I suppose I hadn’t given birth certificates very much thought. Until now, mine has come into play in mostly unremarkable ways.

France seems to have taken the biggest interest in my birth certificate, requiring a certified, translated copy of the original for the stuff of everyday life. Think job applications, apartment rentals, direct-debits and first dates (my years in Paris were marked by a frantic series of expensive FedEx transactions involving envelopes provenancing from all sorts of inconvenient places).

I was once in consultation with an osteopath who suggested he could explain my back pain (with so much yoga it makes no sense!) via the gravitational pull exerted upon me at exact time of birth. I was lonely and had time, and also, I was intrigued. I dug up a scan of my birth certificate in the hopes of a revelation: 3:46 AM.  This information turns out to have had limited explanatory significance insofar as the tension living between my shoulder blades (still there), but the hour somehow satisfies me. It is reliably quiet and solitary between 3 and 4 AM.

The osteopath’s fact-finding mission hast been the most interesting use of my birth certificate to recent date. Certificates of death seem to be the more curious document. When my grandfather died, some travel plans needed adjusting, and this required a copy of Grandpa’s death certificate. I learned some things, if only the condensed and summarizable markers of how one might come to be (a mother, a father, a place and time) and end (here there is more detail: was there a spouse, an occupation, an underlying cause). The certificate was precious, a vestige I had that wasn’t in memory-form; it was also convincingly final. It was the last page of a text.

Would that make a certificate of birth the first?

I was surprised to learn that in one year, give or take, I’ll be issued a new birth certificate from a new country (new to my place of birth, anyway). At least this is what the authorities tell me. Just like that, a second birth will get written. This seems somehow extraordinary. I’m told to expect the document next summer via mail, regular, not registered. At that point, I will be fully USA- and Portuguese-born. Bizarre, I know.

I wasn’t out for a new birth certificate per se. What I actually wanted was an EU passport.⁽¹⁾

The way there, in the French tradition, was a painful and costly paper-gathering exercise, that once complete was followed by a painful and costly excursion to Lisbon’s Central Registry. I left the Central Registry empty-handed. No passport or short- or even medium-term promise thereof.

“For now, just wait until you receive your Portuguese birth certificate,” the public official told me.”

“And when can I expect that?” I asked and the official rolled her eyes, which said, Girl please.

“Just don’t think about it. Forget all of this until you get your birth certificate in the mail. Then come back and we talk.”

In the absence of a passport, I’m now fascinated by the idea of a Portuguese re-birth, like a globe-trotting variation on Benjamin Button.

What will my new birth certificate read? Will I be born on that Friday, 7^th of July, 2018 at the Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteira⁽²⁾ on Rua Rodrigo da Fonseca?

I wish I’d known at dinner the night before I made my application that rebirth was in the cards; I could have used an injection of relative youth. Pete and I were splitting a bowl of edamame when we saw our newly single friend enter the restaurant with what is best described as “a hot date.” The latter wore purposeful makeup, a low-cut tank and high high heels that I can assure you are not Lisbon-friendly. I’m not one for much primping (10 minute time limit, for reasons both ideological and temperamental), but I was conscious and self-conscious of my zero-effort athleisure get-up and ponytail (went to dinner straight from pilates, just some extra deodorant). Somehow I felt old, though not unproudly so. Still, I could do with a little re-birth.

I was recently at a writing conference. After a session on ‘Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in The Short Story,’⁽³⁾ I chatted with one of the panelists.

“I think about identity and race and gender often,” I explained, “especially living in a traditional country like this one.”

“Traditional! How is that possible?” was the panelist’s response.

He was referring to Portugal’s drug laws, which are seen as progressive for their decriminalization of public possession and use (these are treated by Portugal as public health issues more so than matters of criminal justice).

“This place is amazing,” he said. “I don’t get the sense that it’s traditional.  At all.”

Our conversation reinforced a new belief I have that is growing. I used to say that I wrote in the hopes of distilling a kernel of universal truth about the human experience (I am thoroughly embarrassed that this was my line). Now I suspect there is no such knowable thing.

In the inability to know more than our own human experience first-hand, I think I’d be up for re-knowing it via different country of birth.

What would a Portuguese birth have been like? I have written of a minor parking spat that took place in Lisbon a few years ago in which an angry driver sent me back to “my country,” which made no sense because I had no place really to go (and also, all I did was inadvertently make a move on her spot). My birth certificate tells of a hometown that feels a little haphazard. What would it be like to be from the place where you live?

I have questions. Would I eat sardines but only when they are fat? Obviously I would know this is in July. Would I be a natural at the Sunday lunch? I would bathe in the Atlantic and not find it cold. Also, I am almost certain I’d be both less uptight — could extreme perfectionism be a somewhat American symptom? — and less punctual.

On Tuesday I holed myself up in a Brassai exhibition. With all those photos of Paris by day and night and by the foggy lamp-lit stairs in Montmartre, he seemed thoroughly French. Of course he wasn’t, and I’d forgotten this detail until I looked up his biography. He was born in a part of Transylvania that became Romania after the Second World War, at which point his ‘official papers’ were invalid in Romania. This left him stateless for four years before he naturalized as a French citizen via marriage to a French woman. Did he wonder, too, as he photographed the prostitutes in the 18^th and soirees at Maxim’s and Christian Dior: what is the experience of this person or of this place?

His words, translated: “My ambition has always been to show the everyday city as if we were discovering it for the first time.”

His art was a process, you could argue, of perpetual new births – to see Paris and its subject via his Voigtländer Bergheil folding fixed-lens camera anew.

Here is Kerouac’s take, excerpted from On The Road. Like Brassai, Kerouac tells of limitless new takes.

“I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.”

—

Notes

^[1] Yeah, me, and every other non-European aspiring to more than a brief dalliance in the Old Continent. I’ve known people who go to great lengths for an EU passport. I can report as fact that the prospect of an English passport at the end of a seven-year tenure in the country is what keeps young US lawyers working in City jobs that can objectively be described as thoroughly miserable, although there are also different approaches. A Venezuelan-American friend very seriously considered marrying a French woman, for the pretty face but also for the visa, but the plan was aborted when he fell in love with a Portuguese anesthesiologist named Nuno.

^[2] This is an administrative black hole in central Lisbon (not my words, but common knowledge) where the likelihood of catching some kind of airborne virus is significant (my direct experience).

^[3] Nerdy and delicious, I know.