November 6, 1967 was to become an important date in my life. Of course, I didn’t know it then, three years from being born.
On that day, somewhere in Lakemba, in Sydney, Australia, I believe, a 25-year-old beauty named Helen Levine, smart with long, almost-black hair curled up into a beehive, was getting ready for her wedding to Ian Jeffrey Bersten, a tall, lanky 28-year-old world-traveller with blue eyes and a head full of ideas. I don’t know much about what happened next; I don’t know whether it says more about me or them that I know more about her work at Fisher Library in the rare books department and more about his adventures in the Andes and Eastern Europe.
Still, they went to a synagogue, and a rabbi intoned the prayers and a cantor sang and my father lifted his foot and crushed that wine glass wrapped in its white-and-blue cloth – well, when I say crushed, it neatly snapped into bowl and stem and remains that way today, wrapped back up in a dining room drawer – because that’s the way it was done, so I know those things occurred.
Later that night, when the newlyweds were tucked up into bed for the first time together – I don’t know where, whether it was already in the little apartment above the shop that my father would start or whether it was a hotel – halfway across the world, where it was still November 6, something else happened.
At 10.15 in the morning, Joy Lorene Cloud, née Mundon, a slight, small woman whose own wedding day photos had included her in her white dress being wheeled down the main street of her town in a wheelbarrow by her stocky groom, gave birth to an 11-pound baby boy she named Douglas James. His 6‑year-old sister wasn’t impressed.
Happy 40th wedding anniversary, Mum and Dad.
Happy 40th birthday, darling.
It’s almost enough to make you think fate was planning things: okeydokey, those two are married, they’ll have a child in about three years, better get a friend organised for her.