Animal Behavior

No matter what country they live in or how many figures they make a year, there seems to be one universal truth that moms and dads everywhere know; that at some point, their children will want to hear the same bedtime story every night for an extended period of time. For my five-year-old son Thaddeus, it’s currently Blueberries for Sal. For others, it’s one of those monosyllabic “this is dog” monstrosities that make parents wish pernicious diseases on the author. But when I was a child, my favorite bedtime story couldn’t be found in a bookstore, as it was the tale of how I got my name. Legend has it that my father had picked “Alison” while listening to Elvis Costello as he was driving around downtown Boston with my mother, who was so heavily pregnant with me that she could barely put her seatbelt on. She didn’t wear it, and if he ever had to slam on the brakes – which happened pretty often due to the fantastic driving skills of other Massachusetts natives – he thrust out his right arm to keep her (and me) from hitting the dashboard. I loved hearing that story and would ask both of my parents to tell it again and again, wrapping myself up in this warm quilt of history that I never knew; an era when my father’s devotion to us burned bright.