La-la, How the Life Goes On. . .

OK, there seems to be some kind of movement sweeping through the corners of blog-space that I habituate, in which several of my blog-friends (Buck, Suldog, Uncle Skip and Michelle Hickman, for starters) have chosen a theme-song for their lives, then give a brief synopsis of their life, organized by decades.  I don't know if I'm really all that ambitious, but I'm at least willing to half-ass it, out of stuff I've posted before. . .

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I suppose I'm more-or-less honor-bound to choose as my theme song, 'Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da', since, you know, that's where I got the name of my blog in the first place, with the whole 'Desmond and Molly' thing, and 'Home Sweet Home', and 'a couple of kids running in the yard', and all that.  (I don't know how to embed the video right here on my blog page, but I can at least give you the link. . .)

Over at Suldog's, I posted a comment, in which I said, (quoting myself verbatim):

"I have some vague memories of Elvis that must have been from the 50s, but that's about it. For me, the 60s were the Tigers, the Beatles, and the space program (also my parents' divorce, and variations on my family configuration). In the 70s, I expanded my mind, too, but mostly along the educational track. I got married in '80, and since then, we've been raising kids. Right now, I'm just trying to stay focused long enough to get 'em all launched and on their way. . ."


So, you know, there's that.  I have posted a few items, both here and on my old blog, over the years, which might serve to elaborate a bit on the above (very extremely ridiculously) brief synopsis.  If you're interested:

Growing Up In the 60s

Where Were You. . . ?

March of the Gadgets (which isn't really a  true 'retrospective of my life', but it's fun)

Up In Smoke

I have never really been a smoker, of substances either legal or illegal.  But I want to be utterly clear that I make no claim to any particular virtue of my own, for that particular transgressive lack in my Curriculum Vitae.  Back in the days of the Clinton White House, I might have been the only US citizen (or heck, the only living person on earth, for all I know) who could give at least a partial nod of recognition to our erstwhile president's claim that, while he may have lit up a fatty or two back in the day, he didn't inhale. . .

Folks under 40 or so, who have lived their whole lives under the anti-smoking regime, really don't have any way to understand what it was like back in the '50s and early '60s (which were really just the latter part of the '50s; 'The 60s' of popular imagination really happened between about 1965-74; but that's another discussion for another time), when smoking was widely perceived to be hip, cool and sophisticated.  Every talk-show host on TV had a cigarette in his hand, to lend an air of sophistication to the conversational art.  Heck, there were even candy cigarettes for the kids (like after-dinner mints, rolled into a stick; they even had one end dyed red, so you could pretend that it was lit), so we could practice looking cool while holding a cigarette (the girls held them daintily between their fingertips, while the guys held them further down in the 'crotch' between their first two fingers).

My own extended family was a pretty smoky crew.  I don't remember ever seeing either my grandmother or grandfather smoke, but two of my uncles were very dedicated cigar-smokers, and my dad also went through various periods during which he appreciated a good cigar (actually, as I think back on it, I don't think the cigar in question even had to be all that good. . .).  One uncle in particular, was very fond of his cigars; so once, when our family took a trip to Mackinac Island, I bought one of those giant novelty cigars - a foot long and at least an inch in diameter - to give him as a Christmas gift (he told me that he actually lit it and took a few puffs from it, but that, even by his standards, it was pretty awful; but he appreciated the thought).  And most of my aunts could often be found with a cigarette pinched between their fingertips.  The holiday gatherings when the whole extended family got together were smoke-filled affairs, and no-one thought anything of it.

(As an aside, some years ago, I had to put a new furnace in one of my previous houses, and the old ductwork was wrapped in asbestos.  So I did a bunch of research on just what risks I was exposing myself to with the asbestos, and how I should handle it, and one of the sources said that, even if the asbestos in question was 'friable' (ie, flaking off), the exposure from a small job like mine was roughly equivalent to spending a couple hours in a smoke-filled room.  And I had spent many, many hours in smoke-filled rooms in my formative years, so I worried a lot less about the asbestos thing after that.  But just to be clear, we still took the proper precautions - wetted down the surface, wrapped the ducts in plastic wrap, and wore masks.)

My parents were more ambivalent smokers than the rest of the extended family, I think.  At least, they would quit from time to time.  I think that my dad had essentially quit smoking for good by the time he married my stepmother (I feel it more-or-less necessary to be clear that I refer to her as my 'stepmother' just for purposes of clarity; I've never called her anything other than 'Mom'), although I do remember him going through one final cigar fling for a couple years when I was in high school.

