I'm not saying mom did this on purpose but this used to scare the heck out of me. Leave the door to the house open and mom would say, “What were you, born in a barn?”

If my own mom didn’t know where I was born, then who did?

I saw a birth certificate once that said I was born in Texas, but it doesn’t say in which particular building. There is the name of a hospital on the document, but I know in the old days, horses pulled ambulances. Weren’t they? So, they must have had barns. For the horses?

So if my mom doesn’t know what building I was born in, she must of not been there. And I could have been born in a barn. This would make me an orphan, and as a kid, it scared the underwear off me.

“Oliver” was a movie I saw once about a kid that was in an orphanage. It was written by a guy, I think, that grew up in an era when there were a lot of barns. In the movie, they never say how Oliver got in the orphanage so he might have been born in a barn. There were many barns around at that time.

All I know is that he fell in with a bunch of merry, singing pickpockets, except for one bad pickpocket, and then got into all sorts of scary situations. Towards the end, Oliver is almost sent back to the orphanage.

Oliver was the lead character in the movie, so you were pretty sure watching the movie that he would get to live with his new mom in the end even though she didn‘t know if he was born in a barn or not. I however, was not in a movie. Thinking, as kids do, that I was an orphan who might have been born in a barn, and knowing there was no script writer to keep the orphanage from coming and taking me back, I lived in mortal fear that the orphanage would come and take me back.

Then I would have to eat gruel.

Who really knows what goes into gruel? I don’t. I do know with a name like gruel, it can’t be too good. Can it? Think about it. Gruel. Plus, there were no cats at the orphanage in that movie.
Anyway, mom, if I was born in a barn, and you might ask dad if he knows where I was born, it would be okay, wouldn’t it?
Jesus was born in a barn, wasn’t he? He didn’t even have a horse, just a donkey. If it was good enough for Jesus, isn’t it good enough for me?

Please don’t send me back and make me eat gruel, mom. I promise to close the door.