In The Beginning

How’s that for an opener? Speaking of which, did you read the forward? If it was me reading this I might well have skipped it. I’m the kind who tosses the directions aside and curses when the frame goes together backward and panel C ends up facing the wrong way. So no harm no foul. Besides this one isn’t so much a story as a forward part deux.

What kind of story can one tell about getting born. We come into this world with no agency. None of our own in any case and often with very little on the part of our progenitors.

What does anyone remember of one’s birth? I’m a dyed in the wool skeptic so spare me any of the bullshit about hypnosis-induced rebirthing, cellular memory, prenatal memory recall, or birth trauma regression. (Did I leave anything out?) Let’s be real: nothing. I don’t remember a damn thing till I was, what, maybe 3? So not much story telling quite yet. Still, a little background might help. Here’s what I’ve been able to reconstruct.

I was born May 25, 1957, in Chicago, Illinois, to a woman named Judith Drake of Aurora and a boy named James Ward. I say woman and then boy because my father was a minor. This fact, when I became aware of it forty years on, gave rise to a mistaken fantasy that my father was a coal miner. That would have suited my desire to be a more salt of the earth midwesterner, especially given my love of bluegrass. Of course it meant something rather different, which in turn spawned some sordid speculation that dear old dad was shtupping his piano teacher.

The story is probably more banal. A little too much to drink at the sock hop and sophomore James gets lucky with a senior. That would make sense as I inherited some of that luck, if that’s what you’d want to call it. No doubt Judith didn’t feel so lucky as she took a train to the big city to take care of things.

All guesswork of course. A little too late now to find these two and quiz them on the details. I had to research what the age of a minor was in 1950s Illinois. Twenty-one. Make of that what you will. Hot for teacher? The Mrs. Robinson scenario? Let’s go with the sock hop, no need to rush into anything too sordid. What I do know is that I wasn’t in Chicago long. It had all been arranged when I was in that nothingness of nonexistence, to which we all come and all must go.

And going came next. Alvin and Joan Weinstein, a Jewish couple from Roslyn, Long Island, had made their arrangements with a lawyer. I have the paper. Letters between Alvin and a lawyer, certain James F. Cahill. And the court papers. Alvin Weinstein & Joan Weinstein v. Judith Drake et al. General No. 58-117, Circuit Court of Kane County, Illinois. The et al. was me I reckon. Illinois law required six months residency in the adoptive home before the petition could be filed. The court waived it. I was with some nurse my dad-to-be had arranged for. So after eight months I met these two strangers who flew me off to Long Island in the great state of New York.

Frank Drake became Marc Weinstein somewhere in that interval. I was not consulted.

Forty years later is when I got the package from Alvin revealing all this. I always knew, when knowing was something I could do, that I was adopted. But when asked if I was Jewish before that Alvin always brushed it aside. “You were always Jewish.” Really? Drake, Ward? Sounds pretty goy to me. But you don’t get to pick your parents or, at least at first, your name. So for the time being I’m Marc living in Roslyn L.I. with Alvin and Joan and my now brother Michael and soon enough my sister Abbe, both also adopted.

Later the bio-kids would come along. But that’s post amnesia, we can get to that all in good time. Or just time, as it wasn’t all that good. But not all bad either. I’ll leave it with this memory, possibly my first, though possibly implanted. I’m standing up, hands as high as I can hold them, my fingers on the keys of that gorgeous grand piano grandma Ann had bought during the Depression.