Today I celebrate the forty-fourth anniversary of my birth.
As I’ve been counting down to this day, I am posting birthday memories. This is the final installment; thanks for indulging me as I reminisce.
So, my birth day – the actual day of my birth. I don’t remember much about that actual day, y’know, directly. But over the years I’ve collected quite a bit of personal mythology.
This is all pieced together from fragile tissue: my own memory of stories told to me. If I’m wrong, it hardly matters. But if anyone out there is reading this and has more accurate stories (Dad? Lisa?) feel free to post ’em in the comments.
It was 1964. My parents lived in a small house in Gladstone, OR, behind Rex Putnam High School. They’d been married since the fall of 1959.
My dad was working as a salesman for Francis Ford, and was 30 years old the day I was born. My mom was 38 – a divorcée. She had been married before, and had an almost-teen daughter from that previous marriage, and I believe my half-sister still lived with mom and my dad, her step-dad, the year I was born.
My full sister had been born the year before, in November 1963, the same month that President John F. Kennedy had been slain in Dallas. She was 13 months old the day I was born; my half-sister babysat her while mom was being driven to the hospital.
My parents told me that I was a premature baby; I was supposed to be due in February 1965. But for some reason, I wanted out early.
The snowpocalypse of 2008 has reminded me of one other fact of the day of my birth; that December was the last time Portland had seen that much snow, until this year. I imagine that the drive from Gladstone, all the way to the old St. Vincent’s Children’s Hospital, up in the hills of Portland, a trip of of over 10 miles and ending with a drive up treacherous and curvy Burnside Avenue, was a white-knuckle experience. Add in an about-to-give-birth woman, and my father behind the wheel, and, well, such is the stuff legends are made of.
But I was, in fact, born in the hospital, not in a back seat, and at 5:57 AM on December 28th, I was born. (This post was published at that exact time) My height and weight are not recorded on my birth certificate, but, being a preemie, I imagine I was fairly small and underweight.
My parents had initially decided that I was to be named, if I was a boy (the gender-determining technology not being available forty-four years ago), Brian Keith Moon. My mom was a fan of Brian Keith, the actor later known for his role as Judge Milton C. Hardcastle in the TV series “Hardcastle and McCormick”, but who was known to my mom as an actor in her beloved Westerns. Little did they know at the time, but I would have had a double in celebrity names: the famously destructive drummer for the Who, Keith Moon, who had, according to Wikipedia, only joined the band earlier in 1964 at the age of 17, and who would die of a massive drug overdose 14 years later.
But that was not to be. Dad, as he tells the story, decided at the last minute that he didn’t like that name, and, since mom was not willing to budge on the first name, dad went out to the nurses’ desk, where they kept the book of baby names, opened it up to the first page, and selected the very first name in the book to be my middle name: Aaron.
The doctor, who was from the Middle East but not a Jew, raised an objection to a Gentile child being given the name of Moses’ priestly brother, but that objection fell on deaf, and largely irreligious, ears. I was given the name of Brian Aaron Moon.
And that’s all I know about the day I was born.