Of all the personal recollections I think that this is probably the one that shames me the most. It was the time that I found out that babies do not come from the stork nor are they left under a cabbage leaf, well at least not in Germany.
Anyway, my buddy was going to be a daddy and it would be any day now. He was trying so hard to be responsible and with that in mind, we stopped going to the pub about a month before his son was due to be born. Well, babies are not the trains or planes and although the doctor plans when the birth will be, it is just a guess. Either that or pediatricians are the greatest optimists in the world. The early delivery time came and went, the actual due date came and went and now it was about two weeks late and still no babies in sight.
We went out just a for a quick taste after work. Unfortunately, a beer is like potato chips, you cannot have just one. Thus we had more than we should and his trains came and went, and finally he was going to miss the last train so I sent him towards the train station and went home.
Well, things seldom work as smoothly as that. If I remember correctly he needed some cash for the ticket and so he popped into a bank with an open lobby to get some cash. For some reason he could get in but he couldn’t get out. Well, that isn’t a permanent problem within 10 minutes somebody walked by and let him out but by this time he had missed the last train of the evening that went to his little village.
The village was fairly far away from Frankfurt but he did get a taxi home. Well, instead of an extremely angry wife his apartment was empty, except for a note. It seems that his son had decided after all that tonight was a good night to be born. It was the middle of the night and the village had no taxi’s, so he called his friend from a neighboring village to drive him to the hospital. My friend wasn’t very specific what reception he received from his wife but he did mention it was not a warm one.