Monthly Archives: December 2015

Some years ago, I began writing an autobiography. Don’t worry, you’ll never have to read it.

I didn’t begin it with any thought of publication. I may have worked at a zoo and lived in a coal bin, but my life is not so interesting or important that anyone else should be forced to know about it.

It began with a deal with my two brothers: I’ll write my life if you’ll write yours.

I realized that I didn’t know the details of their lives. We’ve always been close enough that I’ve known the basic direction of their lives, but from the point I left for college 40 years ago, the details became fuzzy. And it is the details that add up to create a personality.

So, I tasked them to write down the major points of their lives so we might better know each other: who their girlfriends were, what jobs they had, what books were important to them.

In the process, I thought, we might also get a different point of view on the shared episodes of our lives in childhood. Perhaps what I thought of as roughhousing, my younger brothers might have thought of as terrorism. Perhaps an uncle I thought hilarious, they might have found tedious.

But writing it has been one of the most engrossing tasks I have ever set myself.

I realize now, too, that this task really began when I visited my aging parents and began asking them all those questions that too many people ask only after their parents are dead. I recorded their recollections on my laptop and wrote up a piece of oral history to send to my brothers. It included family trees for both sides of the family, memories my mother had of her childhood and that my father had of World War II in Europe.

It was a revelation: Relatives that had been vaporous ghosts in my own memory were brought back to life and their interrelationships made clear.

I came to know my parents much better and began to admire things in them that had been previously obscured by what I had taken to be their faults.

Perhaps, I reasoned, this same sort of thing could be undertaken amongst us brothers.

“Something like 20 pages,” I told them, “It shouldn’t be too hard.”

Neither of my brothers is a writer by trade, as I am. I didn’t want to make it too daunting for them.

But when I began writing my own version, I found that 20 pages was a mere sneeze.

I have now written about 250 pages and haven’t even gotten to the moment when I met my wife. The first 50 pages only get me through high school.

It turns out that writing one’s memoirs is an endless unfolding of memory. Each tiny recollection is a door that opens into rooms with more doors. And each of these doors open on yet more. A memory, it turns out, is only an iceberg’s tip. Perhaps you recall a family picnic, but as you write about it, you discover you remember the way your mother made a certain sandwich, which connects, more surely than any internet link, with the larger issues of her cooking and the part food played in our family dynamics.

We are each one of us a Proust waiting to unlock our own brains.

It is astonishing what is buried in the synapses, unused for decades, but still there for downloading.

The other lesson of writing an autobiography is to see the shape of one’s life unfold: What had seemed a jumble of unrelated episodes takes a narrative form and you discover that what you did as a 5-year-old flows with the certainty of a great river into what you do as a 50-year-old. It is all of a piece; the child is indeed father to the man.

It has been a while since I continued writing it: My brothers never took up the challenge. Now, one of them has died; I’ll never learn about his life. The other brother has more important things to do than write his autobiography. My version sits in my harddrive, worked over and rewritten several times, unread by anyone but me. The fervor for self-expression has died down like last week’s campfire.

One of the things that has dampened my enthusiasm is that as I’ve gotten to be an old man, I recognize how useless it is for anyone else to know about my life. It is one of the futilities of age that you recognize how much you have learned over six decades of life, and how little it helps the younger generation, who are feverishly intent on committing all the same mistakes you made, and are deaf to any guidance you may offer. This should be no surprise: I didn’t listen to my elders when I was young.

Perhaps one day, my granddaughters will want to read about their grandfather. I certainly wish I could have talked to mine, to find out more about the long line of people that led up to my entrance on the stage. But when I was young, I had better things to do. It wasn’t until after my grandfathers were both long dead that the wish came upon me to have asked them important questions only they could have answered.

So, for whom am I writing these notes? Clearly, for myself. One doesn’t start an autobiography for the benefit of readers, but for the benefit of oneself, to find and delineate the patterns found in the weave, to discover or create the plot that conveys meaning to the life lived. We have a sense of ourselves not merely through our five senses, but through the remembered narrative we have created of our transport through this single, unexpectedly short lifetime. Pulling the memories out of the doors behind doors behind doors of our synapses gives us the matter for this novel we are writing by getting up each morning.

