Here’s another billboard found on the way from Atlanta to Florida:

This billboard tries to convince women not to abort their children.

It seems a good message for my birthday.

Addie Watling-Skinner (and, yes, she hyphenated her name on her return address stickers; I made sure it was hyphenated on her tombstone in Crumpton, Maryland, too).

When my grandmother was 95, I visited her on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

It was the mid-1980’s.

Over my objections, I put a tape recorder on the table and started asking her questions.

She told me how she ran a little corner store in Wilmington. Then, along came my Uncle George.

Three years later, Addie Skinner was pregnant again.

It was late 1915 or early 1916 and her girl friends urged her to get an abortion.

At one point in my interview, my grandmother asked, “What do you think about abortion?”

Flustered at the question, I replied, “I don’t know, what do you think?”

She told me she hoped I was against it because if she had followed her girl friends’ advice, I would never have been born because my father (she called him “Calvin”) would have been aborted.