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.
A compilation of old-time Christmas gun ads dusts off a cobwebbed memory. I was in the seventh grade. “What do you want for Christmas?” my parents asked. I knew they knew and this was a dance of formalities. So I paused as if deliberating before answering. “A .22 rifle.” They said nothing, and I felt my father’s mind-probe stare. He didn’t like guns, and I managed to bargain down to a BB rifle, a defeat that thrilled me on Christmas morning. That afternoon, Dad took me to the city dump, site of an an informal gun range. As I began setting up tin cans and bottles, I recognized a classmate nearby. His Christmas gift was bigger. To be precise, he shouldered a .20-gauge shotgun that kaboomed every time my rifle pinged. He didn’t smirk, didn’t comment, didn’t acknowledge the obvious: we occupied two different strata — his manly, mine puerile. At school he said nothing, though we both knew the injury he could have inflicted. That may have been the best Christmas gift I ever received. Wherever you are, Karl, thank you.
October 30, 2011
Now this is old Florida: Daytona Beach, 1904. More than six decades later, Daytona occasionally beckoned me, especially during Spring Break, a rockin’ happening then but sedate compared to today’s debauched version. The Daytona Beach of my memory, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was overcrowded, the sands jammed with cars, and Highway A1A just beyond the dunes trampled with the schlocky glitz so oddly alluring to tourists. My high school friends and I were more drawn to the reserved and scenic New Smyrna Beach, where we ended up more weekends than not.
Who among the crowd pictured above (and much larger here) could have imagined what the seashore on which they stroll would become? Maybe I’m drawn to photographs like this because they so starkly illuminate the futures we can never behold.
Forty-one years after the fact, I’m still incensed that John Wayne won the best actor Oscar for his starring role in the ho-hum True Grit, despite Dustin Hoffman’s mesmerizing portrayal of Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy. But after watching the trailer for an upcoming Coen brothers remake of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges in the role that Wayne played, I might end up forgetting this cinematic injustice. But I’ll never forget the unlikely bond that Rizzo developed with Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight, who was also nominated for best actor. The loyalty and friendship — love, actually — between these down-and-out strangers remains palpable all these years later. As palpable as Rizzo’s unfulfilled yearning to feel the Florida sun on his upturned face.
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.
Florida urologist Jack Cassell doesn’t want to treat 69,438,983 Americans. “If you voted for Obama. . . seek urologic care elsewhere,” reads a sign outside Cassell’s office in Mount Dora, reported the Orlando Sentinel, a newspaper I helped edit for much of my adult life.
Think of how shunning Obama backers could spread. When I next visit Orlando to see family, will restaurants owned by Republican zealots refuse to serve me? But this is about something much larger. Cassell is expressing revulsion for 52% of those who voted because of our political views. The revulsion is so rabid that the doctor prefers not to talk to us, not to touch us, not to treat us. For a change, a racial minority isn’t facing discrimination but rather a racially diverse majority.
Let me be the first to coin a word for this practice of avoiding, at all costs, fellow citizens who disagree politically with Republicans: Cassellism. I can already see bumper stickers, such as Proud To Be A Cassellist! and I ♥ Cassell.
A Cassellist version of the modern Hippocratic Oath is also inevitable:
I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow beings McCain voters. . . May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling, and may I long experience the joy of healing those Republicans who seek my help.
Today is World Water Day, an event intended to draw attention to serious problems but for me evokes nostalgia. That’s what happens when a childhood is spent immersed in a Central Florida lake back when the water was clear and clean. Some days my brothers and I would swim so long that I imagined gills forming below our ears. We and our friends also spent much time in other waters, too: springs and swamps and ocean surf. With little effort, I can still feel the sensations, still smell the smells, of living in a world of tropical waters.
These photos from The Big Picture tell a larger story about world’s water. They’re worth lingering over. My humble offering below (click to enlarge) from a family vacation on the Oregon Coast last summer, makes me want to drift away on the next outgoing tide.
We had crowded into a building filled with tables filled with wine. As we — wife and another couple — snaked through lines of people and sampled the wares of artisanal vintners, rain began drumming on the roof like it does in Florida, not Oregon. The sound drowned out the chatter. Wind swept through open doors. Curtains of rain swirled sideways. Then came thunder, and people cheered. They cheered because thunder is rare in Portland and because enough wine makes violent storms a happy backdrop on an early spring Saturday. Read More
I can’t imagine a more poignant or tragic portrayal of classroom chaos than that depicted in the French film The Class. Fictional but shot documentary style, the story shows a teacher’s persistent but futile attempt to reach students mired in pubescent rebellion and complex culture clashes.
Throughout the film I kept thinking of my school days, serene and boring in comparison. But that was the 1960s in Central Florida, when classroom order and conformity resembled the symmetry and prevalence of orange groves. Everything has changed there, too. Read More
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
Last night during a concert of earnest and ethereal harmonies, I struggled to keep another sound at bay.
Pressed against the stage at the Crystal Ballroom, five feet from Fleet Foxes‘ lead singer Robin Pecknold and bathed in his melodic voice, I occasionally heard in my head not him but the quavering wail of a toothless derelict. Read More
Growing up on a lake in Florida in the 1960s, I got to know the family next door. It took awhile, maybe because a vacant lot studded with orange trees separated our houses. Three generations under the same roof, they mainly spoke Italian, making them exotic curiosities. Read More