So, my autobiography is unfinished; it may remain so. I learned what I needed by the doing — I sifted through the first 35 years of my life to find the turns and bends that led me to this now. The subsequent 33 years have taken their own shape through the living. The only person I would wish to share them with has no need of my notes: She lived those years with me.

I would, though, love to read her version of those years. Perhaps I will attempt to persuade her to write her autobiography. It would be enlightening to compare notes.

Falling into blue

December 22, 2015

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Condemned to repeat history

December 14, 2015

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At about noon on Sept. 16, 1920, a horse-drawn dray pulled up Wall Street in lower Manhattan and stopped in front of the J.P. Morgan Bank. Its driver got out and walked away. At 12:01 p.m. the 100 lbs. of dynamite inside blew up, blasting 500 lbs. of shrapnel — mainly iron window sash weights — into hundreds of people coming out of their offices for lunch. The explosion killed 38 and seriously wounded another 143. Stockbroker Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president reported being lifted clean off the floor by the blast, several buildings away. Pieces of the horse landed a hundred yards away.

“I saw the explosion, a column of smoke shoot up into the air and then saw people dropping all around me, some of them with their clothing afire,” said one witness.

The Toronto Star reported, “Great blotches of blood appeared on the white walls of several of Wall Street’s office buildings. Almost every pane of glass in the vicinity was shattered and beside a mantle of broken crystal the streets were covered with fragments of brick and stone blasted from the base walls of the skyscrapers.”

The newspaper thought it was too graphic to mention the butchered body parts of those blown to fragments.

It has been called the worst terrorist attack in the U.S. until the Oklahoma City bombing 75 years later.

But it was not the first. It was, if anything, the culmination of years of anarchist bombings that plagued the country from the turn of the century into the 1920s.

Beginning with the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo, N.Y. by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, and peaking during and just after World War I, there were dozens of bombings and assassinations by anarchists and followers of Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani. Among these were:

–The Los Angeles Times bombing, Oct. 1, 1910, which killed 21;

–The Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco, July 22, 1916, which killed 10 and injured 40;

–And in April 1919, some 36 bombs were sent to various politicians and businessmen;

–In June of the same year, Galleanists exploded eight pipe bombs in several cities.

The rash of bombings and assassinations and assassination attempts (many failed, and several anarchists were blown up by their own bombs) led to widespread fear and paranoia about immigrants and bombings. Cartoons of the day attest to the stereotyping of “mad bombers” as primarily Eastern European immigrants, often mistakenly typed as “bolsheviks.”

Laws were passed, immigrants were blamed en masse, there were many deportations. In February 1919, Galleanists distributed a flyer that said, “Deportation will not stop the storm from reaching these shores. The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire … We will dynamite you!”

What really happened, of course, is that the fervor of the bombers died down and the nation tended to forget about anarchists. After all, they had a new boogeyman: Communists. The Red Scare subsumed the anarchist scare and violence was meted out both by labor agitators on one side and police and military on the other. Strikes were squelched; many people died.

The fact is, terrorist violence — and its ensuing fear — comes in waves. There is a continuous drip of violent acts over the years, but if you draw a timeline, you will find clusters of terrorism in several wads.

We should not forget these isolated landmarks:

–Oct. 10, 1933: The first bomb on a commercial airplane killed seven people over Indiana;

–July 4, 1940: Two policemen killed by bomb at the New York World’s Fair;

–George Metesky, the “Mad Bomber” placed over 30 bombs in New York City from 1940 to 1956, in protest of high utility rates;

–March 1, 1954, Four Puerto Rican nationalists shoot and wound five members of the U.S. Congress at the Capitol building;

–Sept. 16, 1963: Members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four young girls.

Hate and self-righteousness are always with us. But we cannot overlook the clusters of events.

The anarchist wave in the early part of the 20th century finds its counterpart in the 1970s, when dozens of radical groups rationalized violence against their perceived enemies.

The Puerto Rican FALN launched 40 attacks in New York City during the decade; The Jewish Defense League was responsible for 27 attacks; anti-Castro groups were responsible for 16 attacks.

