Sorting

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When you're recuperating from an illness, you find yourself with time on your hands. If you're like me, you begin to clean and organize things. Photos and receipts and greeting cards pile up over the months and years, and it's nice to go through them once in a while.

Receipts and greeting cards are easy to throw away, but photos are a little more difficult. I find that I've taken too many overexposed photos of Beautiful Scenery over the years, and it's easy to toss most of them in the trash. When there are people in the photos, however, I hesitate, as if they exert some magical hold on me. Might some hypothetical future descendant muse over these photos, wondering at how distant and mysterious we were?

Well, hm. First of all: what descendants? Apart from a few mangy stuffed animals, I have no kids. I keep in touch with a few members of the next generation of my family, but none of them seems impassioned about family history.

Also, the sad truth is that objects like photos are not generally magical. I pull out old theater stubs and concert programs, examine them with regret, and toss them in the trash. They may have been magical for a little when then they were new, but time has taken their magic away. Photos are a little different, but even they lose their immediacy after a few decades.

How do you react when you see a photo of a distant ancestor? Curiosity, maybe; regret that you will never get to know them; sadness that things pass and people die. I think always of those family-reunion photos in which the kids are lying on the floor up front, clowning for the camera, and the older generations stand ranked behind them, with the oldest of all scrunched against the wall in back. I realized some years ago that (without ever quite realizing it) I had suddenly become one of those pale oldsters in the back of the photo - some forgotten great-uncle, what's-his-name, the one who moved to Rhode Island and lived with another man and had no kids.

Forgotten.

Well, hm.

Get to work sorting and labeling those photos, kids!

Maybe someone will remember you after you're gone.

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Grandma Lottie

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Years ago I came to terms with looking like my father's mother, Grandma Minnie. I have her pallor and her blue eyes, as well as (naturally) her inner sweetness.

Now the page has turned.

I posted a photo of myself on Facebook not long ago, posing in a pink knit hat, as follows:

Very nice, everyone said. Then my cousin Linda piped up with: "Did you know that, with that scowl, you look just like Grandma Lottie?"

When I peeled myself off the ceiling, I wrote back to her immediately to acknowledge that she was right. I even dug out an ancient photo of me in 1970, posing with Grandma Lottie in front of her house, which further proved the point:

Grandma Lottie was my mother's mother. She was consistently dour and seldom wore her teeth unless absolutely necessary, which makes two of us. Despite her forbidding look, however, she was always sweet and kind to me; I remember the smell of food cooking in her little kitchen, and I remember walking with her in her garden (where she often gave me plants and cuttings). The photo at the head of this piece, probably taken in the 1920s, is nice: she’s almost smiling in a Mona Lisa way.

Grandma Lottie married three times, which is enough to make anyone look dour and forbidding. My grandfather was her second husband; he died in a mine cave-in around 1926, so I never got to meet him. My mother, who was only six or so when he died, always said he was a very nice man; I wish I could have known him.

Anyway, back to Grandma Lottie. It’s plain that she wasn’t a smiler. But what's wrong with that? I think smiling is overrated. It's supposed to make you feel good, right? It's supposed to make other people feel kindly toward you? I wonder. Greeting a stranger with a wintry glare can be a very bracing experience, and it's strangely productive: it sets people back on their heels and makes them wonder what they've done wrong.

It gives you the advantage.

As I told cousin Linda: I'm proud to carry Grandma Lottie's scowl and black-framed glasses into the new generation.

Somebody's gotta do it.

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Attention whore

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Way back in the 1990s, my mother had her own adventure with cancer. Along the way, she managed to get herself dehydrated, and ended up in the hospital. To my surprise and that of my siblings, she seemed to love the experience. "I call the nurses 'the girls,'"she told me over the phone. "They are so sweet to me. They know I'm not supposed to have coffee, but oh, I wanted it so much, and one of them brought me a little cup of coffee, and - oh, Loren! - it was so good! And I asked her for one more little cup, and she brought it for me, and - oh, Loren! - it was so good!"

I listened to this story with a thin-lipped expression. Later I repeated it to my sister Susan, who grimaced. "I know," she said. "The nurses fell for it. Mom can be so damned cute when she wants to be. But you just wait: once the nurses catch on, it won't be so much fun for Mom any longer."