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Dad's remarriage was the near occasion of my own first pass at smoking, around the time I was ten years old, or so.  My step-brother (again, I've only ever called him my 'brother') was roughly the same age as me, and I would occasionally tag along with him, to play ball in the summertime, or whatever.  It was after one of these summertime ball games that he and I huddled together in the shadow of the school whose ball field we had used, and he asked me if I wanted to learn how to smoke.  I nodded, and he produced a pack of cigarettes and popped one out for me.  He showed me how to hold it between my lips, then how to strike a match from the little book of matches (you don't find so many of those anymore, either), and puff on the cigarette while holding the match to it, to draw enough air to light the cigarette.  I managed to actually get the thing lit, all by myself, without any help, which gave me a sense of satisfaction, that I was on my way to becoming a grown-up.  Then I puffed on it a few times, actually burning the tobacco, and producing an ash on the end of the cigarette.  Cool!  This smoking thing was really pretty easy!

Then my brother, with an air of disdain, told me that what I was doing didn't really constitute 'smoking'; in order to actually smoke the cigarette, I needed to inhale the smoke.  A silent 'uh-oh' passed through the far back corners of my brain.  Something about inhaling smoke just didn't seem like it would be pleasant at all, and I kind-of looked at my cigarette warily, like, 'I don't think I'm gonna like this'.  But, unpleasantness be damned!  Sophisticated grown-up-hood was at stake here.  So I bravely took a deep drag on my cigarette, and with smoke filling my mouth, I inhaled.

And at that point, either God's mercy, or my own tragically-flawed biochemistry (or, you know, both at the same time) kicked in.  The smoke travelled roughly two centimeters down my windpipe, and caused acute irritation to my bronchial lining, producing an effect that could be roughly described as, "Get that shit the HELL outta here!"  I coughed, I choked, I gagged, I broke a few thousand blood-vessels in my face, and damn-near gave myself a mild stroke, trying to clear my airway of the offending particles.  I tried again, figuring that, like coffee (which was my other marker of 'grown-up-hood'), I just had to persevere until I figured out how to like it.  But to no avail.  I inhaled a second time, and a third, and probably a few more than that, but the result never changed - every introduction of smoke particles to my trachea was met with violent spasms of rejection from my body.  Eventually, I figured that a ten-year-old like myself could only give himself so many mild strokes in a given day, and I gave up.

I tried again a month or so later, with the same result.  And a couple more times in subsequent years, when I was 12 or 13, and I don't think that any actual smoke particles ever actually got into my actual lungs - every single attempt ended with me coughing and choking, and none of the smoke actually, you know, inside my body.

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Fast-forward to my high-school years.  I was probably 15 or 16 when my brother and a few of my friends started talking about how cool it was to smoke weed, and the mellow buzz to be had thereby.  Now, by the early '70s, we'd had ample exposure from our parents, schools and churches, to the idea that marijuana was a Very Bad Thing.  But it is perhaps a measure of the perversity of the thought-processes of 15/16-year-olds that, when our parents, schools and churches said, 'Very Bad Thing', we processed that information as 'Unutterably Cool'; I mean, heck - the Beatles had all gotten high, and no-one was cooler than them.  (It was of course, also possible that we processed some of the dire warnings from Those In Authority as 'Way Overblown'; on the other hand, we also thought that we were Freaking Invulnerable, so it is at least an open conversation as to who was In Touch With Reality to a greater/lesser degree).

So at one point, I decided that I at least wanted to check out the whole 'Weed' thing, just to see what was so doggone cool about it, after all.  I gave my brother $5, and he brought me back a baggie full of chopped dried herbs.  He gave me one of his rolling papers, and showed me how to roll a joint, which was kind-of exotically cool - rolling your own, and all that.  Then he told me it was just like smoking a cigarette.  And the same 'Oh shit' voice that I'd heard five years before, went rattling around the back of my brain again.  I took a couple of tentative puffs, and my brother impatiently explained to me that, look, if you want to get the buzz, you have to inhale.  And just to drive the point home, he explained that, to maximize the buzz, you wanted to draw more air, making a hissing sound as you took a pull on the joint, and then hold your breath, to let the smoke swirl around your lungs for as long as possible (which, I have to admit, did provide me with good training for use of an Albuterol inhaler, years down the road).  Now I had a sinking feeling that this was another Marker of Hipness that was just gonna go by the wayside for me, but, you know, I was at least gonna go down swinging, so I took a deep draw on my homespun little doobie, and strove mightily to induct the smoke into my lungs.