The list of groups engaged in terrorism — just in the U.S. — during that decade includes: The Black Liberation Army; The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord; The Jewish Defense League; the Ku Klux Klan; The Symbionese Liberation Army; The United Freedom Front; The Weather Underground. Bombings, deaths, police shoot-outs; claims and counter-claims; threats and rhetoric; fear and paranoia.

Around the rest of the world, the rise in Maoist groups, nationalist groups and subgroups, and anti-colonialist groups spread terror globally. There were bombings, shootings, assassinations and threats from the Irish Republican Army, the Front de Liberation du Quebec, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the Tamil Tigers, the Shining Path, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, the ASALA in Armenia, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, or “Basque Nationalist Freedom Party) in Spain, the Greek Revolutionary Organization, the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Red Army Faction) in West Germany; Unkhonto we Sizwe (MK, the militant wing of the African National Congress) in South Africa.

Ulrike Meinhof

According to the Global Terrorism Database, this worldwide terror surge peaked in 1979, with 1,019 attacks.

What happened to all of these groups? Some won their cause, others were suppressed, most just petered out as enthusiasm waned and by-and-large, the acts of violence didn’t have their intended results. Probably the greatest cause of their diminishment was sheer exhaustion and the growing up of their members: Most terrorists are young men, poisoned with testosterone; give them a few years and they settle down.

This is not to imply that terrorism ended. But the groups we feared in the 1970s changed. Terror attacks in the U.S. nearly disappeared. There were major attacks in Europe and Asia during the 1980, including the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

In the 1990s, things picked up again in the U.S., mostly through white-supremacy groups, anti-abortion groups and anti-government militias. This reached a climax on April 19, 1995 with the Oklahoma City Bombing, killing 168 people by right-wing terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

One man bridged the years between the violence of the 1970s and that of the ’90s: Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” who carried out attacks over 17 years, from 1978 to his capture in 1996.

But we shouldn’t forget the Centennial Olympic Park bombing by Eric Robert Rudolph in Atlanta in 1996, and a series of anti-abortion shooting sprees by James Kopp in 1998.

We have largely forgotten the militias that were such a concern in the 1990s, because the slate was wiped clean and a new title written at the head of the slate on Sept. 11, 2001. From that point on, our terrorists are all Muslims — of course, except that they are not. Most of the terrorist deaths in this country have continued to be by white supremacists and right-wing nutjobs. But it is the high-profile cases of Islamic terrorists that drive our current fear and paranoia.

Islam is not the problem, and we should, as one commentator insightfully wrote, recognize not the radicalization of Islam, but the Islamicization of radicalism: Radicalism has always shared the same characteristics: a sense of grievance (real or imagined), moral certainty, self-righteousness, lack of empathy, and an almost childish fascination with destruction (how few of the terror groups of the past have an actual agenda, other than the destruction of the status quo.)

I am not trying to downplay the seriousness of such attacks, but rather to place them in context: Acts like these are nothing new, and their most probably future is that they will die out on their own, like the anarchists and Weathermen before them. If we take the long view, and the rational view, we will outlast such groups.

But the second half of the historical equation is just as important to pay attention to: Fear and paranoia has led politicians to feed deeply at the trough. The Red Scares of the 1920s, Father Coughlin in the 1930s, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the Silent Majority of the 1970s — and the current xenophobia exploited by virtually all the Republican presidential candidates — are all of a piece. They use the fear-de-jour to seek power. The desire to stop Syrian refugees from entering the country is not different from the passage of the Sedition Act of 1918 and the subsequent “Palmer Raids” and deportations, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the “lists” that Sen. Joseph McCarthy threatened to make public in the 1950s, and the “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon in the 1970s. All play on a fear that is more imaginary than real.

And we see it again in the demagoguery not just of Donald Trump — who is more clown than threat — but in the piling on of Ted Cruz, Mario Rubio and others. The nation has many problems, including income disparity, racism, an epidemic of gun-deaths (far worse than those committed in the name of terrorism), climate change, corrupt Congressional reapportionment, educational slide, under-employment, financial institution crime, sectional factionalism, the loss of newspapers and the rise of Murdoch-inspired propaganda journalism — the list could go on. And I am not suggesting that terrorism shouldn’t be on the list, but rather that we need some sense of proportion.