Which, in fact, happened a day or two later. "I don't know what happened all of a sudden," my mother groused on the phone. "The nurses don't seem to pay attention anymore. Sometimes I press the call switch and it's a couple of minutes before anyone shows up. It's like a whole new staff. I can't wait to go home."

This whole thing seemed very strange to me. Mom was normally the soul of staunch individualism; she lived all by herself at the end of a dead-end road, and most days she didn't see a living soul. Why should it be so much fun for her to be the center of attention all of a sudden -

  

Aha.

She finally had center stage with a whole retinue dancing around her, and she was loving it.

She had become an attention whore.

Flash forward to the other day. I'm in recovery, which means I spend days at home alone watching TCM and waiting for the mail. So then I have a doctor's appointment, and the doctor says, "You could use some fluids. We can give them to you today, in the chemo ward - "

I nearly knocked her down, I was so eager to get to that chemo ward.

"Chemo ward" doesn't sound appealing, but it’s nicer and more comfortable than you think. The chairs are all recliners. There's a TV in every little nook. There are chairs for visitors. The nurses are funny and make light conversation as they poke and prod you and stick needles into you. Snacks and beverages and warm blankets are available upon demand. In short, the staff waits on you hand and foot.

Does this sound familiar?

Ah, but I learned from my mother's experience. Her mistake was that she overdid it.

I will not overdo it.

I have another fluids day soon, back in the chemo ward with those nice kind attentive nurses. I hope I can maintain my composure.

I don't want the girls to know what an attention whore I am.

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Westerns

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I was born into a shit-kickin' family. My father's parents were Eastern Washington farmers, and my sister Susan married into a local dairy family, and - well, what more do you need?

Evidently it’s in our DNA. My brother Leonard worked in grocery stores his whole life, and yet he talks like Walter Brennan. He was, for a fact, born on my parents' farm, during a brief period in their early married life during which they were farming, but still!

Anyway, everyone in my family loves Westerns, and the whole Old West folklore thing. (When Leonard found out I was doing our family history, he drawled: "Are we descended from any horse thieves?" Evidently that would have been perfectly delicious. The reality - some Polish peasants, some Italian peasants, some English hooligans and riffraff - just isn't colorful enough, in a six-guns-and-Randolph-Scott way.)

Every once in a while I try to reassociate myself with my Boot Hill roots and watch a few Westerns on TMC. Sometimes they're harmless enough that they sort of wash over me. But - you know? - a lot of them - most of them - just aren't very good.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that there are some classics, like "Cimarron" and "Stagecoach" and "Red River." I have seen at least ten minutes of each of these - more of "Cimarron," because it has Irene Dunne in it – and they are all lovely. I stick by my original point, however. Read on:)

·        Westerns are all depressingly similar. I will spare you a recitation of plot points, cliches, situations, etc. I will only say that I recently fell asleep during a Jimmy Stewart western, woke up about ninety minutes later during another Jimmy Stewart Western, and was uncertain for a few minutes if it was the same movie.

·        They certainly save money on costumes and sets. I'm sure there was a kind of Studio Western Kit, containing things like 1) one chuck wagon 2) three dance hall girl dresses 3) two fancy saddles 4) one fancy lamp with a fringed shade, for indoor / city-slicker  / bawdy house scenes.

·        Scenery. Magnificent, right? HDTV has killed that illusion. In Movie #2 the other day, J. Stewart and company were riding along a dangerous mountain ridge with all kinds of mountains and forests and valleys in the distance, except that, um, no they weren't. The foreground was perfectly clear and in focus; the scenic background looked like Jackson Pollock's hick cousin Vernton Pollock had blooped and blopped together some green and blue and white paint to produce Western Background #14.

And so forth.

I am sure, as we say, that for people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like. I like all kinds of silly / stupid / sub-par things, especially in the movie category. (Next time you hear me warbling on about how wonderful "Shack Out On 101" is, give me a real hard whack on the back of my head.) But, bafflingly, I was born without the mental toolkit required to make sense of these verkakte Westerns, even though genetically I should be right in there with my relatives.

Sigh.

Okay. Now: anybody want to see "Shack Out On 101" one more time?

