London Falling

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I owe my name to Queen Elizabeth.

Had I been born a girl this blog and the newsletter that points to it would have been written by Elizabeth Rosmarin. Maybe I would have snazzied it up a bit and said it was by Lilibet Rosmarin. But I was born a boy.

A very lucky boy. Lucky, first, that I got out of Los Angeles’s South Hoover Hospital at all, carried in my sharp-eyed protective mama’s arms to my first home just fifteen blocks up the street from there. Other mamas may not have been so sharp-eyed, according to lawsuits filed against the hospital and Mo Pilson, the doctor who took me from her womb. Some of the mamas who lay in South Hoover’s thirty-five beds said they were sent home with the wrong baby, in one case a girl who started out as a boy. One blamed him for the stillbirth of her child, saying she was strapped down over the two days she was in labor and that the cesarean was so botched an orderly told her “They have done a mess with you.” The Supreme Court of California said it “may well have been a meritorious claim,” but agreed with clever Doc Pilson that even if he did do it, that mama filed her lawsuit just a little bit outside the statute of limitations. Her sorrow, said the high court, was “the price of the orderly and timely processing of litigation.”

The second reason I was luckier than that woman’s baby, is that before Queen Elizabeth’s marriage, she had dallied with the Seventh Earl of Carnarvon, whose courtesy title was Lord Porchester, and whom she affectionately called “Porchey.”

As it was, Lilibet married Philip Mountbatten, and that was the story that headlined the newspaper lying in her hospital room when absent-minded Doc Pilson asked my mama, what did you say you gonna name that boy?

Good lord. Porchey. That was a near thing.