But alas, my 15-year-old lungs were no more tolerant of marijuana smoke particles than my 10-year-old lungs had been of tobacco smoke particles.  I coughed, I choked, I gagged, and darn-near puked, so violently did my lungs reject the smoke.  My shoulders sagged, and I knew that I'd been defeated, betrayed by my own biochemistry (and, you know, God's mercy; although I had really been hoping to have a different kind of 'Cosmic Experience', if only God had been agreeable).  I made a few more half-hearted attempts to experience the elusive Buzz, but I could never manage to actually ingest smoke into my lungs.  Probably the closest I came was during my first year or so of college (in the early 70s, 'The Sixties' were just winding down), when, on Friday nights, the dope smoke hung like a cloud in the hall, somewhere around eye-level; it's possible I inadvertently experienced a 'second-hand high', but it wasn't sufficiently 'cosmic' for me to actually, you know, notice it. . .

So yeah - I'm definitely down with the whole, 'Yeah, but I didn't inhale' thing.  Me and Bill, we understand each other. . .

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In my college years, and into my very-early-married years, I made a couple more passes at smoking, but in ways that didn't bring inhaling into play.  In college, a few of my friends took up cigar-smoking; and, as fate would have it, there was a very good little tobacco shop in our college town.  So, every so often, for whatever occasion we deemed suitably 'special' (a buddy's wedding, or something of that order), we'd pop into the smoke shop and pick up one or two $3 cigars to enjoy with our beer (and I will admit that there is something very cool and mellow about conversation over beer and cigars).  But cigar-smoking was always a 'special-occasion' kind of thing for us, and never remotely rose to the level of a 'habit'.  And I didn't have to inhale.

When Jen and I were still pretty newly-married, I picked up The Lord of the Rings for the first time, and I'm sure that I remarked to her on more than one occasion that Tolkien portrayed pipe-smoking in a very cool, mellow, almost romantic, way.  And so Jen, eager as she was to please her young husband, gave me my first pipe as a gift (I don't recall if it was a birthday gift, or what; but she gave me my first pipe, a really nice briar, with a pearlescent mouthpiece), along with a bag of very nicely-aromatic vanilla-blend tobacco from the smoke shop.  And so, for a couple of years, I was a very occasional pipe smoker - once or twice a week, at the very most (and of course, you don't inhale pipe smoke, either, so it was perfect).

I enjoyed several things about smoking a pipe - the smell of the (unburned) tobacco; the smoke swirling around my head (somehow, cigar and cigarette smoke doesn't swirl around one's head; or at least, it doesn't conjure up those images in quite the same way pipe smoke does), like something out of The Night Before Christmas; even the little 'Pipe Culture' bits, like tamping the bowl, and cleaning it afterwards.  But I could never really tolerate the taste in my mouth the morning after a night of smoking - someone has likened it to the Russian Army marching through your mouth, and I can't really quibble with that simile.  So, after a couple years, once the 'romance' of pipe-smoking had worn off sufficiently, I decided that the charred/ashy aftertaste just wasn't worth it anymore.  And, for all intents and purposes, I've never smoked since.  Oh, if someone offers me a cigar on a Special Occasion, I'll smoke it with him, for comradeship and the honoring of the occasion.  But I'm not any kind of Smoker; and I've never been any more than a failed Toker.  I'll happily cop to 'Joker', though. . .

And you know. . .  I don't really feel like I've missed all that much. . .

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I posted another telling of parts of this story, on a somewhat different spin, a couple years ago, on my old blog.  So, you can check it out (and maybe get some extra texture) (Hey, is that another ex-Beatle reference?)

Eschew Obfuscation; or, Politics as Usual?

One of my all-time favorite humorous bits is one that I first saw in Mad Magazine when I was 14 (does it cause you to think less of me that I read Mad Magazine when I was 14?).  Just in the interest of giving credit where it's due, I found it here.  It's a wonderfully obfuscatory piece of vocabulary-stretching brilliance (although I promise you, when I was 14, I had no idea what 'obfuscatory' even meant).

