Today is Daughter’s 26th birthday, July 10, 2007. This is the last year she will be eligible for a Birthright Trip to Israel, the educational and cultural opportunity offered by Israel at no charge to Jewish young people here in the U.S. who have never visited their Holy Land. Since Daughter passes up no chance to leave her zip code, she has scheduled this tour for later in the summer when she has a break from grad school and teaching. Of course she is unbelievably excited and also of course my emotions run along a different edge but all that is for another time and entry. This one is about the actual birth day.
On December 8, 1980, my ex-husband and I were living in a studio apartment on West 57th Street in Manhattan and I was two months pregnant with our first child. We planned on moving to Brooklyn near his medical practice in the future but the studio was located perfectly for the time being since St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital was right behind our building and that was where my obstetrician was on staff. We had just gone to bed that night a little after eleven when we heard a chorus of sirens out our back window. The noise went on for half an hour unabated. Hearing sirens was not out of the ordinary for us being next door to a major NYC hospital but this was unusual even for 57th Street. After a while the sound died down and we fell asleep.
The next morning as I got ready for work I turned on the Today Show and Jane Pauley looked like she had been crying. Tom Brokaw was visibly upset. John Lennon had been murdered. He had been shot by an obsessed fan outside his home at The Dakota on the upper west side about 11:00 the night before and rushed to St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital where he died shortly afterward. Like everyone else that day I was stunned and saddened at the loss of such a boundless talent to an act of madness.
Seven months and two days later I was whisked down the halls of that same hospital, past the “John Lennon Lives!” graffiti on the wall and the memory still raw in music’s heart to a delivery room where Daughter entered the world with her huge eyes and dark hair and unbridled joy for living. After her C-section grand entrance and my visit to the recovery area I was taken to my room where I met my roommate for the next several days, a young first-time mother like me who we’ll call Diana.
Diana was married to James and they were yuppie New Yorkers like us except maybe a little more so we’ll call him James William Familymoney, Jr. and that would make the little boy they had just delivered James William Familymoney III. Except that in the throes of labor Diana had an epiphany, one only she could explain but which her husband would support, and from the other side of the drawn curtain between us I listened to her and James tell their families that their son’s name was predestined to be John Lennon. John Lennon Familymoney. The first.
Little J.L. Familymoney had aspirated some amniotic fluid on his way into what was probably predestined to be a circus and he was kept for the time being in the infant ICU until his lungs cleared. Diana had delivered naturally and felt good but her baby couldn’t be brought to our room. I had a baby who was brought to our room but I wasn’t mobile yet after my surgical delivery. So Diana would carry Daughter to me from her bassinet and note the nursing procedure for future use. We both examined her fingers and toes and her little rosebud mouth. When I couldn’t manage the diaper change Diana lent a hand. And all the while her phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing about that name.
Daughter says she has a famous-name twin somewhere, a boy exactly her age whose mother helped change her first diaper. A family we never saw again after her first week of life but who retain the mythic status of present but unaccounted for. Lucky for me I got to bring the little traveler home with us and watch her beautiful rosebud mouth smile and talk and turn 26 today. Happy, happy birthday. For both of us.
Here are some of my favorite Daughter Fotos for everyone.
fuzzy dimensional
kissing trees, madison sq park sculpture
very cool houston street sculpture
clocktower