Soon after I moved to Iowa 24 summers ago I enrolled in a course in the nonfiction department led by a longtime editor of its literary magazine. One of the pieces I wrote referred to being conceived on the Atlantic Ocean. I was early in this process and often played with mythic imagery of mermaids especially because my mother described a mittelschmerz aboard the Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen in October 1962 which disembarked in the land of Hans Christian Andersen with gestation ending in quick labor nine months later at a hospital (now facility for seniors) located four minutes by foot to Andersen’s final resting place at Assistens Cemetery.
When I playfully teased about “being a mermaid” to my husband a few years later during our brief courtship, he, or maybe his son who was eight, mentioned it to the birth mother who, I was told, seriously replied with wide-eyed maternal concern, “She doesn’t really think she is a mermaid, does she?”
My stepson’s mother descends more recently than I do from Floyd County, Kentucky—her kin via Ohio. Her folks (father was an accomplished artist and professor of same) apparently had a mythic sense of humor. Some years ago during a chart reading appointment via phone I mentioned the daughters’ names to noted classics astrologer Demetra George who replied, “Oh dear.” One is named for a siren who sits at the edge of the Rhine and lures sailors to their doom, and the other is named for a sorceress who turns men into swine. So perhaps no quixotic concern to wonder if the son’s stepmother-to-be crazily thought of herself in mythic dimensions.
And, no, I do not. Though some day I would like to attend the Mermaid Festival in Key West. I grew up in a family of skeptics and married a family skeptics and as much as I incline toward magical thinking, these skeptical influences (bless them) do at least keep my verbal proclamations of reality in check. Besides, with age my views incline political. Now my curiosity leans toward timing of a conception in nautical transit during the heightened climate of Cuban Missile Crisis culminating in a birth on Hemingway’s birthday four months before JFK’s assassination. Not mythic, nor magical. Anomalous? And while long past the courting world’s charm, I remain ever loyal to the inner girl even if only amid everyday digressions to price off-the-shelf spandex vs. custom-made silicone flukes.
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