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Love your enemies

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When my mother was undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, she went through all kinds of interesting states of mind, way beyond Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s measly five.  Elisabeth would have been astounded. 

One of the most unexpected was the “I’m gonna tell you what I think of you before it’s too late” phase. We discovered that Mom was calling up people from her past and telling them all the things she’d been holding back for decades: how they’d disappointed or betrayed her, how they weren’t good enough for their wives/husbands, how they’d made bad decisions. (Myself, I was surprised that Mom had ever held anything back – she could be a real loudmouth when she was wanted to be – but apparently she’d kept a lot of opinions back after all.)

I am my mother’s son. I am full of grudges and unsettled scores. I am terribly self-righteous, just as she was. I only hope that, as the cancer treatment weakens me, I don’t succumb to Mom’s let-‘em-have-it mentality

This is why I was bemused by something that showed up on my Facebook wall a while back: a serious discussion of why you shouldn’t have enemies. To wit:

·        Enemies take up a lot of your valuable time – whether you’re actually taking revenge, or just thinking about it. (This is true, and I hate the idea of wasting time, especially at this point in my life.)

·        Your enemies probably aren’t worth hating as much as you think they are. (Maybe. Some of mine are pretty loathsome.)

·        Most of the world’s religions tell us to be kind to our enemies.

This last one needs some scrutiny. Certainly Jesus tells us to love our enemies. But the God of the Old Testament certainly didn’t mess around with anyone who got in his way. And many modern Christians seem to act as if they loathe whole squadrons of people.

So what’s an unbeliever to do?

Well, I normally don’t like Saint Paul, but in Romans 12:20 he comes up with the perfect reason to do good to your enemies:

Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

See? You can make your enemy ashamed of himself by being nice to him. And then, if he doesn’t make friends with you, he presumably goes to hell.

Doesn’t that make you feel better?

It does me a world of good.

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High-tech medicine

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My father’s radiation therapy in the mid-1970s was really brutal. It scorched his entire torso, and it did no good anyway, as his cancer was far too advanced.

My mother’s 1990s chemotherapy in the 1990s was much milder. She was only nauseous a few times. Taxol made her hair fall out, which really stunned her; I think it was the worst thing about the treatment for her. But the chemo extended her life considerably, without much affecting her quality of life.

And now it’s twenty years later, and I’m doing a tandem combination of radiation and chemotherapy. The radiation is directed straight at my left tonsil; after the first few treatments, I haven’t noticed many ill effects, apart from a little neck soreness/stiffness. The first few chemo treatments were similarly mild (apart from a little nausea and fatigue).

When I go in for radiation, I lie on the table and let the nurses fasten on my Radiation Mask:

They also give me a plastic hoop to grip with both hands, so I don’t flail my arms too much. The treatment is about ten minutes long; the machine makes all kinds of space-age humming and beeping noises. Then the attendant comes in and unbuckles me.

My mind wanders during the treatment. Early on, I found myself thinking about the plastic hoop. It’s ridged, and slightly flexible –

When the attendant came in to unbuckle me, I handed her the hoop and said: “This is a dog toy, isn’t it?”

She chuckled. “Yep. The medical version costs a hundred and fifty dollars. I bought that one at Petco for seven ninety-five.”

File this one under “health care costs,” and “high-tech medicine,” and probably under “human ingenuity.”

Pity the poor dog going without his toy. But it’s in the name of medicine, after all.

Woof woof!

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Smoking, take two

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(Note: this is a rewrite of a blog I wrote back in 2011, with maybe a few updates, in the light of recent events.)

Both my parents smoked. I have distinct memories of sitting in the front seat of our family car, with my father in the driver’s seat on my left and my mother sitting to my right, both of them puffing away, the ashtray overflowing. I couldn’t breathe. I finally spoke up about it when I was about nine or ten years, and it actually inspired my mother to quit smoking.

This, however, didn’t stop me from taking up the habit myself. I got a free sample of Lucky Strikes at Fenway Park in 1983; I smoked one or two of them; soon after I was in Morocco, and smoking a pack a day; soon after that I was in Tunisia and smoking two packs a day.

I kept this up until 1998. Remembering the family proclivity for cancer, I resolved to quite when I was forty, and I managed it, just a few months shy of my forty-first birthday.

