Well Documented – Eventually

Facebook continues to be a brain sucker. I try to sit in a coffee shop and I literally cannot remember what I was going to write here, even though it was so important to me this morning that I brought my journal and computer to work and then stopped at a coffee shop afterward with every intention of writing it. Now, media in all its glorious forms have robbed me of the memory of what was, until very recently, an urgent and pressing thought to capture.

What have I been doing with myself? I have acquired several documents for my genealogical research. Some I downloaded from county websites, others I had to purchase. Siblings’ marriage licenses I downloaded. My father’s land purchase I paid a nominal fee for and downloaded. My mother’s marriage license to her first husband I purchased from Gonzales County – and I received a certified copy. (This is so exciting!) I’ve begun to log these items. At work I abstract documents like these, and I feel an irresistible urge to do it at home as well. So, I’ve used genealogy as a pretext to begin collecting documents, so that I, too, can have fun with them.

I went through a similar phase at a very young age. I worked at HEB and I desperately wanted to work in bookkeeping. And, I don’t use the word “Desperately” lightly here. So many things at that time of my life were so very important. I was so very in love with Michael. (Being gay in the 80’s was an exercise in self-torture.) And, I wanted so very badly to work in bookkeeping and make all of those numbers line up and balance. I even dreamed, while sleeping, about using an adding machine. There is little in this world quite as satisfying as an 11 X 17 sheet of tiny numbers that balances to zero. I felt so good. Accomplished.

Accounting never called to me that way; very little did. My entire existence was a large vacuum of need for approval. I wanted so badly for my bosses to be proud o me. I longed for it with tears in my eyes. I don’t know why I never sought this approval at college. I did attend for a while, but I didn’t finish. I didn’t have the same drive, sadly. A logical person would have put their energy into something that would offer better returns later in life, though I do have to admit that the skills I developed in the bookkeeping office at HEB all led, in one way or another, to almost every job I’ve had since.

I’m reading a book called Word by Word by Kory Stamper. She was an editor at Merriam Webster Dictionary and I first fell in love with her when she made her infamous “Plural of Octopus” video for their Ask the Editor series. Reading her book reminded me of this passion I’ve been talking about, as she described discovering Medieval Icelandic family sagas and Medieval Studies in general. And as she described her love for the English Language. She writes about seeing an Old English word and noticing that it had a similarity to modern English, but that others did not, about chasing down these words across languages and continents – learning from whence they came how they developed to the spelling and pronunciation used currently. She writes about the restless need that drove her to learn these things. The way she describes her studies, her interview to work at Merriam Webster – I can so relate. The difference being that she has a successful career to show for it.

I look back at that time of my life – late teens and 20’s. My quest to learn Spanish was no less intense than the bookkeeping deal. I must have irritated friends to death by demanding that they tell me what was being said in every Spanish song I heard. Songs are a good way to learn Spanish. Repetition, baby.

Come to think of it, I got on a lot of people’s nerves. For a lot of things. Being passionate leaves you vulnerable, especially if you don’t develop a level of narcissism to allow you to block out others’ feelings, a character trait that I never managed to develop. A passionate person is considered a genius or an idiot, depending on the viewer.

Nowadays I pursue interests, but I don’t have that passion as much, which is almost just as well. It’s exhausting. Until, that is, something like historic documents comes along and I dream of a climate/humidity-controlled room in which to collect documents and ephemera – and to catalog them. Marriage licenses help establish parentage (typically). Birth and Death Certificates offer information about people, assuming that the information could be had at the time of the event. Property sale documents help establish where people were and give a good idea how serious they were about being in a certain area. There was a migration from Europe through the Carolinas and Alabama that left my family here in Texas as the wave carried people all the way west to California. I’m finding paperwork that can tie my family to this migration, and I can see how we moved from North Carolina to Alabama to Northern Texas. Some other things I’m finding – particularly about a specific relative from Mexico – are fascinating, but I need more documentation. The name is the same as my mother’s grandfather, but I need something that ties the Braulio Hernandez from the Chihuahua area during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th Century (Pancho Villa apparently loathed my great-grandfather) to the man who fathered my grandmother. Some of the stories don’t seem to line up perfectly and I really need proof that this historic figure is the same man as the one in my family tree.

