Dr. Cherry
I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,
almost gave birth to me on the Roosevelt Island tram, which would have been cool in a Spiderman-outtake way. My mom opted out of the fifty-feet-aboveground theatrics and hightailed it to the hospital. According to my birth certificate, I was born in New York City, I came out a girl, and a Dr. Cherry and Nurse Rabbit were on the scene.
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. My mom’s obstetrician was Dr. Cherry, of Mt. Sinai Hospital, whither my mom also rushed, but from Jersey City and not Roosevelt Island.
With one thing and another it has been a long time since I last heard the story of my birth, so I might not have all the details right. But here is the gist. I didn’t cry at all when I was born, causing my mother, in her concern about my lung function, to ask Dr. Cherry whether he wasn’t going to slap me on the back to make me cry, as is customary in these situations. But Dr. Cherry replied, “Nobody needs to hit this baby, she’s just fine.”
All my life I have felt grateful to Dr. Cherry for sparing me at least one jarring experience in this world, vale of tears that it is.
Asking myself how many Dr. Cherries there could have been in the OBGYN racket in New York City in this particular year which I will not mention since we are none of us as young as we once were, I wrote to Lauren asking whether she had been born at Mt. Sinai. She had! (Her first question was, whether my birth too had been attended by Nurse Rabbit. But I don’t think my mother ever mentioned a Nurse Rabbit.)
Moved by this coincidence, I visited the web page of the Mt. Sinai Department of Obstetrics, and was further moved to see that Sheldon H. Cherry is still practicing: there is a Park Avenue address, and office hours Monday to Friday. The next time I go to New York I think Lauren and I should visit him, so he can see what lively and literate young women he ushered into the human condition.
Despite our birth in the same hospital, Lauren and I did not formally cross paths until our college years, when she comped the Harvard Advocate one semester after I did, and I was assigned to help her with the essays.
It’s kind of like The Prince and the Pauper because, notwithstanding our similar beginnings and proclivities, Lauren grew up to become a rich and stylish writer, while I grew up to become a graduate student. You may know Lauren as the co-author (with Laura Moses) of the Balzacian Tenth Grade Social Climber books for young adults. Mechling’s first solo Y.A. book, Dream Girl, comes out in April. It’s about a girl called Claire Voyante, the scion, if memory serves me, of a fabulously wealthy tube-sock baron (or was it a ketchup czar?), who has dreams where she sees clues, and then when she wakes up, she follows the clues and solves mysteries.
So here it is, my must-read list of April 2008: Lauren Mechling’s Dream Girl, and Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men. In fact I think Amazon should combine them in one of those “Better Together” promotions.
Amazon! Are you listening to me?
Tags: comparative literature, Elif's mom, Keith Gessen, Lauren Mechling, YA fiction