I have been reasonably healthy on and off since.

And now, fifteen years later, I discover that I have throat cancer, the main risk factor for which is – ahem – smoking.

Go figure.

I freely acknowledge that it’s my own fault. I knew there were bad genes on both sides of the family, and I knew that smoking could only be bad for me. But I kept it up for fourteen years.

Foolish, naturally. Most of those fourteen years between ’84 and ‘98, I was just smoking out of habit; I even (as do most smokers) kept it up while I was sick with colds and the flu. I even smoked at meals. I was smelly and utterly obnoxious, and probably nearly burned myself to death more than once. I realize that now.

But I remember one beautiful morning in Tunis, before I developed my two-pack-a-day habit. I left the house around 8am, bought a pack of local cigarettes, lit up, and –

That first puff was heaven.

So it wasn’t all bad.

But it probably wasn’t worth getting cancer for.

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Ivy

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Providence is full of Ivy. Brown University is Ivy League, after all, and there’s English ivy (Hedera helix) growing all over the place. A friend of mine, freshly arrived in Providence from Montana, plucked some ivy leaves off the wall and mailed them to her family and friends in Billings, to underline the reality of where she was.

Ivy wants to go up, away from the ground, against gravity. There’s a nearby building with two ivy tendrils curling up its walls like arms outspread. And up up up they go!

I always think of my mother when I see ivy. When my father built our new house in the early 1960s, my mother decided that she liked ivy, and planted shoots of it all along the north side of the house and along the roadside.

Those shoots were stubborn. They didn’t die, but they didn’t grow. A few leaves stuck out of the ground, year after year. And then, after five years or so –

They exploded.

The entire north side of the house was engulfed with ivy. And do you know what ivy does to the side of a house, especially one with wooden shingles? It chews it up, om nom nom. If you try to pull the ivy down, you rip away half of the wooden shingles at the same time, and you reveal the dark mottling that the ivy has produced on its way up the wall.

Mom got her wish, and how! But she wasn’t happy that her plan had gone beyond expectations. She managed to get most of it off the shingles, and she repainted, but she couldn’t get the ivy off the brickwork. This picture, taken in May 1971, shows the ivy covering the exposed brickwork:

It looks nice, doesn’t it? Nice rhododendrons in front of the house, and a nice ivy-covered chimney.

But Mom was watching that ivy every moment, to make sure it didn’t leap onto the wooden shingles again.

Ivy is aggressive.

And now, a song:

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Sufferers, losers, and survivors

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There’s a language which appears to have grown up around cancer and cancer patients and cancer therapies. I think I’m considered a “sufferer,” although I’m supposed to be “battling cancer” also. Biff! Bam! Ow!

Those who have managed to overcome their cancers are “survivors,” and I approve of this term. Cancer, as one of my doctors told me the other week, usually comes to people as a terrifying and sudden bolt from the blue. “One of my patients,” she said, “said it was like mowing your lawn on a sunny day, and then suddenly a big truck comes screaming into your yard and crashes into you.” Something like that you can only survive; there’s no other word for it.

Here’s the expression I hate, though: “he/she lost the battle to cancer.”

Sorry, kids. My mother and father did not “lose their battles,” nor did my sisters, nor my niece, nor my aunts and uncles. They sickened and died, as does everyone sooner or later. Most of them were diagnosed very late in the course of their illnesses, so they didn’t have much chance to undergo successful treatment.

Much is made of “positive attitude,” and how it improves your odds. Certainly, psychologically, I see the point. It’s impossible, as one of my survivor friends told me not long ago, to think about cancer all the time; it makes you crazy and gloomy. You need to cheer yourself, and reassure yourself that not everything ends in tragedy. As yet another doctor said a few weeks ago: “If you look at prognosis statistics – and you probably already have – don’t let them worry you too much. You’ll either be one of the people who live, or one of the others. There’s no way of telling.”

My mother was a terrible patient, but she lived seven years after her diagnosis at age seventy-two. Her cancer never quite finished with her; she underwent repeated bouts of chemotherapy over the years, and each was a little harder for her to deal with; finally, in her seventy-ninth year, it was just too much for her. She began to decline seriously in September, and by November she was gone. Along the way, she exhibited every behavior you can imagine: self-pity, fear, anger, selfishness, mean-spiritness. Also kindness. Also a strange late-autumn sweetness.

