You could say my parents had spring fever the night I was conceived, but was it even spring? March is never a pretty month. It’s a tired-of-winter month, sooty snow melting into soggy mud. Not apple blossom time. And yet there my parents were, in Garrity’s Grille on the Old Post Road. What drew them together, across a crowded room? It must have been moonlight. Stardust. That old black magic. Love potion #9. Drinks were imbibed: on that you can rely. 

On the night I was conceived, did my father wear a tweed hat, tilted like Sinatra’s, with a slightly drooping feather in the brim? Did he wear wingtip brogues, purchased at Thom McCan, with an extra pair of laces thrown in gratis? I am here to tell you I think he did. That his cheeks were red with slapped-hand Aqua Velva, and his eyes shone with the desperate conviviality of the serial adulterer as he shared martoonis with my mother, who remains strangely less embodied. Did she wear white boots, made for walkin’? A miniskirt or pantsuit? Was her hair a Sassoon cut, swinging forward to hide a guilty face as she sipped her drink, or a Priscilla Presley beehive, shellacked to flammable perfection?

Did she make him feel so young? He was older, seasoned, divorced. Veteran of Korea. Did he see Marilyn there? In that frigid Korean winter when she stripped off her parka and sang to the GIs? She didn’t feel cold at all, she said later. She felt loved. 

Did my father make my mother feel loved? Was his figure less than Greek? His mouth a little weak? Like Elvis’s. How many times did my mother tell me Elvis was my father? How many times did I believe her? Practicing sneers in the mirror, looking for that pouty underlip. 

When you know nothing, anything can be true. 

Did the jukebox play songs about drinking and cheating and pickup trucks? Did it play James Brown? Did the Rat Pack still croon, oblivious to moon shots and Vietnam? 

Did they take each other’s hands, encased for one moment in a bubble of desire? Did their hands shake? Did they sense an irrevocable future stretching out before them like a burning ring of fire? Was it a night to remember? 

Or was it just one of those things?