Terrorism is not new. It has been around at least since the Sicarii Zealots of the 1st Century and the Hashshashin of the 11th century. We have outlasted all but the most recent, and I’m reasonably sure we will outlast them, too.

A sense of history can provide the calm and deliberation we need to address the current problems. But what we hear from the loudest and shrillest of the current crop of politicians, seeking to exploit and fan our fears, is simply ignorance.

George Santayana got it wrong when he said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The truth is that for those who cannot remember the past, every event is brand-spanking new; it is those who do remember history who are condemned to see it happen all over again.

Backstory — Part 5: Theory of Relativity

December 3, 2015

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PART FIVE: THEORY OF RELATIVITY

It was Thanksgiving and Stuart and Genevieve were fixing a big dinner.

Outside, it was a Maine November, dry and crisp but not yet cold. The fallen maple leaves textured the ground at the base of the trees. There was a mackerel sky.

Bernard was there with his wife. Stuart’s younger brother was there, too. Mitch came in from New Jersey with his new lady friend. Bernard’s two children had come, also. Both now grown and Liz had her own children. She came with her best friend, Dell. Jason came with his girlfriend. They all drove in from Allentown. Stuart’s father sat in the corner; he barely moved all day, taking in the scene — probably. It’s hard to know. Bernard and Ellen had picked him up on the way.

It was full house. Mia hadn’t shown up yet.

Bernard: “So, little brother, how’s life treating you?”

Mitch: “Just fine.”

In Stuart’s family, this counted as an extended conversation.

Liz: “Dell, can you take the brussels sprouts off the burner? I have to mix the Jell-O.”

Dell: “Which are the brussels sprouts? I’ve never had brussels sprouts.”

Pots were steaming, with rutabagas, potatoes, brussels sprouts and green beans. In the oven were the turkey and two pans of oyster stuffing. The gravy was yet to be made. That was Stuart’s job. He was the gravy man.

Mitch: “Hey, you’ve got Coltrane here.”

He was flipping through the CD collection.

Mitch: “A Love Supreme. Geez, what music.”

Stuart: “Put it on if you want.”

Thanksgiving was the only holiday Stuart enjoyed. The others seemed like obligations, but Thanksgiving seemed like a warm, humid, cozy indoors played against a cold, dry outdoors: You could feel it when you touched the window.

There was a brief discussion, as Bernie wanted to watch the game, but Mitch wanted to play Coltrane. They compromised and watched silent football with a jazz soundtrack.

Stuart: “Now that’s what I love about Thanksgiving.”

Meanwhile the grandkids were pinging and buzzing their Gameboys. The women gravitated to the kitchen. Mitch’s girl, Jerri, came in to help.

Jerri: “Pie!”

Liz: “Pumpkin”

Dell: “Cherry.”

In the living room, Mitch and Jason had taken to comparing political theory. Uncle Mitch was a Democrat; Jason was a Republican. It is one of the anomalies of history that as the millennium winds down, it should be the younger generation who turn conservative. It is as if time were out of joint.

Mitch: “Yeah? What do you know? You’re just a kid.”

Jason: “Well, I know Bush is going to trounce Gore.”

Mitch: “God help us. We’ll have gone from Reagan to Bonzo.”

Politics brings out the analytic elegance in people.

The doorbell rang and Stuart opened the door. Mia came from the bright blue sunny outdoors to the dark, warm inside, thick with the scent of turkey, dressing and nutmeg and cloves. With her came Michael. Yes, they were still together, 10 years later.

Mia: “Everyone, this is Michael.” Mia went around the room introducing everyone and they all shook hands.

Dinner was a feast; everyone ate till their bellies hurt. Conversation was warm, funny, by turns nostalgic.

To Mia, this was family, even if she wasn’t related by blood to any of them. She knew many of them well — Stuart and Genevieve might as well have been family; Bernie and Ellen; even Mitch, although she had never met Jerri. Others were more peripheral, but Mia knew which was which, for the most part. It was hard, though, to tell the twins apart at that age.