My sister Susan, diagnosed in her forty-sixth year, was an angel. She suffered miserably with her cancer, but I never saw or heard her angry or upset. She spent time picking out her own coffin and the clothes and jewelry she’d be wearing at her own funeral. She was a wonderful person, and I kick myself that I didn’t see more of her and call her more often during her last few years.

My sister Darlene: I don’t know. We weren’t close. But I think she made great use of her last years: she underwent a clinical trial, and she did community work right up until the very end. She was always tough, and a good citizen, and I salute her.

My poor niece, who died only a few years ago in her forties, was surrounded by her family, and comforted by her faith.

None of them were “losers.” They sickened and died, but they were by no means “losers.”

So don’t speak to me of the “battle against cancer.” Cancer’s not an ideology or a bad guy or a rebel army. It’s a disease, that’s all.

We’re all terminal, after all. None of us is coming out of this alive.

All that really matters is how we use the time we’ve been given, cancer or no cancer.

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Nicknames

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I’ve spoken before about nicknames in my family. My mother Tosca was “Shim,” and her brother Primo was “Bud,” et cetera.

Well, my friend Apollonia has taken this to new heights.

Every day she comes up with a new name for me. Today it was “Gort.” (Klaatu barada nikto!) The other day it was “vigliacco,” which is the Italian word for someone beneath contempt.

I, on the other hand, give her only lovely reverent names, like “Principessa,” and “Miss Kim Novak,” and “Mother Nature,” and “Reverend Mother,” and “Great Old One.”

You can tell that we plan these ahead. I think about it in the morning, and I can tell she’s planned hers too.

It demonstrates that we care for one another.

For tomorrow: what do you think about “Ursula the Sea Witch”?

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Bees

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My sister Susan was deathly allergic to bees. She swelled up terribly when she was stung, and came close to death several times. Once in the early 1960s, she was mowing the lawn and ran over a hive of ground-burrowing bees (yes, there are such things, at least in the Pacific Northwest), and they stung her all at once, and we had to put her in the bathtub and pack her in ice to keep her from swelling to death.

Our father was allergic to bees too, but not as badly as Susan was. Evidently he passed his allergy to poor Susan. None of the rest of us got the bee-allergy gene.

But I think Susan may have saved my life once.

It’s a very early childhood memory of mine. It was a nice sunny day, and she and I were sitting on the grass outside our house, playing. This is rare and memorable in itself, because she usually hated playing with me. I think we were playing school, or store, or some such thing.  Anyway, we were having a very nice time.

And suddenly she grabbed my head and shoved me face-down into the grass and held me there.

I had no idea what was going on. I thought it was part of the game, but I was also mildly irritated at her. And, at the same time, I could hear a peculiar thrilling hum over my head, louder and louder, then softer again.

It turns out that she saw a swarm of bees suddenly fly out of a nearby tree and come sailing toward us, only a few feet above the ground. She grabbed me and pushed me down to protect me, and crouched down herself to protect herself.

Bees swarm when they’re looking for a new home. They’re not especially dangerous when they’re swarming, but they generally land on the first thing they encounter. If that thing had been me at the age of five years, I would have shrieked and screamed and rolled around, and the bees would have been – hmm – alarmed.

And I probably would have been in bad shape after that.

Susan also.

But we lived past that day. Susan died in 1995, sadly, of aggressive ovarian cancer. I’m still here.

But at least the bees didn’t get us.

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Beets

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I hated vegetables when I was young. This included beans of all kinds, spinach, carrots, radishes, squash, peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce. Potatoes I accepted, because they didn’t look like vegetables; corn I also accepted, because it was sweet, and corn-on-the-cob was especially interesting (most especially when it was dripping with butter and covered with salt).

Some studies show that children are picky eaters because nature makes them that way; if we were living in a state of nature, foraging for our food, my pickiness might have saved my life many times over.

Also, pickiness is heritable from a parent. This makes sense to me: my mother was one of the pickiest eaters I’ve ever known, even as an adult. Her favorite meal was a hamburger and French fries at the local Burgerville (hold the ketchup).