I also love pamphlets from art fairs, business cards, magazines, personal letters, post cards… the only requirement is that it have a traceable connection to me. I have a journal where I keep business cards of my friends, and I write a little bit about how I know them and why I feel they are important enough for me to keep their cards. Some of the ephemera can serve to remind me of a life well-lived. And, as I said, genealogy offers an excellent reason to pursue this fascinating, albeit pointless hobby.

I need to learn to direct my heart to logical, useful things.

A Leaf Blowing in the Wind

As I was driving this afternoon I came across a Historical Marker – one that I must have passed many time before. It is for the town of Kimbro, TX, an unincorporated entity that was founded in 1870 by Swedish, Danish and German immigrants. There are a lot Swedish towns scattered across the fields around this area, though as far as I can tell not many of them actually exist any more, except for their small cemeteries. Kimbro has a City Limit sign on highway 1100. Manda, Carlson and Lund just have historical markers and roads named after them. New Sweden has a church and a somewhat larger cemetery, though no town in the way that people think of towns now – a geographic location with crossing streets and avenues. Here there are fields of corn and other crops, and the occasional house. I read that general stores and schools once existed, but they are no longer around. (One of the schools has its own historical marker.)

Maybe I'm still tired, but walking through the tiny Kimbro cemetery made me a little sad. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez observes that a new community has truly planted roots when it buries its first citizen and establishes a cemetery. I feel a little like a leaf blowing in the wind. Like I don't have a community of my own. I know that this could be perceived as a slap in the face to all of my family and friends, and I assure you all that it's not intended this way.

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Gravestone in the Kimbro Cemetery. Very faintly you can see the steeple of the New Sweden Evangelical Lutheran Church on the horizon.

I have lived in Elgin, TX off and on for over 10 years. This is my third time living here, as a matter of fact. I know people here; I have friends. However, the feeling remains that they are all Barry's friends, and mine by extension. When I walk through the town I resist the temptation to like it, though the houses and trees are very appealing to me. I resist the temptation to fall in love with the house I live in, though I love the wooden floors, the front yard and the front porch. I've left so many places and I don't feel that I have ever learned to belong anywhere. 

I think the geographical aspect is key here. Yes, I have a large family, but none of them live in Elgin with me. I could live in Boerne, where I graduated high school, but I don't know that this is the best thing for me at this point. I want to find a place to put down roots and call it Home. That requires action on my part, and I don't seem to be good at that particular skill. I am sitting in a coffee shop writing these words, because I couldn't think at home. From the time I first lived on my own (150 years ago), I've always avoided being home. Friends have commented on this all along. It's easier just to be somewhere else.

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New Sweden Evangelical Lutheran Church

Churches also hold a community together. I have struggled to find a church, and I have enjoyed being a member in several throughout the years. There are two problems: One is the fact that I'm gay and this tends to go against Christian theology. The other problem is me. I admit it. I am not good at getting up on Sunday mornings and going to church. I'm not any better at Saturday evenings. The Catholic church has been the most comforting for me. I love the ritual of Mass. The reading of the Psalms is particularly comforting and I've spent a lot of time reading the Liturgy of the Hours. But again, as soon as I commit to doing it, I fall off. (I am such a large part of my own problem it's amusing.) New Sweden has a beautiful church, and the sign promises that everybody is welcome. But, I'm not Swedish and I don't know these people and while I'm certain that I would be welcome there, how long could it be before I truly belonged? Would I ever? Could I? My track record isn't good.

So, where will I be buried when I die? Let's pretend that's not as morbid as it sounds. So many people are choosing to have their bodies cremated. My Aunt Roslyn was cremated when she passed, but none of us knows where the ashes are. Her husband said that he put them where she had requested, but hasn't told us where that is. It seems like a nice idea to have a place – a physical place that I could go to visit her and think about her. A grave, for instance. A grave is in a cemetery and a cemetery is part of a community and do I have a community? I mean, a town – a physical location with crossing streets and avenues, with people around that I belong to and who would claim me. Would people visit my grave? That's such a quaint, Old-World mentality – as foreign to me as the continent of Europe itself. It seems nice, though.