With the meal packed solidly in their collective guts, like sausages stuffed into their casings, the evening wore on. The women put up the leftovers. Stuart told them to leave the pots and dishes; he would get them in the morning. The men sat on the sofa; Mitch’s head was cocked back and a slow stertorous snore echoed in his gullet. Stuart began to talk about ancient Egypt.

“Not now,” Genevieve said, heading him off. It was not bossy, but teasing. He stopped.

After dessert and coffee, when the evening wore down, Bernie and family, along with dear old dad, left for the motel. A pile of others found a place in the guest room or on the sofa, wrapped in a down comforter.

Mia and Stuart stayed up late.

“Gen is great,” she said. “But you realize, don’t you, that you have been with her for more than a decade. You are breaking precedent.”

“Well, yes. But I have gotten old. It isn’t as easy to wander aimlessly. And we get to travel a lot, as she gets gigs all over. Spent most of the summer up in Hancock for the Monteux Festival. She got to play the Shostakovich sonata. It was great.”

“She’s a steady presence,” Mia said. “I can’t tell whether Michael is a steady presence for me, or if I’m the steady presence for him.”

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe not.”

They stood over the kitchen sink, piled with dishes. Stuart had his arms up to the elbows in suds.

“Let me tell you about my first official marriage. Before I married your mother.

“I was unfaithful to my first ex-wife before we were married. I loved Ruth, although she drove me nuts. She was always worried about things like window curtains and insurance. She wanted kids; I wanted to continue being able to sleep late for the next 18 years and I knew that her plan would have made that impossible.

“But Ruth was really a great woman. She was beautiful. Had great eyes. And she was smart as hell. Maybe a little skinny. But there was this conventional side to her. In my lovesickness for Ruth, I pretended I didn’t see that, or at least pretended that it didn’t matter. She insisted we wait till marriage. I was so smitten, I didn’t even question that.

“Oh, but there was Helen. This was a different Helen. She wrote poetry. It wasn’t bad poetry, considering we were all just sophomores in college. Helen was not a beginner at love. In fact, she was the ‘college widow,’ as Groucho Marx might call it. A completely free spirit. I fell hard; Helen admitted me to the inner circle — so’s to speak — inner circle: I’ve never heard it called that before — as one of many admirers.

“You should have seen me. I panted like a puppydog, waiting to be patted on the head. Helen and I hitchhiked one week to the coast and spent the nights sleeping in the sand. We made love in the dunes, in full sight of anyone. A fisherman in a passing boat waved to us.

“We left love stains all over campus. Our favorite was a practice room in the music building, and boy, we got lots of practice.”

“Yes, I remember you told me about the Organ Room on campus.”

“At night, it was unlocked for some reason, and we snuck in.

“Oh, but there was Ruth. And I loved Ruth, too. I didn’t know what I wanted. Sensible Ruth or crazy, passionate Helen? Should I go with the sensible choice or should I go with my gonads? Thrill or stability?

“I knew I was not terribly stable, that I was not really a fully mature human being, that I was flamboyant in my irresponsibility, and so I finally decided that I needed Ruth for balance. I did the sensible thing; we got married. I learned my lesson: Never do the sensible thing again.

“I made life miserable for her and without trying, she made it miserable for me. Years later, friends told me they knew it wouldn’t last and I wanted to slap them — Why didn’t you say anything then? But I also knew it wouldn’t have made any difference if they did.”

Mia looked confused.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Isn’t this what you’re doing right now, with Gen? Aren’t you making the ‘sensible’ choice all over again?”

“Of course,” Stuart admitted. “Of course, I’m doing the same thing all over again. I’m a lot older now, so it’s different.”

“Different?”

“Well, maybe it’s not different. As you get older it isn’t so much you get wiser in the sense that you make better choices, but that you get wiser in that you recognize the fact that you’re never going to get any smarter and you’ll always do the same stupid thing.”

“That’s wisdom?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“That’s depressing.”

“No, not really. It’s liberating. That’s the thing about getting older. All the stuff that used to drive you nuts, you let go of. It no longer matters.”