But I’ve mostly gotten over my pickiness, as I’ve gotten older. I like trying new strange foods.

But I have not yet made friends completely with beets.

Beets are a root crop, and very healthy for you. Also, you can eat the greens on top.

But I am still not delighted with them.

When you prepare them with a little sugar and vinegar – that is, as “Harvard beets” – they’re almost nice. (The more vinegar and the sweeter the beets, the better.)

When prepared naturally, however, they have a very – um – natural flavor. That is to say, they taste like dirt.

Apollonia told me a story recently, about taking her sons to a local historical attraction, where people dress up in period garb and pretend that it’s 1790. A woman came up to them with a big bowl of beets. “Beets are wonderful,” the woman said. “You can pickle them, or eat them raw. You can eat them in salads. You can use them to dye cloth. Or –“

“Or,” Apollonia’s son said, “you can throw them out the window.”

This is an excellent suggestion. Next time I see beets on the plate, I will try throwing them out the window, and see what happens.

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Green thumb

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All kinds of weird talents run in my family. My aunt Louise channels entities who tell her about life on other planets and who have shown her the history of Atlantis. Mom could tell when I was sick, without even seeing me: I’d come home from school feeling ill, and she’d already have the bed turned down for me.

But I never had the green thumb.

Mom and my sister Darlene had the green thumb. They could take a leaf – one leaf! – from a plant (usually stolen, from a doctor’s office or a restaurant) – and put it in a pot of unpromising soil, and it would grow. And in no time they’d have a whole garden full of – whatever.

I had the black thumb – the opposite of the green thumb – for many years. I’d buy a potted plant, and it would keel over within days. I’d plant seeds, and nothing would happen. If I repotted something, it died within weeks.

Except that, over the past few years, something has happened. Evidently the stars have realigned. Now I can make things grow!

Example: I put a potted Pereskia aculeata (“Barbados gooseberry”) in my office window a few years ago. Within months it was climbing up the Venetian blinds. It has now made its way all the way to the ceiling (well over ten feet), and is thriving. Regardez:

Example: I took a few Sansevieria leaves out of the garbage-can at work, and a few stems of Epiphyllium that someone threw away, and potted them. The Sansevieria grew at approximately sixty m.p.h., and is huge now. The Epiphyllium is thriving, and I even gave some to Partner’s sister. This is the Sansevieria:

Final example: a departing staff member gave me his dying Dracaena. It looked moribund when I took it in. I repotted it, and gave it some nourishing plant-food and a little water. It returned from the dead within days. It’s thriving now.

Finally: I’m making amends for all of the plants I’ve killed over the years.

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Vacation Bible School

Neither of my parents was a churchgoer. We were, in general, scornful of people who went to church. I don’t recall why exactly.

But, about two weeks after regular school let out, the local church (a generic Protestant denomination) held Vacation Bible School for a week.

I went several times, and I adored it. I loved memorizing Bible verses, and making crafts with coffee-cans and macaroni and papier-mache, and eating lunch outside.

I even took it to heart once or twice. One of our memorization verses was Jesus saying “Fear not,” and I remember saying it to myself when I was frightened once or twice, and it helped, for some reason.

I was young and credulous. I liked the “school” part of this, and I wasn’t terribly receptive to the religion part, but then again maybe I was. Several of the Bible School teachers saw me as an eligible convert and gave me all kinds of books, some of which I still have: Bible guides and such.

Here’s my problem: I love the feeling of belief, but I don’t really believe the doctrine. I don’t believe that the creator of the universe entered into a man two thousand years ago, just to make a point. I don’t believe that Old Testament doctrine is superior to any other religion doctrine (although some of it is very profound).

I miss the calm serene feeling that Vacation Bible School gave me, when everything was nice and orderly.

But I’m afraid I’ll never be able to feel that way again.

How lovely the violin

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My father played the violin!

Yes, indeed: farmboy though he was, he had a violin, and he took mail-order lessons. I inherited Dad’s violin, and the stack of 1920s mail-order lesson plans he learned from.

I never heard my father play. But I went through his old lessons, and I learned basic fingering at least. I never learned to play well, but I could probably still scratch out Frere Jacques or My Country ‘Tis of Thee.

Charming!

I should really take it up again.

