Maybe (Maybe Not) Read Online Free PDF Page A

times have you filled in that blank? All our official records bear it. Our obituaries will carry it. “Where were you born?” The question always comes up.
    And from me always gets a reply of “It’s not really very important.” My family and I lived there about six weeks and have never returned.
    Ask me instead where I spent my childhood, where I spent those years of grade school and junior high school and high school. Ask me what it was like one mile in any direction from my house at age nine. Ask me where I grew up. Ask me, “Where do you come from?”
    There’s yet another question in this vein—one never asked in official forms. It exists only in the secret biographical records of my mind.
    CONCEPTION:_________________________
    Where was I conceived—and under what circumstances?
    Since both my parents are dead, I’ll never know.
    But I’d like to know. I’d
really
like to know.
    They spent the years I can remember sleeping in separate beds in separate rooms. Never once did I see them embrace or kiss one another. At times they fought, but most of the time they were politely civil. They led lives apart.
    I wonder how was it for them at the beginning. How were they feeling when I was conceived? As best I can figure, it must have been in early September. Where? Was it planned or an accident? A matter of love and passion or a matter of course? Was I wanted? Did they at least love each other then?
    For reasons I cannot articulate, it would settle my mind to know.
    Over the last year, I’ve asked many people these two questions: “Where were you conceived?” or “Where were your children conceived?”
    A surprising number of people seem to have come into being as a consequence of passion and laughter. Not a bad mix for a beginning. Sites and occasionsthat stand out so far in my poll: in an elevator, on a windowsill, in a boat, in a closet, in the backseat of a car, in an outhouse, in a bathroom during a reception after a funeral, in a church office, in an airplane, and in front of the TV while watching Nixon make a speech.
    A young friend told me what she knew about her conception and birth.
    For reasons she will never comprehend, she was placed for adoption the week she was born, even though her parents were married at the time. Years later, when she was thirty, she was reunited with her biological parents. She asked many questions, especially about the “why” of the adoption. The answers were difficult and confusing to her, because her biological parents were equally confused about it—then, and now.
    Her father told her it might make some difference to her to know that when she was conceived, he was in love with her mother and she with him; that they were engaged to be married in late summer. They were young—not yet twenty-one. It was April. And that on a lovely, warm Saturday afternoon in the spring in Texas, they went on a hike along a remote and secluded section of a river. They waded in the water, played, splashed one another until they were soaking wet. They took their clothes off and made love in great passion, in the hot sunshine, on a sand-bankin the middle of the river. The Spanish had named that river “
Los Brazos de Dios
”—the arms of God.
    In a way, this story answers the question of my own conception.
    Wherever and however any one of us may be conceived, it is the same.
    We come into being in the arms of God.

A fter the blanks for name and place of birth on official forms, we come to
    ADDRESS:_____________________________________________
    Where do you live? For many of us, the answer changes often in a lifetime.
    Nearly one in five Americans moves every year. About half the population has moved in the past five years, according to the most recent census. More than 19 million people will move between Memorial Day and Labor Day this year.
    Not surprising. We’ve always been a nation of migrants. We think the earliest arrivals came across a land bridge from Asia, and 65 million more