11.15.1965 @ 13:25

Today is the end of the fourth decade of my life. It marks an uncomplicated life and a complicated day. I was born Brian Scott Schwarz at 1:25 p.m. on November 15, 1965, to a young woman who was 19, had acne, and who for the past five months had resided in a Georgetown home for unwed mothers. I was born at George Washington University Hospital, and was with my mother for seven days before, I am told, I was swaddled up on a Monday, held carefully and placed into the arms of a stranger, and then driven across town to Family and Children's Services at 16th and K Street, near the international youth hostel in Washington, D.C.

The ride between Brian Scott Schwarz and the person I am now was about fifteen minutes. I doubt I understood the noise of the car nor comprehended the light from the day passing over my face. I don't know who drove the car, but I imagine it was a woman, and I don't know if she hummed a song, remained silent, or listened to the radio. I wonder what she did, a stranger who transported me from one life to another, from an unwed mother to an expecting couple. In those fifteen minutes I was still Brian Scott Schwarz, son of Pamela Schwarz, given up for adoption.

I left the arms of one young woman, bereft, and as I traveled from the life into which I was born and into the life of new parents, I was alone with a stranger in a car, bumping across a city and through the afternoon traffic, turning on Whitehurst Freeway, down K Street NW, past the monuments and statues, into a parking lot next to a garden, with a large plate glass window looking over us as we pulled in. What an incredible, short and immeasurable distance, this day of my 40th birthday, that seventh day of my life.