On the other hand: there is nothing in the world worse than a beginner violinist. No, strike that: there’s nothing in the world worse than living in the vicinity of a beginner violinist. The screeching and squawking, if you’ve never heard it, is unearthly. And it just goes on and on.

Maybe, for Partner’s sake and the sake of all our neighbors, I will leave the violin alone, and take up something quieter.

Maybe needlework.

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Neanderthal DNA

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23andMe.com, the online DNA-analysis company, came back to us with information on our Neanderthal descent. Mine is 2.6 percent; Partner's is 2.8 percent.

There’s been lots of disagreement about our Neanderthal cousins. They were shorter than us and almost certainly stronger, with heavy brow ridges, and maybe larger brains. But Homo sapiens sapienssomehow swamped them, and now they’re gone.

Except that our H. sapiens sapiens ancestors (evidently) interbred with them.

The Neanderthal genome has been recovered from fossils and compared to the modern human genome. Result: most people of European and Asian descent have at least one percent Neanderthal DNA; some have as much as four percent. (People of pure African descent have none at all, or nearly none.)

It’s fun to think about our caveman ancestry. I even bought the t-shirts that 23andMe offered, with a cute Fred Flintstone-type caveman depicted on them, and Partner’s and my respective percentages printed alongside.

But maybe I’m proud of my Homo sapiens sapiensancestry too. Maybe I’m proud of all my ancestors, unicellular and multicellular, mammalian and primate. They all had one thing in common: they reproduced, and their offspring lived long enough to reproduce also.

I have not had children in my lifetime, and almost certainly never will. My genome (such as it is) will be lost. But hopefully my nephews and nieces will manage to carry on the odd and unique messages in our family DNA.

I feel like a caveman, thinking about a future I won’t share.

But maybe – just maybe – some fragment of my family inheritance will survive in that future.

Here’s hoping.

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Grampa Narciso Vinci

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My mother’s family history was (supposedly) a simple story: an Italian grandfather just off the boat, who married a nice Polish girl. That should make for a nice simple genome, right?

Not so much. According to the 23andMe database, my genome shows similarities to people from Hungary, Finland, and the Czech Republic. I have a small but significant segment of “Balkan” DNA, not to mention a drop of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

So what happened back in Europe, with my great-grandparents and their forebears?

I know a little about my Polish grandmother Lottie, but almost nothing of my Italian grandfather Narciso. He was dapper and handsome, and he liked posing for the camera – look:

Mom always said he was good with kids; naturally she’d say something like that, but then again, there’s this nice picture of him posing with his kids and stepchildren (I think the one with a bucket on his head is my late uncle Primo):

According to my great-aunt Estelle, Grandpa Narciso was a bit of a dog. He romanced both my grandma Lottie and her sister Julia at the same time; Grandma got pregnant first, so she won the prize (so to speak), and Mom was born a few months after the wedding.

Grandpa Narciso died in a mining accident 1926, when my mother was six years old.

I did a Google search for “Narciso Vinci” the other night, and found his name listed on a website documenting the people buried in the Old Wilkeson Cemetery in Pierce County, Washington State. The website included this note:

Old Wilkeson City Cemetery, Wilkeson, Pierce County, Washington.

(There are two cemeteries at this location. The old Cemetery was

overgrown and all but forgotten; the data is from the old Cemetery only)

Submitted By: Ryan William Wagner as part of his Eagle Scout Project

which included cleaning the headstones and clearing the overgrowth.)

Good for Eagle Scout Ryan William Wagner, for cleaning off my grandfather’s grave and recording his name.

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Goldendale, Washington

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 Goldendale is a town in Washington state, in Klickitat County not far north of the Columbia River. The sign at the city limits used to read like this (maybe it still does):

 

 

 

WELCOME TO GOLDENDALE

THE GOLDEN GATE

TO THE EVERGREEN STATE

 

 

When we made our yearly visits to my my paternal grandmother, back in the 1960s and 1970s, Goldendale was the last real town we passed through before we arrived at her house. We usually stopped for a burger. I wish I could remember the name of the burger place, because it was excellent.

 

 

Partner and I have passed through Goldendale a few times over the past fifteen years. It’s bigger than I remember, but I see from Wikipedia that it has less than four thousand residents, so it’s still pretty small.

