Break Every Rule

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THIS IS THE PLACE I WILL BE CONCEIVED. In joy and love, with awe and fear — some fear. This is the place I will be made — next to water. And the longing for water shall never leave me. What are my parents, two kids from Paterson, New Jersey, doing here? That’s my father, over there, stepping off a navy destroyer. It’s 1955 and he’s stationed here, and my mother has come to be near him. They love the song the water sings and the sailing songs. Later my mother will tell me that they read books aloud to one another and I like to imagine they read Yeats, and Melville, and maybe Sonnets to the Portuguese and other such conception texts. I like to imagine that language conjured me and the sea and these two people crazy for each other. Photos from this time reveal them to be so young: my mother golden blonde, with eyes the color of the sea. She is sitting next to a window, looking out — the window like the eye, transparent, suggestive, dazzling. And my father, a stringbean, a stick figure, though an ecstatic one, in a white sailor’s suit. The pants with nobody in them, as we children will call him later.

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