“So, it’s OK to be comfortable in a relationship? Without fireworks?”

“Violas seldom break out in fireworks,” he said. “But I’m happy.”

“But you said it was a mistake.”

“Did I?”

I’m coming out of my duck blind for the last time. I just turned 40; I got tenure. I published a book last year — a new translation — or retelling, really — of Ovid for children. I’ve been living with Michael for about as long as Stuart has lived with Genevieve. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to compare my life with his, but there is no one I’ve known as long or as closely as I’ve known Stuart. He is the only touchstone I have.

This has been a strangely skewed memoir — I have left out so much: my career at the university, several relationships that went nowhere, the whole world of Greek and Roman letters that are so central to my life — because I wanted to focus on this single aspect of my life that has been so muddled. Family. What is it, why is it, does it need to be?

When my dad died, it hit me in a way I didn’t foresee. I always thought of Stuart as my father; he’s the one who was there when I was a little girl, and he has remained there through my life in a way Dan never did. Yet, I felt so odd when I went to visit Dan in the hospital. I saw something in him — gesture, voice — that caught me unawares: They were mine, too. Dan had tried to tell me about it, but I didn’t have ears to hear, or to pay attention. He was dying, after all. Other things seemed more important.

It was the day after that Thanksgiving, when I talked with Stuart’s brother, Bernie, that he brought it all together for me. Stuart and Ellen went to the kitchen to finish cleaning up what we hadn’t washed the night before, and Gen was in her study practicing. The dulcet tones of the viola filled the house like dinner had the night before. Bernie and I sat in the front room and talked.

“What do you think about family? Why is it important? Stuart always says his friends are his family — except for you, he says. You are more friend than family, he says.”

Bernie had bad knees, and sat on the sofa. His hair was mostly gone and his mouth had settled, the way they do as you get older: Younger mouths show off the upper teeth; aged mouths show the lowers.

“I take your point,” he said. “Families can be quite a burden. We have to take care of dear old dad, for instance. He’s barely there anymore. But I have the example of my wife.

“You’ve been with her a long time.”

“Thirty years …”

“Can’t fathom that. Mind you, Ellen’s great. You hit the lottery, as it were.”

“Ellen has a take on family I’d never really considered,” he said. “Family is something different for her. For her, it is where she came from.”

“You mean, like genealogy?”

“Sort of, but she isn’t so much into the family tree as such, or into whether or not she has a coat-of-arms, but rather, that she is made up of the hand-me-downs, genetically, of the ancestors, the piling up of character — of meaning — that has concentrated in her. Her family is her roots, deep in the ground, and she is connected to them as literally as the tree is to the root ball, all of a piece.

“She sees her hair in her grandmother’s hair, her jawline in her father’s, her love of nature — and, I might add, her stubbornness — in her grandfather. She grew up with her great-grandmother in the house, who was a Civil-War widow, and sees history not in paragraphs on a page in a book, but in her wrinkly skin. She wants to know how her great grandfather came to live in North Carolina, whether he is Scots-Irish, why they eat collards or sing certain hymns as opposed to others. Obviously, this is not all genetic. A good deal is cultural, but I don’t think Ellen makes that much distinction: It is all roots, all the long line of ancestors, which, for her, go back — and I’m not kidding — to Adam and Eve, or whoever you want to pick as the ur-progenitors. Her interest in cave men is part of the same thing. She calls it ‘the long man,’ the person drawn from one generation to the next the same way a plant goes to flower, a flower to seed, a seed to seedling, to plant, to flower, to seed and so on in a continuous recreation of the same life — the same DNA shuffled around — of which she is merely the latest flowering. Or the antepenultimate: She has now sprouted a daughter, and that daughter twin granddaughters. So now Ellen can see she isn’t the end of a long line of ancestry, but only one link in a continuity.

“Thus, family for her isn’t simply the people who she shares Thanksgiving dinner with, as if they were all discrete entities, but rather as if they were the acorns hanging on the same oak tree, in a sense, a single person with multiple incarnations. At Thanksgiving, even if she is alone, she is having dinner with all of them.”

