Our Story Begins

Our story begins on Sunday, June 25, 1967. The Summer of Love. The Sign of Cancer. One week earlier the world had been introduced to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin at Monterey. Neither star would live to see the age of thirty. According to one biographer, when Joplin was asked to comment on the death of Hendrix she responded, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” She died two weeks later.

“Sitting down by my window, looking out at the rain/Sitting down by my window now/Just looking out at the rain/Something grabbed a hold of me/Felt to me like a ball and chain.”

In 1967, Lyndon B. Johnson was President of the United States and Jackie Kennedy was a stylish young widow whose every move was scrupulously observed to ensure that the memory of Camelot remain untarnished. According to the local paper, the weather was predicted to be fine that day—partly sunny with a high temperature of seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit—the world not yet gone metric. A young woman in Paris had fallen from a third floor window to her death the day before. Turn the page and you find that you could buy a brand new sofa at Emerich’s Furniture store (still in business today) for eighty-five dollars. Keep turning the pages and you discover that You Only Live Twice—the new James Bond film—was playing at the Arlington Movie Theatre (no longer in business).

Our story begins on this day—June 25, 1967—at precisely 3 AM.

Or does it?

Our story begins on a night in November, 1966 in a house they say was haunted. My father’s parents lived there, where footsteps could be heard along the stairs as everyone tried to sleep; where the piano my grandparents bought for my aunt played without need of human hands.

“Heart and soul I fell in love with you/lost control just like a fool would do/madly…”

My grandmother would sing sometimes, resigned to the melody as she paced the floors, not knowing where my grandfather was or even if he was still alive, until he returned just before dawn with no offer of an explanation. My grandmother had long ago stopped asking. She stayed, she said, because divorce was a sin and she worried for his immortal soul.

My father’s parents were gone that night in November, 1966 and my father’s sister was sound asleep, leaving the teenage couple who would be my parents alone to seal their fate…and mine.

I see their young faces now in black and white photos—all that remains of the life they shared; that is, if you don’t count me. I marvel at their easy smiles and playful affection; my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulder; their heads leaned against each other in the faded and stained pictures. Who would have guessed that they were once young too with a life and a world ahead of them?

Just sixteen and seventeen and anxious to start living before the snares of this life could catch them. Just a girl, sixteen and a seventeen year old boy left nearly alone on a winter’s night. No turning back; no looking ahead.

Time was lost. Time was running out. My father’s parents would soon be home. My father’s sister would soon be awake. They had no time to waste.

No turning back; no looking ahead.

Sunday, June 25, 1967 at precisely 3 AM—two months ahead of schedule—our story begins.

My mother was then sixteen—unschooled, unwed and with child. My father was then seventeen and conspicuously missing. My mother gave me his name—the only name she could think of at the time. To this day his name is all I have of the man.

My birth was unplanned and my arrival unexpected—two months ahead of schedule. Weighing three pounds, eleven ounces—the world not yet gone metric.

The Summer of Love. The Sign of Cancer—Taurus rising.

The Year of the Ram; Yin year; a Year of Fire.

As young men marched off uncertainly to the East, young men were silenced by bullets as they marched in the streets at home; clinched fist raised high until they were forced down and gassed by the authorities; order temporarily restored as revolutions smoldered in the ashes both near and far. Sons and fathers lived and died; a stunned nation wept for its own loss. Men raced to the heavens and transmitted photographs of the things they found—orbiting the moon and sending probes to Venus only to return to Earth like meteor showers.

Perhaps they wished to escape the fate they created daily.

Bombs were created, tested, lost and found. Energy, like thoughts, harnessed and released. Energy, like thoughts, with the power to heal or destroy; obliterating in seconds what could never be replaced. Energy, like thoughts, once unleashed, its damage unforeseen and untold like so many children born into the world who are seen and not heard.

They say that’s the way it should be.

This is the world I came into—two months ahead of schedule, kicking and screaming and fighting for each new breath. Or perhaps I heard Motown

or Aretha Franklin

Or Sgt. Pepper and simply could not resist.

“Here comes the sun/here comes the sun/ and I say it’s alright…”

Fighting for each new breath. Denied oxygen, the brain cannot fully function.

Oxygen: From the Greek Oxys (Acid) and genes (Born of). Born of acid. In its elemental form it is the third most abundant chemical in the universe. Oxygen is essential to the body’s metabolic processes; denied oxygen for more than four minutes, the heart and brain are irreparably damaged.

The brain: Both mind and matter. The brain, not the heart, is the seat of intelligence. It is the hardware that allows all other body systems to operate. Death is determined as the point when the brain ceases to function; without it, we cease to exist. In ancient cultures, the brain was removed after death because people believed that it was the heart, not the brain, which mattered.

The heart: An organ, a muscle, a metaphor. Its four chambers contain secrets we are only now beginning to decipher. To decipher the secrets of the heart is the job of the doctor, the poet, the priest, the madman, the artist. To decipher the secrets of the heart one must first have the courage to open it and look inside. To tell a secret is both a blessing and a curse—you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. That is what becomes of the broken hearted.

Damage: The brain is divided into two hemispheres that together make a whole. Impaired it cannot stand. A child slow to smile, slow to crawl, slow to play and slow to speak is a marked man. The stars are not in his favor; the cards never lie. His mother’s pride—she dipped him in the water all the way to the heels of his feet by which she held him. The task unfinished, the damage done—she did the best she could and it was not enough.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

I want to fly in an airplane; I want to cross the Atlantic and hitchhike across Europe. I want to pray in Chartes and bathe in the Ganges. I want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a rock star, a veterinarian. I want to get married and have three kids and live in New York because sometimes I have insomnia and that city never sleeps. I want to stand in Time’s Square on New Year’s Eve and wait in the frigid air for the ball to drop and wave to the people at home watching me on their T.V. I want to live in a house by the ocean; I want to drive through the desert and never run out of gas. I want to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge and once on the other side, live there forever because it looks pretty on postcards.

Her child was a door—a way out, a way in. At least that’s the way she planned it. “You wanna make God laugh,” he father used to say, “tell him your plans.” Her father—who drank too much and lost his temper. Her father—who flew planes and one day left and never came back. Her father—who one day re-married and had a new family in a new place far away and forgot about the life he had before.

Her son was a door—a way out, a way in. A new family. A new place. A new life. She was certain of it in that foolish way only a sixteen year old girl can be certain of something. Nothing bad could happen because nothing bad had happened. “You’re at that stupid age,” her mother said, “When you think you know everything and you really don’t anything.”

My grandmother sat by my mother’s side and tried to rest in the cramped chair, listening to the nurses talking in the hall. She watched the morning news on the television: President Johnson was sending more troops to Vietnam despite protests. Jackie Kennedy was living in New York with her two small children despite objections. A college student studying at the Sorbonne had committed suicide—her final act of dissent.

My grandmother went to the nursery to see the baby that I was then—tangled in wires, hooked up to machines like something from a Sci-Fi movie. Those things frightened her. Those things kept her awake while her daughter, by some miracle, slept.

“What are we going to do?”

My name is Jacob. My mother named me after my father because when the nurse asked, it was the only name that came to mind. My father was named after Jacob in the Bible. Jacob, who wrestled with God. Jacob, who was maimed and blessed. Jacob, who dreamed of falling angels and a ladder to heaven. A blessing and a curse.

Life is like that, I guess.

~ by erc2008 on May 12, 2008.