 

 

In June 1918, astronomers William Campbell and Heber Curtis came to Goldendale to view a solar eclipse. This was an especially important eclipse, because Einstein’s theories predicted that the light of stars close to the sun would be deflected slightly, and everyone wanted to see whether or not it was true.

 

 

The Goldendale data (which wasn’t terrific) did not confirm Einstein’s theories. Luckily, other viewings over the next few years confirmed that Einstein was correct.

 

 

But Goldendale turns out to be a great place to have an observatory. The air is clear, and the weather is mostly cloudless. There’s a permanent observatory there now, in its own state park.

 

 

And here’s the thing: my father (who was six years old at the time) was only a few miles away from Campbell and Curtis, on his parents’ ranch, as Campbell and Curtis performed their observations.

 

 

The world is a very small place after all.

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Jewish after all!

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23andMe.com, the genome-reading company, let me know recently that one-tenth of one percent of my DNA was (maybe) of Ashkenazi Jewish origin.

 

 

Aha! I knew it!

 

 

I looked through my list of “relatives” (people with snippets of the same DNA) on 23andMe.com, found a few who self-identified as Jewish, and wrote to them to see if they’d be willing to share DNA results. One, a guy my age in upstate New York, wrote back; he was skeptical, but promised me that he’d check.

 

 

Well, guess what? He and I share a snippet of DNA. And the same snippet of DNA is shared by almost all of his relations.

 

 

Aha! Aha!

 

 

What this means is that some ancestor of mine, at some point many generations ago, was Jewish.

 

 

I’m delighted. I know this is silly, but I can’t help it.

 

 

I grew up in a rural area of the Pacific Northwest. In my (very large) high school, in the early 1970s, there were exactly two Jewish students. (I remember a note in the school paper in my high-school years: “Merry Christmas to everyone, and Happy Hanukkah to Isaac and Rebekah Birnbaum.”)

 

 

As a result, I knew next to nothing of Judaism, until I read Leo Rosten’s “The Joys of Yiddish” in high school. I discovered a whole world that lay beyond the rural Pacific Northwest: urban, civilized, European, witty.

 

 

I kept reading: Rosten’s “Hyman Kaplan” stories, and Harry Golden’s essays from North Carolina, and everything Isaac Asimov ever wrote, including his Bible-commentary books.

 

 

I loved it all. I didn’t quite understand all of it, but I loved the feeling of it, and I wanted to share it.

 

 

Then, one evening, while helping my mother do the dishes (she washed, I dried), I said, “I wish I were Jewish.”

 

 

And, good Polish/Italian Catholic/nonobservant girl that she was, she blew her top at me.

 

 

Well, of course it was a stupid thing for me to say; you can’t be something that you’re not.

 

 

But it was interesting that my mother was really that furious at me. (The Poles, you know, are famous anti-Semites. Go read Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” for more information on this topic.)

 

 

And now – what do you know? I’m one-tenth of one percent Jewish after all!

 

 

And (assuming it came through my eastern European ancestry) so was my anti-Semitic mother!

 

 

To the world at large: Shabbat shalom!

 

 

And maybe also mazel tov!

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Wanda

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I discovered lately that a co-worker’s middle name is Wanda. “It was my Polish grandmother’s name,” she said. “I told my mother: why did you name me Kathleen Wanda? And she said: just be glad I didn’t name you Wanda Kathleen.”

 

 

I had an aunt Wanda. She was full-blooded Polish. My grandmother was Polish, and her first husband was Polish, so her first three children (my half-aunts and half-uncle) were full-blooded Polish too: Maryann, Wanda, and Tony.

 

 

Great-aunt Wanda I met only once or twice. She was a handsome Polish woman who lived in northern California, and she has many descendants in the current generation.

 

 

Does anyone name his/her children Wanda these days? It’s an evocative name.

 

 

The only famous Wanda I can think of is Wanda Toscanini Horowitz. She was the temperamental daughter of the temperamental orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini, and she married the pianist Vladimir Horowitz.

 

 

Here is a brief YouTube video of Vladimir Horowitz playing a Rachmaninoff prelude. As the camera circles, you can see Wanda lounging on the couch, listening:

 

 

 

 

Who says Wanda isn’t a pretty name?

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