Things I Did The Day You Were Born

    I wake up at seven am, Los Angeles a bright and welcoming world. I set about making a pot of coffee. I run back and forth between the kitchen (checking the coffee) to the living room (put coats back in closet, sweep the floor, whisk away rings on the table from last night’s drinks) to the office (check internet, wonder where all my friends are only to realize that no one I know is awake at this hour) wash, rinse and repeat.

    “What the hell are you doing out there? Running a marathon?!” comes the disembodied voice of my disgruntled boyfriend. He gets up and slams the bedroom door shut that I had purposely left open as punishment. I DID want him to think I was running a marathon-ON HIS HEAD (later he will awaken to kiss me with a full and open heart, having, in his sleep, let bygones be bygones thereby robbing me of my need to continue discussing whatever it was we were discussing which lead to the throwing which led to the neighbors banging which necessitated the silent treatment and with no other recourse, bed.) These are all things you will one day do too and it will be ridiculous, but that’s just the way it is.

    My boyfriend wakes up and it’s just like I said it was gonna be; he all sweet and sugary and me all cold and distant, listening to music LOUD which he hates, while he sits quietly and reads. We come together over breakfast (the only meal he’s allowed to make). Nourishment sates my appetite - both physical and mental - and we kiss and he leaves for work. I decide to go for a run because that’s what we do here in Southern California where the sun shines all the time. You live in Brooklyn. Park Slope, and one day when someone asks where you live you’ll reply that you live in Park Slope or maybe not. Maybe you’ll have moved by then. Your folks may have up and joined the circus (your father was once a magician) or decided they’d always wanted to live on a farm and gone to Ireland to raise lamas. Are lamas raised in Ireland? Who knows? There are no guarantees. Nothing is for certain. You may end up in France which would be nice in one way, but bad in another. You’ll learn all about the French soon enough. Zoot alors!

    You  have a house in Aspen. We’ll go there together and snowboard one day. Your father will snowboard too even though his parents, your grandparents, will wish he wouldn’t since he's always been accident-prone. Maybe one day he’ll tell you about it -  the two of you eating Chinese take-out in white, cardboard boxes, your mother on her way to Miami to visit her mother, your grandmother who is Peruvian. I think. She speaks differently than your other grandparents. She’s quieter and more reserved and slight with a sweet smile. Your grandparents on our side, my parents, are not slight. Neither is “sweet” a word I’d use to describe them and certainly they are never quiet. Maybe during a movie. But this is all a part of who you are and these are the genes you’ll have to choose from - do so carefully.

   So off I go for a run. Out on the beach is a small plane, a Sessna, that has crashed into the ocean, not three miles off shore. A surfer paddles out to help but the three people aboard have already drowned and you were born not half an hour prior. The ocean claims lives when mermaids need love is as good an answer as any.

    Back at home, the sun was goes down and great sounds of jubilation ring out from the crack house next door-an unmistakable homecoming from jail. I stand in the office and listen as the Great Return explains to his six year-old nephew-I tole judge if he didn’t let me out, I’d send my nephew Martel down to git ‘em ‘cause you a baaaad baaaaad boy.

    But talk like this will be old hat to you. Not because you’ll live next to crack dealers too, or maybe you will, again, who knows? Nothing’s for certain. But it’s more likely the familiarity will come from your parents who represent “these people” in their belief that everyone has the right to good Counsel, they’re innocent until proven guilty. Remember this when they punish you for staying out past curfew - do they have evidence? Maybe their clock is fast. Did they check www.time.gov/timezone.cgi?UTC/s/0/java where the time maintained never differs by more than 0.000.0001 seconds from the Universal Time Code?

     Now it is time for Carter Carter’s birthday party so I dress up like Wonder Woman and ponder the implications of being a Superhero on the day that you are born; I dress as Wonder Woman. A child is born. Wonder. Woman. Child. I am a woman. She is a child. I was a child. She will be a woman. Deborah. Alina. Red, white and blue are the colors of freedom. Alina is free of the womb, entering un-chartered territory on an unsafe planet from which perhaps a Superhero could save her but we live in The Real World not a cartoon and we’re free but…uh…you are free and I Wonder. Woman…And then suddenly I get it! I am acting like a child while you are a child and that is something that will bind us together forever.

    Happy Being Born.