On Origins, Irony, & Retrospective Glances
one of many to come
September 8 fell on a Friday, and was the 251st day of the year 1967. It would be another fifty years, not until 2017, that the calendar would be exactly as it was in 1967.
Like you, the above tidbit of recently discovered trivia would have been meaningless to me, had it not been for the fact that on 3:23 pm, September 8, 1967, I came into this world.
For as long as I can remember “on a tailwind blown in from the summer of love”, was the poetic phrase my mother employed when making reference to my birth. While metaphorically lush, the actual reality couldn’t have been more jarring.
My father, working in overseas intelligence for the Canadian government, was on assignment in the north of Japan when my mother’s water broke. She had been packing for her planned return to Canada the next day. The decision to deliver in the West had been made due to concerns over the availability of her blood type in Tokyo, as well as a lack of RH factor.
Upon arriving via cab at the 106th medical unit of the US Army, a hospital just outside of Tokyo where most western expatriates received care, it was rapidly determined that the three-weeks-premature delivery would be further complicated by a breach presentation. As several ultimately unsuccessful calls were placed to notify my father, my mother was prepared for surgery where a C section would need to be performed.
A somewhat obsessive 60’s music fan, my mother had always maintained the last thing she would recall before the anesthesia took effect, was hearing the top of the chart hit, Georgy Girl by The Seekers, playing from the nurses station outside the OR Suite.
Years later, in the days after Google, that specific recollection would always result in spirited disagreement between my mother and I over what song was actually the number one hit on September 8, 1967. Some references would site Georgy Girl, others would claim Bobby Gentry’s Ode To Billy Joe.
To which my mother would note the unfortunate irony in the movie of the same name suggesting a young man’s leap off the Tallahatchie Bridge was due to his supposed sin of homosexuality, being number one on the day of my birth.
“And besides,” she would say, “the camp value in Georgy Girl is too good to resist.”
A point that I am in every way unable to refute.
