Back Where I Come From

Little-known fact about me:  I was born in Kansas.  Really.  My father was working on his doctorate there.  We moved back to New York when I was two years old, but my earliest memory takes place in the state of my birth:  I am outside, chasing our dog around a garbage can.  Neither I nor anyone else in my family has ever gone back.

As part of our adoption paperwork, however, I had to contact the Kansas State Department to get a certified copy of my birth certificate, and I was astounded, though I guess I shouldn't have been, by the difference between the vital statistics people in Kansas and their counterparts in New York, where all the rest of my vital records reside.  The Kansas people were genuinely nice, kind, generous, and helpful.  They called and left a message when they had a question for me.  The state registrar herself helped me to complete my request because a very nice vital statistician named Betty, which seemed the most perfect name for a kindly low-level bureaucrat from Kansas, transferred me over to her during a phone call.

The New York people, on the other hand, have sent back my vital records applications several times for various oversights and infractions.  And they are, I'm chagrined to admit, not really all that nice.  I wonder if they'll ever cough up all my other vital records unless I go there in person and wait all day with cash in hand, which is exactly what I'd do if we still lived there.

Another little-known fact:  I've been told my entire life that I have an accent.  I always took this to mean that I actually had no accent, i.e., that my speech had had all regionalisms trained out of it through my long years of voice study.  But once, when I was in my teens and working at an ice cream parlor for my summer job, a graduate student in linguistics came into the shop.  While I was scooping his order, he told me that everyone's speech patterns were laid in place by the age of two, and that he could usually guess where people were from by the way they spoke.  I smirked; here was my chance to stump him.  "So where was I born?"  I demanded.  "Kansas," he said.