“Well, that is Ellen, through and through, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and it has made me think differently about family. I share your sense of relatives as something you’d rather not have to spend time with. I have chosen my own ‘family’ of friends, who mean a great deal to me. But I also have come to see the ‘mystic bonds’ of family — again, not as a question of whether I want to spend time with them. I don’t, really. But rather as a continuation of a process.

“Looked at another way, I am a bit of my parents planted in the future to grow, and to plant my children there in the future that extends beyond my harvesting.

“I had the oddest experience a few years ago. Did I ever tell you about it? You know, before Ellen, I was married and divorced. We had a son. When we split up, she took our son and I didn’t see him for something like 30 years.”

“I didn’t know.”

Mia was surprised. Bernie always seemed so rock solid. How could he have not seen his son for so long?

“I was young and a prat,” he explained. “So I moved on without much thought of it. Most men are prats when they are young; I was no exception.

“But a few years ago, I got a phone call and on the other end a voice said, “Are you my father?” It was my son. I had not seen or had any contact with him for 30 years.

“Well, Ellen and I went to Austin, Texas, where he was living and we met him and the shock was palpable: He looked exactly like I did when I was his age. Not just in physiognomy, but he wore the same kind of thick-rimmed glasses, the same plaid shirts, the same long hair I had back then. It was uncanny. He was living with a woman who came from the same county in North Carolina that Ellen came from. His house was a mess of books and CDs and DVDs. He worked, at the time, in a used bookstore and was in charge of the classics section and the poetry section. His favorite literature was the classics. The resemblance was uncanny.

“I had always assumed that in the ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ controversy, that nurture was by far the more important. We were raised at a time when we thought, ‘It’s all cultural.’ But here was evidence in front of me that perhaps it wasn’t all cultural. Perhaps DNA ruled not only the shape of our noses, but the preference we might have for Manhattan or New England clam chowder.

“The real clincher came when we walked through his office at the back of his house and there, on the top of a bookshelf, he had a world globe with the ball taken off, turned upside down with Antarctica now at the top, and replaced. I laughed. Back home, on top of my bookshelf in my office was a world globe that I had reversed to put Antarctica on the top. It was almost scary. How many people have done that with their globes? What are the chances that father and son, with no interaction for three decades, would each do the same peculiar thing?”

“So, you’re saying then, that as opposed to the question of whether you choose family or friends, that the question is basically irrelevant: That family is who you are, that ancestry defines your nature and you have family to thank or blame for it.”

“I remember having this discussion many years ago with a colleague. We had both grown up in New Jersey in the 1950s and ‘60s. We shared a good deal of nurture and could understand many of the same cultural references. But he was from an Italian family and I was from a Norwegian family. Despite how much we shared, he had a preference for Fellini films and I had a preference for Bergman.

“Not that I couldn’t appreciate Fellini — I do — but that deep in my bones, I knew the Bergman world; it was my interior world. While the Fellini was tremendous, but exterior to me. There is something in my genes that responds in a family way to the world of Bergman that Fellini doesn’t hit. But it was the reverse for my colleague. Italian genes felt at home in Fellini.

“In the old days, I would have chalked it all up to culture: He grew up in an Italian family and so the folk ways would have felt familiar. But now, I think — it’s only tentative, of course — but I think perhaps it may be something genetic. This may be the collective unconscious that Jung wrote about. The pile of chromosomal tendencies, tastes, judgments, behaviors, that have been reinforced over the generations by the distillation and concentration of DNA.

“I’m sure that upbringing and culture plays a part, no doubt, but I now think that there may be something inherent, that if I had been adopted by an Italian family, I would still feel more at home in Bergman. Not provable in my case, perhaps, but I think plausible.”

“So, I think you are saying, that you are inevitable in terms of family as you are in terms of history, that you may not like the times in which you are born, but you simply have no choice in the matter, and that all those relatives who bore you on holidays are just the titrations of chromosomes and you are thus embedded in your family like raisins in a muffin. No choice. Just is.”

“Yes.”

“Still don’t want them over for dinner.”

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Monthly Archives: December 2015

Looking back, looking ahead

Falling into blue

Condemned to repeat history

Backstory — Part 5: Theory of Relativity