Cherries and the Snow

I was born in a country that exists now only on old maps. My father was an air attache at the embassy so on the day when my mother began to feel the birth pains, my father took her to the embassy physician where most American babies were born. Because I was breech, the doctor decided that the best thing to do was get my mother to the main hospital.

My mother spoke no Czech, no Russian or German. So in this hospital where she couldn’t understand anyone, where the doctors were using outdated Soviet equipment, and under the auspices of the great nation of Czechoslovakia, I was born at three o’clock in the afternoon.

With a new infant, my mother insisted on returning to the United States. She could tolerate being pregnant in Prague, but she could not tolerate having a little baby there. My mother arrived with me in New Orleans when I was just a few months old. Her father had founded an oil company – you would recognize the name – and she worked there a few days a week while I was watched by a nanny I loved.

My father, apparently lonely in Prague without my mother, arrived a few months later. It went on like this for years. He was there a few months, gone a few months. I will never know the conversations they had, the compromises they struck. I will never know if he simply chose to live on another continent because my mother was such a shrew, and if that is the case then I applaud his perception.

But what I remember is that occasionally, when we were all together, my father would sometimes tell me the story of my birth. And sometimes, if I was persuasive enough, he would tell me the story of how he met my mother.

They were in college. He was running late for his class and as he was hurrying across the quad, he saw a girl on the library steps wearing a white dress with red cherries on it. “And?” I’d prompt.

“And she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” he would say.

The thought fascinated me. But I would sit quietly, and wait for the line I knew I was coming. He told me how the fact that he was late for class suddenly didn’t matter anymore; in fact it was forgotten completely. He approached her, this vision of lovliness in her cherry-print dress.

“And I asked her to go out with me.”

“And she said yes?”

“She said yes.”

“And just think,” he said, and kissed my cheek. “If I had been on time, I never would have met your mother…And you might never have been born.”

The thought riveted me. I could have not been born? The last time he told me the story, I was fourteen years old. We were in Jordan, and it was Christmastime.

“And she said yes?” I asked, though I’d heard the story a million times.

“She said yes. And just think. Had I been on time, I’d never have met your mother. And you might never have been born.”

I thought of how Czechoslovakia had evolved to the Czech Republic, how pretty and enormous the stars were in Jordan, how battered and disoriented I felt looking at all the snow in Moscow. I thought of all the countries I had seen in my fourteen years, how I knew the vastness of our world, how I felt so deeply attached to it all, and for the first time, I knew the story wasn’t over.

I knew it was impossible that I wouldn’t be born. Had my father been early, he might have seen her. Or maybe he’d have seen her on another day. Someway, somehow, I was going to happen.

I knew then, and I know now, I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

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