An Episode Preceding My Birth

Before I was born and my mother was a strict Buddhist-liberal-vegetarian she stood on the beach in Los Angeles and fed birdseed to a group of doves that had washed up on the sand like sleek feathered shells. “Where did you come from?” she asked them. The doves spoke English, though their native language was Mandarin, a happy coincidence, as my mother had learned how to count to 100 in Mandarin and also knew a few common phrases through her marriage to a man from Korea. The doves paused a moment on my mother’s question and then laughed the sound of gongs. “We came from everywhere,” the doves said, “for we are everything. We are light and also air. We are the unfathomable drops of water that make up this sea. We are howling angels imploding into new matter. It matters not where we came from, but why. We came to tell you that you will move to Philadelphia and become impregnated by your chemistry professor and you will beget a daughter.” My mother laughed the carefree laugh of a woman aware of her own dreaming. She laughed the laugh of a woman that once felt the wind and noticed the sun. She threw the last of the handful of birdseed and the doves disappeared and she worried a moment for she was unsure what had taken place. Not long after, my mother’s husband smashed up her white mustang with his green mustang and the steel horses clashed in an expensive shining crunch of metal. Not long after that she moved to Philadelphia and her time there was interrupted by a belly swollen with child. It was a daughter (my sister), and in the first ultrasound my mother swore she saw the flutter of wings in the grainy black and white picture.