5 BIRTHING DAY THOUGHTS

By Douglas John Imbrogno | WestVirginiaVille.substack.com | May 1, 2026

PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED to sing to you and write nice things on your birthday. But I can’t sleep and the 100-plus-year-old clock atop our living room piano just chimed 12 times, signifying that yesterday has turned to today, ushering in May 1, 2026. And that marks the start of my 70th year of existence in this current incarnation of mine here ‘in the middle of nowhere and everything,’ a line I once wrote in a poem whose title and whereabouts I can’t at the moment recall.

So, I thought I might flip the birthday script and write, if not nice things about myself, then some things from a mind that couldn’t sleep as it neared the transit from 68 to 69. Lying abed, my head kept surfacing sentence fragments, observations, aperçus, pithy remarks, folderol, and stuff I might wish to say on such an occasion, to those people who sustain my faith in life, in myself, and in the future. And also things to say to people who want nothing to do with me anymore as they show by their ongoing silence despite several invitations to resume where we left off. I try again since we loved one another once and could again, you know? Until I stop trying, which is sad, but probably wise.

WHEN SHE WAS STILL HERE, my mother recalled that on the day I was born she felt me coming on strong at our small house at 212 Fisher Drive, in Falls Church, Virginia, and that her man had best get her to Arlington County Hospital, pronto. And as he drove and I kicked to get out, she saw the yellow daffodils of the Spring of 1957 all in bloom along the ride. She passed down to me my newborn bracelet; a lock of my hair in a sealed envelope inked with my Dad’s handwriting (‘Dougie’s First Haircut’); and a newspaper birth notice announcing that ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dulio Imbrogno’ were new parents and negating her prior existence by calling her ‘the former Joanne Thesing.’ Plus, a ‘Certificate of Live Birth’ (thanks for the delivery, Dr. Curt!) with a notable detail:

How many OTHER children are now living: 3.
How many OTHER children were born alive but are now dead?: 0.
How many children were stillborn (born dead after 20 weeks pregnancy)?: 1.

My Dad must have filled out the form. Neither of my parents ever spoke, at least to me, of what must have been one of the worst days of their young lives. Yet, here I was on Daffodil Day. I had made it through. A tow-haired, fourth live birth of this 31-year-old man and 27-year-old woman, these ‘former Lorainites’ as my birthing notice referred to the Ohio lakeside town where they grew up, met, and fell for one another.

HE WAS AN IMMIGRANT KID from deepest Calabria, who passed through Ellis Island at age three in 1928 with two brothers and their young mother come to reunite with my Italian grandpa-to-be. He arrived from the Old World first, finding work in the New World at a Lorain steel mill, forging a beachhead for la famiglia. My elder brother David tells this history gorgeously, emotionally, and well in a 17-minute prose-poem of his I set to video, ‘The Key to My Grandfather’s House,’ stoked by our 2003 visit to Italia and the hill and the house where my Dad himself first arrived in this realm.

My mother was a thin, striking Lorain-ite beauty of Scots-German stock. She was feisty, stubborn, keen, and well-read to the Nth degree. She is pretty much the reason you are reading this today. It was her books and multiple magazine subscriptions flooding the house that made me want to try my hand—and later devote my life—to this maddening, nearly impossible-to-do-right quest called ‘writing.’ Let us blame her if I write something so foolish, politically cranky, or inane that you un-subscribe from WestVirginiaVille. Happens all the time. Yet, let us praise Joanne Marie Thesing Imbrogno (to restore her full identity) if I crack off something worth spending a few minutes of these precious moments of daily life—and they are so precious—to ponder.

P.S: You could give me a welcome birthday present by subscribing to my little outpost here on the World Weird Web, if you found your way in via an unsubscribed side door.

I AM ROUNDING THIRD and at last heading for home on a novelized memoir I hope a few of you may read someday. (I pray it will be in hand by around this time next year.) The book tells the larger tale of my now 69 years of life, detailing extremely dark secrets and self-inflicted calamities no one but a handful of people in my life know about and some therapists and trusted spiritual counselors. It is also quite funny in places, I declare! And full of colorful adventures from Paris to Dublin, New York to West Virginia. My Muses have been peeved I have not finished the damn thing after all these years. Yet I think it is also I wasn’t able to finish it, lacking until maybe just about my 69th birthday the fuller understandings needed to get to ‘The End.’

Life is indeed what happens while we’re busy making other plans, as we diddle and dream up timelines to our story that often remain just dreams. Then, we get pissed, mad, depressed, and full of immobilizing despair. Guilty as charged, sir! Not to mention every day’s headlines feel like the End Times of the Republic in America, authored by a kakistocracy of dunces breathtaking and heartbreaking in their utter devotion to cruelty, corruption, and looking the other way like nothing’s happening.

THAT IS WHY LOVED ONES, our most trusted confidantes and fellow travelers, plus our communities of care and spiritual lighthouses, are key. We also need regular reminders of the many, many millions of good souls in this world, those who live and act sincerely. They put a lie to the onslaught of soul-crushing headlines that detail the dirtiest deeds done by the most awful of actors. And those ones who give themselves over to deceit and perfidy? They are the outliers, not the countless people who move through life with open hearts and fair souls. Existence is hard, indeed. Life, my Dad liked to repeat, is not for wimps. But life is what we have and what we make of it when we pull ourselves together again. As ever with a little help from our friends, our guides, our teachers. Coming back to equilibrium and—may it be so—happiness, is a joy of joys. Below is a prose-poem of mine and happy birthday wish for when your birthday rolls around again. May we all find our way back to glad moments.

I stop the Honda and turn off the key to sight-see from a lookout along Route 92. In the curves ahead, the road crests the Allegheny Ridge high up in Pendleton County. Many thousands of feet below spreads Germany Valley. Left to right, receding mountains dissolve into mist far away to distant horizons. No one knows where I am.

Now, I am crying in the high passes of West Virginia. These waves of mountains about me, east and north, west and south, are a blue-green Pacific, an ocean of calm. The breeze wafting through my four open windows smells of pine forest. This is what you look like—I flip down the visor mirror to remind myself—when you are happy.

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