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Gravestone in the Kimbro Cemetery 

I sometimes feel that these words that I write are me – the only roots that I am capable of putting down, the only hope I have of being remembered. My published books will be my grave, their covers my gravestone. People will visit me by reading my words.

I am truly feeling like a leaf today – lost and blowing in the wind. Maybe that's just who I am, and maybe I should embrace, rather than fight it. The North Wind calls and, again, I must move on. Maybe I'm just low on iron, and all of this is just a physical reaction. Maybe I'm just tired. My desire to create something beautiful out of all of this is matched only by my desire to lay down for about an hour and let sleep carry me away in its loving arms. When I wake will this all be gone? Will sleep gently stroke my face as it hands me back to wakefulness, who promises a new world, a new beginning and outlook? Perhaps these emotions will have ebbed with the circadian tide? In which case, I am glad I took the time to write this, so that I can remember how I felt. Because this is a powerful feeling, and it bears remembering.

DNA Testing and Some Unsuspected Consequences

I read a fun story on the Washington Post website. It's about the unexpected surprise element in the growing field of DNA testing, an idea that has become more commonplace in the past few years. My mother and my half-brother have taken one. If the story-line in the article were a novel, it might almost be too convenient to be a believable plot. "Woman takes DNA test and discovers that she's half Jewish, not 100% Irish as she had thought, beginning an adventure that would span years, and people that she would not have otherwise met."

I wouldn't have expected their real-life reaction, though. I suppose it would have to do with the way we were raised, but I don't think that a surprise in a DNA test would unnerve me in the slightest. Granted, this comes from a person who knows next to nothing about his ancestry's heritage. The person in the story was Irish, through and through, so I can see how having that fact ripped away from her could cause an existential crisis. (The same half-brother told me once that he was eleven years old when he discovered he was Hispanic, even though his last name is Spanish and he lived in Mexico for three years. That did, indeed, cause an existential crisis for him.) 

Also, having five half-brothers and sisters means mixing it up with people I'm not biologically related to is pretty much a way of life for me. They have a half-brother on their father's side, who has a half-sister on his mother's side, so our family Christmas parties are always fun. For the past 20 years or so, there have always been at least three children under the age of three toddling around, which leads to the game of sitting with my sister and asking, "Are we related to that one?"

My father passed away recently, so I wouldn't be able to talk to him about anything we discovered. Again, I don't know how much the DNA aspect would matter to him. A cousin of mine did some genealogical research a few years ago and it was fun to find relatives and ancestors that I hadn't known before. Even Dad was pretty excited about that. (I also learned that the name 'James' being given to everybody in our family [including myself] is not a new trend – it seems to go back to the days of the Civil War.) But, if we found out that one of them wasn't biologically related to us, it wouldn't have much of an impact. Why would it? We didn't know about them to begin with. I never knew any of my grandparents so I don't have a personal stake in a genetic relationship. My maternal grandmother's family came from Mexico, but that is also of vague/mixed heritage. 

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Eye color in my family is all over the spectrum, except I haven't seen purple yet. Still waiting.

I was happy to see that, while birth certificates had a part in the story, their integrity was not questionable. Very nice to know that our collection, keeping and indexing of vital records has proven efficient and useful. They even played a minor role in the solution. 

All in all, I think that my family's experiments with DNA testing has been one of discovery. Not having preconceived notions about our heritage helps a bit. I haven't taken a test yet, myself, but I do plan to do it soon. (I have to research which one would be best.) It's not likely that any of us would find that we had a different father than we expected – we all look too much like our fathers and each other. There remains the possibility that one of my parents' siblings had a father from an extra-marital affair, or we might find an adoption that we hadn't previously known about. Considering everything we've been through, though, I don't think even that is likely to bother us much at this point. Maybe some of my siblings or cousins would be upset, but from where I sit it would just be more intrigue in the family. 

