When we were kids, my brothers and I spit a lot. Our spitting styles varied in volume, range, and sound but had the same goal: create tough-guy facades. In those days of grappling with budding masculinity, I could not have foreseen that the spit I sent flying so often would mean so much now. Saliva of all things has opened a crack in the towering black wall that hid my very distant past, revealing a path to nameless, faceless ancestors.
The crack is my DNA, identified and analyzed via spit samples I sent to the company 23andMe. Among other things, 23andMe pinpointed the distinct genetic threads of my parents that trace back to two radically different times, places, and cultures. Some 10,000 years ago, as sea levels rose dramatically as the Ice Age ended, the North Sea swallowed the likely home of my father’s ancestors, a vanished place sometimes called the Stone-Age Atlantis. Doggerland was sandwiched between modern-day Denmark, The Netherlands, and United Kingdom, and was a place of natural bounty that National Geographic has visualized. My mother’s ancestors, the reviled and persecuted Roma people, often called gypsies — fled Eastern Europe for Portugal around the 15th century. They arrived in Europe from India more than 1,000 years ago. My mother’s genetic subgroup is among the smallest so far identified, and my father’s is the most prevalent in Europe today.
Armed with this information, I find myself wondering how these backgrounds influenced my parents, who had no inkling of their deepest roots. It’s difficult not to ascribe characteristics to them based on what little is known about their ancestors. My father loved the water so much that he made sure his sons were raised on the shore of a Florida lake. We visited the ocean often as well. With all her qualities my mother had a fiery, mercurial temperament and other traits that one might associate with the stereotypical image of gypsies. Have two people so different ever married?
The genetic path I explore through them stretches far back, past darkness. Much searching remains. The path also leads in the other direction, to me, and forward beyond the horizon.
January 25, 2012
Thankfully no one can see our dreams. In these impenetrable realms we have no choice but to watch bizarre and disjointed narratives starring ourselves in roles not of our choosing. Like everyone I suppose, I want to attach meaning to my dreams. But aren’t they random shards of memory reassembled into stories that never were and never meant to be?
Then again such thinking keeps me from enjoying, even reveling in, reunions with loved ones and friends, some dead for decades. Take last night’s encounter with high school buddies: two with whom I still talk, one who died from injuries in a college accident — his paralyzed legs withered but his smile back, and inevitably the girl who exited the dream with too much unsaid. If asked to write the plot’s highlights, I would deliver an empty page. Only the actors go unforgotten.
Maybe like all others the dream was merely the brain clearing its cache and rebooting for the next day, an automatic mental house cleaning. I choose to think last night’s dream was more. Upon waking a feeling lingered for a few moments then slipped away. Putting it to words now doesn’t bring back the feeling but captures why it felt so good: unburdened by the weight of so many years, we were together again.
November 12, 2011
For decades a thought arrived often and too pushy to ignore: I had a purpose in life not of my choosing. Without warning I would have an instant to save a stranger’s life. The chance was destiny. Imagined scenarios would flash past, chief among them rescuing a drowning child. Maybe the idea emerged from a childhood immersed in water and lost in the fictional worlds of Tarzan, Tom Swift, and The Hardy Boys.
In adulthood this destiny became an unplayed ace-in-the-hole to erase disappointments and atone for mistakes. Until this week the idea had vanished, a victim of age perhaps. But the shocking news at Penn State left me wondering whether nothing has changed, and I need to be ready. I don’t want to fail like assistant football coach Mike McQueary, who stumbled upon the rape of a prepubescent boy in the locker room showers in 2002. He has been vilified for not stopping the alleged rapist, the team’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky. Instead McQueary testified that he hurried away and contacted his father, who advised him to inform head coach Joe Paterno. McQueary did so but the police were never told, and Sandusky went on to sexually abuse other boys for as many as seven years, according to a grand jury report.
I’ve tried to imagine McQueary, a former Penn State quarterback, looking back at that horrifying moment and reacting as he did. Has a day or even an hour passed in which he hasn’t agonized over a mistake that led to so much suffering? What McQueary failed to do brands him forever and blots out qualities that earned him admiration from players he has coached. For better or worse, we’re all like McQueary was just before he saw a terrible crime in progress, candidates awaiting a test, a test that will change everything.
November 7, 2011
Leave it to Steve Jobs to depart this world with words of wonder. In another context his last utterance would have been overused slang, a reflexive expression lacking meaning. Oh wow. Not so with Jobs as he slipped slowly toward death. Immediately after gazing at his family and then staring past them, he said: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.
His sister, novelist Mona Simpson, related the final words in her moving eulogy, published in the New York Times. Simpson’s use of all caps indicates that Jobs spoke with emphasis and even enthusiasm. She offered no clue about inflection or tone. It’s natural to assume that Jobs, guru of technological artistry and paragon of steroidal perfectionism, was describing with joyful awe what awaits beyond the veil. Mere words might have been his greatest creation of all, delivered without marketing fanfare and free to all. Was the Triple Wow a reassuring wink about the answer to The Big Unanswered Question? Or was Jobs elated not by what he saw ahead but endorphins secreted as people journey toward death, chemically easing their passage? We’ll each know soon enough. In the meantime, let’s go with the wink.
November 6, 2011
Two recent stories of love and death feel connected. This is absurd considering that 1,500 years and 5,000 miles separate them. But why let facts get in the way of a feeling, a yearning? Last month an Iowa couple married for 72 years died an hour apart while holding hands. The wife died first but the hospital heart-rate monitor kept showing she had a pulse. The equipment was detecting her husband’s heart through their clasped hands. Then came news last week of an archeological find in Italy: two skeletons buried in the 5th or 6th centuries while holding hands. How can there be a connection beyond hands held and the bond of enduring love they signify?
