Our visit to Portland is a vacation. So far, I’ve averaged about 9 hours sleep per night.
Our calendar has filled with times to get together with friends and family. Beyond that, lots of time to just wander, or sit back and relax.
This schedule leaves lots of time for aimless thoughts.
I was wandering around Powell’s Books yesterday, looking at the vast collection that fills the bookstore’s many rooms, and thinking that everything worth saying must surely have already been written in book form.
Somewhere in that wander, the thought occurred to me.
I was born without a name.
A good first line for a book, perhaps?
The delay in naming was, as I understand it, on the advice of my mother’s physician.
I had arrived on the scene two months early, weighing just over four pounds and, so I later learned, went right into an incubator for another month or so before being paroled to my parents’ home in Kahala.
Decades later, after my parents had both died, I found a letter my mother had written which described her doctor’s advice at the time.
He told her that my survival was uncertain, and he advised holding off on choosing a name because it would make it easier if I—the preemie—didn’t make it.
I believe my parents generally followed that advice, and didn’t finally decide on a name until it became clear they would be able to take me home.
It’s doubtful that there’s anyone alive who would remember that long-ago sequence of events, so this is the version of the story I’ll have to accept.
My problems didn’t stop there. I was, so I’m told, allergic to lots of things, including milk. My mother finally tried feeding me poi, and that did the trick. I was a poi baby from then on.
Now I’ll have to ponder whether-or how—all this affected my life as a kid and, later, as an adult.
And I have to remember exactly where I put that letter for “safe keeping.”
It also makes me understand how lucky I am to have lived this long, and this well.
