of the formative years of my life in their attempts to school my scattered consciousness into a shape were i would be able to present my thinking inside the lines and within the boxes sought and expected by a society committed to reason and logic.
All their powers mental physical emotional and social where applied liberally, without stint, thought of loss or consideration of cost to their own well-being physical emotional or spiritual,  but unfortunately with little success. I sympathize with you and advise that if it should be overly troubling i will not be offended if you avoid this place of butchery.
it may b of  consolation that we now have spell check and you are spared the pain of seeing words like opportunity appearing in all its possible variations in one paragraph, by, that little champion of the spelling bee guy housed in some remote cell in the dungeons of this laptop, in their defence his arrival could not be foreseen by the pedagogues and paedophiles charged with my schooling and education.