The stories reminded me of a column, “Einstein’s God” that suggests the possibility of something I want to believe: the two couples are one in the same. When Albert Einstein learned of the death of a physicist friend, he wrote to the friend’s family:
He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn illusion.â€
The serendipity of discovery on the web is old news, though it remains a hallmark. I was reminded of this recently when, as a longtime subscriber to Classmates.com, I received an email about the site getting a new look and name, Memory Lane. I clicked the link and immediately saw links to yearbooks from my alma matter, Winter Park High School (behold the power of cookies!). One featured my younger brother David’s class, 1970, the first to graduate from what back then we called the new school.
Surely I browsed through David’s yearbook around that time, though I was mostly away at college. But I don’t remember and probably wasn’t that intrigued. Flipping through the pages online so many decades letter was mesmerizing — and bittersweet. Not only did I see him and my other brother Bill in all their youthful glory and geekiness but also two of David’s closest friends, long dead. They looked so alive, one beaming with a gorgeous classmate whom I lusted after, the other a gifted athlete, and later a sociology professor, clawing the air for more distance during a long-jump competition. Seeing them made me ponder the holes in my brother’s life that not even his precious family of wife and two sons can fill.
I guess Memory Lane is the “time machine” that the CEO of its parent company touts. Without my unexpected journey back, I wouldn’t have seen the photos, wouldn’t have remembered so much, wouldn’t have brushed up against the jagged edges of pain not my own.
Some photos haunt me. None more than this one. It was taken behind our house in Nashua, New Hampshire, circa August 1958, seven months before our family moved to Florida. My two brothers and I posed for our mother, and judging from our expressions, we hadn’t yet reached the stage of reflexive smart-ass resistance to any family formality.
Thanks to technology at the time, she had to shoot the image while holding the camera at her waist and looking down at the view finder. (This camera looks familiar to what she used in those years, familiar at least to a memory clouded from a half-century and more gone by.) Thus her shadowed figure also looks posed, the image of someone watching us rather than an amateur photographer guilty of a common composition error. With no outline of her hands holding the camera, it’s easy to imagine them clasped in front of her over a late summer dress, and her eyes cast not downward but fixed on her sons.
What prompted the photograph, the mood of the moment, and what was happening in our lives that day are questions whose answers — likely inconsequential — are gone forever. I’m certain that our mother never pictured me staring at the photo so many decades later, enthralled not with our youth or our brotherhood or the memories her snapshot awakens. What haunts me now is the accidental but enduring vestige she bequeathed. Not merely a shadow persisting on faded film long after her death but a presence hovering over us still, a presence always there, no matter the location, no matter the light.
A sudden medical problem nearly a decade ago made me afraid I was going to die on the spot. Inside a Costco of all places and near a woman cooking meat samples. Croaking at Costco wasn’t my idea of death with dignity, especially with shoppers rushing past to score the woman’s free food. They looked as if a corpse sprawled in the aisle wouldn’t deter them. Luckily the symptoms faded, and I finished my shopping trip.
Today, strolling through a nursery that supplies plants for my small but lush goldfish pond, I thought again of death. If everything ended now, this would be a fine and fitting place. A brief item in the newspaper would read: “Police said nursery workers at Hughes Water Gardens found him in a greenhouse, floating face down among giant tropical lilies. When they turned him over, he was smiling.”
Who wouldn’t prefer a last breath scented with the earthy smell of water alive with greenery rather than that of sizzling fat at Costco? Or see as a last sight the veined symmetry of Victoria lily pads rather than the meat cooker’s inadequate hairnet? Then again, no one gets to choose.
“It’s his time.” A doctor said this twenty-three days ago. He was speaking to my father’s wife and one of my two brothers. Down the hall in the emergency room, Dad was slipping away.
Gazing into still waters aglow with exotic plants and flowers, I wanted to see a reflection of his face, not mine. I wanted to go back fifty years, back to our lake, my brothers and I kids again, taking turns launching from Dad’s slippery shoulders. I wanted to see him looking skyward, squinting into the sun to follow my arc, the rise and fall that he began. But I felt only a memory. It was his skin that I remembered.
Regardless of your opinion of Ted Kennedy, this eulogy by his oldest son is something you won’t soon forget. I heard it today, on my father’s 81st birthday, while driving home from Seattle. Hard to see the road through tears.
I saw my heart beating today from behind its walls. In darkened chambers easily mistaken for underground rooms, a handful of workers labored without pause. The workers are valve gates, flanges of flesh regulating blood flow with relentless precision. It’s easy to see why one day they might quit from fatigue or boredom. But one can hope they’re in quest of a gold medal for length of service.
The last European survivor of World War I has died at age 111. Harry Patch’s late-life interviews are cautionary. Reading this story, I’m struck by a glaring hole: unmentioned is why nations sent millions to be slaughtered. A close friend of Patch said the veteran stressed two messages: “Remember with gratitude and respect those who served on all sides, (and) settle disputes by discussion, not war.”
I’m a big fan of a guy’s blog. He’s a storyteller, and a damn good one. Even if he wasn’t, he’d win my award for best blog name: And I Am Not Lying.
Jeff Simmermon hasn’t posted much lately, and I just found out why: he apparently has testicular cancer.
His account of learning about the tumor and what’s ahead is entertaining yet poignant, like his other writing. The piece also conveys an attitude worth emulating when confronted with a serious medical problem.
The older I get the more I wonder how I’ll handle what’s likely inevitable.
In February on a rare sunny day, I helped friends dig up and move a Japanese laceleaf maple from their backyard to their front. No chance the tree was going to survive the unavoidable mugging at our hands. Read More
