Place of Birth

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I’ve dragged Michigan around my whole life. 

As the place of my birth, it turns up on every form I fill out, my security question for on-line accounts, on my passport and my FM2 and my teaching contract and my marriage certificate.  Yet I have no conscious memory of living there—I’ve lived in fourteen different houses, in five states and two countries, and of all those places, Michigan is the least meaningful to me, but the only one that shows up at every important juncture in my life, like a persistent, distantly-related aunt who appears uninvited at every family function. 

Sometimes I find all the places I’ve lived slipping together in odd ways: last night, walking home from the tortillería with the warm, paper-wrapped stack hugged to my belly, I cut though the park.  A man was walking two fuzzy black puppies, became fed up with their sniffing, and grabbed them up by the scruffs of their necks—one in each hand—and strode towards home.  Their slack, dark bodies immediately reminded me of an orphaned bear cub I once watched for an entire, sub-zero morning in Missoula, Montana, slung across a high cottonwood branch over Rattlesnake Creek. 

I suppose everyone who has lived in many places, or who travels, experiences these odd moments where disparate places intersect.  My problem is that I never know which place to claim: did the puppies remind me of that bear?  Or did the bear somehow foreshadow the puppies?  Am I being reminded of home, when a tree on a Pachuca street catches the light in a way that transports me to San Jose?  Or am I at home, being reminded of some other place?  Or neither—they’re just places sliding against each other, none with any more weight or significance that any other, and home will come farther down the road that began but didn’t linger in Motor City. 

At the Social Security office this morning, I had to turn in a copy of my birth certificate.  The man behind the counter glanced at it, and said, “You must not even feel the cold in Pachuca, huh?  It’s way colder in Michigan, right?” 

I could’ve told him that my hands have been so perpetually freezing that my husband threatens to make me wear gloves in the house.  I could’ve told him I don’t know Michigan from a hole in the ground, much less its metrological conditions.  I could’ve told him, well, I dunno about Michigan but I lived for a while in Montana after California and before here, and the winters there…

But: “Yeah,” I told him. “Really cold.”