Take Good Care of My Baby

As my mother's life slowly winds down (not to say with certainty that the end is imminent, though yesterday, four days before her 97th birthday, my siblings and I raced to her side, thinking it was), I find myself haunted by the doctor who delivered me.

Having recently fixed on his name at the bottom of my 1961 birth certificate from the US Army Hospital in Munich, Germany, I've discovered, among other things—thanks to Google and Ancestry.com—pictures of his wedding and of his gravesite in Quantico, Virginia, a scant hour from where I live. 

Yes, the doctor who delivered me died—in 1968 at age 35, in the Panama Canal Zone (of what cause I don't know), seven years after bringing me into the world in a hospital where my mother always said the American nurses were brusque and impatient, even rude, so unlike the German hospitals where friends of hers had given birth, with weeklong stays, feather beds, and geraniums on the windowsills.

Was Dr. V., this blond 28-year-old Army captain, equally cold? How did he comport himself as he pulled me from my mother? I experienced the touch of his hands before I did hers. 

She has known me for 55 years—knows mainly the touch of my hand now and the sound of my voice. Does she recognize my face in those fleeting moments when our eyes lock, when her eyes are even open?

As it happens, Dr. V. came back to America on the same ship my family returned on, a year and a half after we did. I know this because I found a photo of him and his wife and two children onboard. It was the SS United States, the fastest ocean liner ever to cross the Atlantic. 

SS United States today

Today that enormous vessel sits empty and rusted at a dock in Philadelphia, but still hanging on 47 years after its final crossing in 1969, awaiting its hoped-for second life, an effort I've contributed money to. Save the SS United States! If you've driven along I-95 through Philly, you've passed it. You've also seen it, from above, if you've watched the opening credits of West Side Story, released a month after Dr. V. cupped his hands around my slippery head for the first and probably only time. 

Bobby Vee

Another coincidence: Several weeks ago, I read the obituary of singer Bobby Vee, who recently died. His biggest hit was "Take Good Care of My Baby," a song I've always liked. After reading the article, I did some additional research out of curiosity and learned that "Take Good Care of My Baby" reached number one in the US on September 21, 1961, the day I was born—not in the US but across the Atlantic, into the hands of an intimate stranger who transferred me, kindly or officiously, into the arms (or not) of my exhausted mother. 

These are the pieces of a story I seek.

My family (left half of group) and the SS United States, 1963

Outward Bound

Seeing the wonderful movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel the other night got me thinking, and not only about how rarely you see older people in films depicted as anything but pathetic or clownish—which they certainly are not in this story, but rather as actual adults with ambitions, inner lives, and nuanced spirits. 
 

The movie—about a group of “seniors” (a word I’ve always hated; I makes me think, at what high school?) who are lured to an overpromised retirement home in India—is essentially about a junior year abroad for adults. I’ve written before about that kind of experience, which I knew as a young man, as well as my history of shying away from adventure. It's always heartening to be reminded that the door isn’t really closed. 

My 50th-birthday trip to Germany last summer made me think I’d like to do a two-week Goethe-Institut program in that country someday. Much like the movie, I've thought of it as a mini–junior year abroad for the adult me. I’m better equipped to roll with any disorientation and language problems than I was at age 20—and I’d better be, because two weeks goes by fast. Also because I took a German test on the Goethe-Institut site after I got back and was shocked to see, in stark numerical terms, the rudimentary level this former German major had devolved to. I mean, I knew from the trip that my street skills had atrophied (I had to be reminded by a phrase book how to ask for a restaurant check), but I’d always tested well! 

 

In my mind, I tend to define adventure in literal terms—travel, relocation, trying new activities—but it's worth acknowledging the smaller doors I've stepped through. During the four years I was single after my last long-term relationship, one of the biggest surprises to me was that it was possible to make new friends in your forties. Strangely enough, I never really doubted love was possible again, but I didn’t expect new friends—real ones, not the verbs but the nouns. A couple of them in particular helped sustain me during those years, just by being up for getting together on a Monday or Thursday night or a rainy Saturday at 4. Those times when the 15-year-old in you takes over and you think everyone else must be busy and why would they want to spend time with you on such short notice? When the riskiest adventure feels like picking up the phone to call someone you're still getting to know, and the nicest sound is that person saying, “Sure, let’s do it.”

Photo: Oberammergau, Germany
By Billy

The Chapel That We Crave

"Happiness is absorption, being entirely yourself and entirely in one place. That is the chapel that we crave."

That's my favorite passage from a really nice essay called "Chapels" by Pico Iyer in this year's Best American Essays. I read it today while sitting in a little garden off Dupont Circle where in-the-know people bring their lunches, or just themselves, on a day like this in late November when the temperature lolls in the 60s. Beyond the garden gate, you can see and hear the life of the city, but it feels like nothing more than a sheer, rustling curtain waving in the near distance—non-threatening, even pleasant—while the greenery of this boundaried space holds you.

Even as I sat in a kind of outdoor chapel, reading the essay made me realize I need to spend more time in those places, physical and otherwise, where I'm entirely me, not split off in shards.

One of the things that make the Iyer essay notable is that he's talking about literal chapels as much as figurative ones, but he never mentions the word God—doesn't need to because that's not what his story is about.

He admits, "For all the years of my growing up, we had to go to chapel every morning and to say prayers in a smaller room every evening. Chapel became everything we longed to flee; it was there we made faces at one another, doodled in our hymnbooks, sniggered at each other every time we sang about 'the bosom of the Lord' or the 'breast' of a green hill."

I can relate to that feeling, having spent a fair amount of time in this musky chapel as a preteen and teen, even having acted (badly) in a 15th-century play within its walls:

As idyllic as it looks here, I don't miss it—almost never, in fact, think about it.

Iyer's essay is about the quiet spaces, sometimes but not always walled, that allow us to recharge. And maybe you have to be an adult to do that with intention.

"Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul," he writes. "They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our lives—usually by finding all we aren't, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up."

Call that God if you want, but he's not writing about religion, at least not to me. I have no interest in religion. Yet it turns out that this is the wallpaper I chose months ago for the computer on which I'm writing these words:


Hard to say which is the "chapel" in that picture—the space where I took it (on the way up the tower of the Freiburg cathedral, on a 50th-birthday trip to Germany with D. this summer to revisit some important parts of my life, in this case the site of my junior year abroad exactly 30 years ago) or what my eye was taking in.

Or was it where my mind rested at that moment as I held the camera, paused on the bridge between who I was and who I am now?