The Christmas Sculpture

It's nearly Christmas. My younger brother, my older sister and I have had an online conversation going on for a couple of years now. In it we were talking recently about Christmas and family and how hectic and overwhelming the whole thing can be. (I think we all save quite a bit of money on therapists by talking with each other this way.) Naturally, we thought about our childhood, because Christmas is 90% about children, childhood and memories. It's easy to think about a simpler time, but the biggest difference between now and then is the fact that we were children then and we are now adults with the attendant responsibilities that we didn't comprehend before. Of eight siblings, the three of us were the only ones left living in our mother's home. There is an age gap between us for one thing. Also, the first five have a different father with whom some of them were living at that time, and some had already moved out to begin their own lives. So, it was just the three of us for a quite few years with our mother and father. And, as in so many stories of the simpler times, we were very, very poor.

One year our father told us that there wasn't enough money for a Christmas tree, and judging from the way he was talking it seemed that we might skip Christmas altogether. I remember listening to him talk – much the way in old Charlie Brown movies adults speech is represented by a "Whah-WHAH-whaaaaaah". My father had a way of lecturing that tended to be rather long-winded and the tiniest bit imperious, as if he were explaining something to a bunch of hammerheads who had been arguing with him for an hour, when actually we had yet to say a word. The gist of it was that Christmas is about materialism anyway, and there wasn't extra money, so we were going to have to do without a Christmas tree this year. We didn't dare ask about presents. What will be will be; there wasn't much we could do about it anyway, and asking would only make him angry. (In his defence, this can't have been an easy conversation to have with children who were between twelve and four years old.)

There wasn't much we could do about Santa Claus bringing us presents, but we could do something about the tree. We were no strangers to walking to the park. If we had nothing else, we had time on our hands and it was an age in which children weren't expected to remain indoors and/or in constant contact with their parents. So, the three of us bundled up against the cold and set off on foot for the park where we knew there were evergreen shrubs. Wind biting the skin on your face was a way of life in the Panhandle of Texas and crunching through snow was as fun as anything else we could have been doing. We laid out our plan all the way there. We would gather up limbs from the evergreen shrubs, take them back home and build our own tree. I imagined in my mind using baling wire, because this was before duct tape became a common household item, and baling wire was how you held things together then. (Those simpler times had some limitations.)

On the way back home my sister and I were chatting about how we could put it together. My little brother, almost five years younger than me and probably only four years old at the time, was just happy to be along and part of things. We were not exceptional children with regards to bickering; we certainly had our arguments and screaming matches. Our parents' favorite way to put a stop to the fighting was to make us sit on the sofa holding hands. (The giggling inevitably started in less than three minutes.) But, carrying Christmas Tree limbs through the cold, back to our home, we had our heads together and we just tossed around ideas about how to build a tree.

I don't remember exactly how many limbs we managed to get or who carried what, but we got home and showed our mother what we had brought and told her about our plan to make a Christmas tree, since we weren't going to be able to buy one this year. She looked at the limbs and considered. I still wasn't sure how all of it was going to be held together, but mothers are magical creatures who know everything, and, as if she had been expecting us to come home bearing evergreen boughs, she almost immediately began putting them together. She had a trunk that she kept fabric in (still keeps fabric in, as far as I know.) This she covered with a sheet and she laid the boughs across the trunk, creating a bush right there in our living room – not really a bush, but more than a stack of limbs. Truly, what she made was a sculpture with our found objects. She used one string of Christmas Tree lights, winding them through the limbs and we put a few baubles on it. Then we all stood back.

It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful Christmas Sculpture I could imagine, much better than a tree. And, we did it together, the three of us and our mother. Warming up indoors after walking through cold wind, our fingers tingled, but there was a more subtle feeling of security that came from being warm when the wind was still blowing outside and the windows were fogged. Having our Christmas Sculpture there in the living room and feeling all warm, happy and excited, we decided together that it didn't matter if we had presents. It didn't matter at all because we already had the most beautiful Christmas Sculpture ever. We couldn't wait to show our father when he got home.

Santa did come that year. Christmas morning brought gifts for the three of us and for our parents. I don't remember what Santa brought me that year, but the thing about Christmas gifts is that seeing them wrapped first thing in the morning is the most exciting part. Lately I've been trying not to think about the past at all, to look only ahead. But, talking with my brother and sister this year, I very much remember the Sculpture and the three of us taking it upon ourselves to make sure that we had a Christmas.