11/11/11

When I was little, I thought that the world made November 11 a holiday because it was the day on which I was born.  In the United States, Veterans Day was another way of saying, Happy Birthday, Jehanne.  And in Europe, Armistice Day was just a synonym for "Jehanne Gets Lots of Presents."  Well, you get the idea:  it's easy to think you're the center of things at age 8 or 9 or 10.

So, today I'm turning...some number of years.  For my 10th birthday, my parents threw me a party at the now-shuttered Dolls' House and Toys Museum in DC.  After a tour of the Museum's collection of tiny domiciles, creepy porcelain dolls, and rickety tin toys, the party ended in a marble-floored room made to look like an old-fashioned ice cream parlor.  The other little girls and I ate petit fours.  I'm sure that I wore a pink, frilled dress (as was my way in that first decade of life).  And I bet there was a fluffy bow in my hair.

Another year--I think it was my sweet 15--we were posted to Poland.  My party was held at the brand-new Hotel Marriott in Warsaw.  The locals used to call it "the Spaceship Marriott," because the hotel was one of the first hospitality imports from the west, so gleaming and crystal that it seemed a spaceship had just landed in downtown Warsaw, not far from the birthday-cake monstrosity that was the Russian-built Palace of Science and Culture.  My Marriott birthday party included a sacher torte decorated to look like a yin-yang symbol, an ice cream sundae and banana split bar, a popcorn machine, as well as blinis and caviar.  All the guests were instructed to wear black and white; I was the P. Diddy of my day.

My father tells a story about either my 2nd or my 3rd birthday (I'm not sure which).  My mother and I had been evacuated from Zaire and sent back to DC, while my father remained alone in Lubumbashi, finishing off the remaining half of his tour in Africa and consuming the family-sized contents of several freezers.  During our absence, my father took a short trip to Kenya, where he stayed in a sleek hotel.  On my birthday, my father bought two presents for me in the hotel gift shop:  a picture book of fuzzy, baby animals and a small charm carved in the shape of an elephant.  Then, after an expensive long-distance phone call to hear his baby daughter's voice, my father--who is not a drinker--got very drunk and passed out.

Many birthdays, I used to ask my mother to cook her famous homemade macaroni and cheese with wild mushrooms.  I often asked my father for a sacher torte, a recipe that came from his mother, who had learned to bake in Vienna, as part of her training to be a proper German hausfrau.  My father spent years trying to get the handwritten recipe to come out just right. When my grandmother died, she left the recipe for him, tucked between two pages of a favorite cookbook.  But, from what I understand, her recipe didn't include complete information about the chocolate icing for the sacher torte.  So, my father went through dozens and dozens of icings--with honey, with granulated sugar, with powdered sugar--always trying to find the one that was the right sweetness, the right depth of chocolate, the right thickness against the tongue.

Food is an important part of any birthday.  I was born several days early, after my mother consumed some bad gorgonzola, developed food poisoning, and went into labor.  And I was born just in time for dinner hour.  After my father left the hospital, he wandered through the winding, Italian streets until he found a small restaurant.  The waiters took one look at him and could tell, as my father tells the story, "that something extraordinary had just happened."  So, they fed him free pizza and toasted his new daughter.  Italians love babies.

In my first book, The Hardship Post, there's a poem about my original birthday.   At the time I wrote "In Vicenza," I was in love with a poem by Adam Zagajewski, "A Morning in Vicenza" (here's a great piece by Zagajewski that examines the subject further).  Zagajewski's brings together the city of my birth and a group of Polish poets, making it a poem that feels as if it were written just for me.  So, I wrote a poem about Vicenza too.  At the time, I was also in love with elastic rhymed couplets:

IN VICENZA

Thirty years ago, my mother ate a poisoned slice

of gorgonzola, and I was born, knifing 

from that womb, a luminescent world,

where I once curled

my body like a fern.  It’s just another place I don’t recall

for all its resonance, awful

and darkly beautiful, a landmark learned then lost,

as though the cost

of too much journeying must be amnesia.  

Returning to Palladio’s loggias,

I follow corridors that fuse with rooms

subsumed by other rooms. 

The marble echoes underneath my feet.

I hear the heartbeat

of a ticking clock.  A wall’s

pierced openings let sunlight fall

on the floor in slivered marks,

so that I cross from day to dark

and back again, always the visitor 

through passageways both bright and sinister.