Since 2012 is a presidential election year, we are already well into 'all politics, all the time'.  So, as a brief, subversive respite from the exaggerated self-importance of all things political, I offer it here for your enjoyment and edification.  (OK, 'edification' might be a stretch; but I hope you'll find it enjoyable. . .)

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Guaranteed Effective

 All-Occasion Non-Slanderous Political Smear Speech

(By Bill Garvin; MAD #139, December 1970)

My fellow citizens, it is an honor and a pleasure to be here today. My opponent has openly admitted he feels an affinity toward your city, but I happen to like this area. It might be a salubrious place to him, but to me it is one of the nation's most delightful garden spots.

When I embarked upon this political campaign I hoped that it could be conducted on a high level and that my opponent would be willing to stick to the issues. Unfortunately, he has decided to be tractable instead -- to indulge in unequivocal language, to eschew the use of outright lies in his speeches, and even to make repeated veracious statements about me.

At first, I tried to ignore these scrupulous, unvarnished fidelities. I can do so no longer. If my opponent wants a fight, he's going to get one!

It might be instructive to start with his background. My friends, have you ever accidentally dislodged a rock on the ground and seen what was underneath? Well, exploring my opponent's background is dissimilar. All the slime and filth and corruption you could possibly imagine, even in your wildest dreams, are glaringly nonexistent in this man's life. And even during his childhood!

Let us take a very quick look at that childhood: It is a known fact that, on a number of occasions, he emulated older boys at a certain playground. It is also known that his parents not only permitted him to masticate excessively in their presence, but even urged him to do so. Most explicable of all, this man who poses as a paragon of virtue exacerbated his own sister while they were both teenagers!

I ask you, my fellow Americans: is this the kind of person we want in public office to set an example for our youth? Of course, it's not surprising that he should have such a typically pristine background -- no, not when you consider the other members of his family:

- His female relatives put on a constant pose of purity and innocence, and claim they are inscrutable, yet every one of them has taken part in hortatory activities
- The men in the family are likewise completely amenable to moral suasion
- My opponent's second cousin is a Mormon
- His uncle was a flagrant heterosexual
- His sister, who has always been obsessed by sects, once worked as a proselyte - even outside a church
- His father was secretly chagrined at least a dozen times by matters of a pecuniary nature
- His youngest brother wrote an essay extolling the virtues of being a homosapien
- His great-aunt expired from a degenerative disease
- His nephew subscribes to several phonographic magazines
- His wife was a thespian before their marriage and even performed the act in front of paying customers
- And his own mother had to resign from a women's organization in her later years because she was an admitted sexagenarian

Now what shall we say of the man himself?

I can tell you in solemn truth that he is the very antithesis of political radicalism, economic irresponsibility, and personal depravity. His own record proves that he has frequently discountenanced treasonable, un-American philosophies and has perpetrated many overt acts as well.

- He perambulated his infant son on the street
- He practiced nepotism with his uncle and first cousin
- He attempted to interest a 13-year-old girl in philately
- He participated in a seance at a private residence where, among other odd goings-on, there was incense
- He has declared himself in favor of more homogeneity on college campuses
- He has advocated social intercourse in mixed company -- and has taken part in such gatherings himself
- He has been deliberately averse to crime in our streets
- He has urged our Protestant and Jewish citizens to develop more catholic tastes
- Last summer he committed a piscatorial act on a boat that was flying the American flag
- Finally, at a time when we must be on our guard against all foreign "isms", he has unashamedly announced his belief in altruism -- and his fervent hope that some day this entire nation will be altruistic!

I beg you, my friends, to oppose this man whose life and work and ideas are so openly and avowedly compatible with our American way of life. A vote for him would be a vote for the perpetuation of everything we hold dear.

The facts are clear; the record speaks for itself.

Do your duty!

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And, just because I'm kind of a geek on history, and my home state. . .

Please join me in raising a celebratory glass in observance of the 175th anniversary of Michigan statehood, this past Thursday.  January 26, 1837; God bless Andy Jackson, for signing the statehood bill just before he left office (and even though we got jobbed out of Toledo, the Upper Peninsula is more than sufficient compensation; just imagine if it had taken two governors, and two state legislatures agreeing, to build the Mackinac Bridge. . .)

March of the Gadgets

A while back, in one of my posts, I mentioned in passing the old film projectors (and the reel-type movies that came in the big old metal cannisters) that we had back when I was in school. In a comment to that post, my friend Lime, who is probably 12 or 13 years my junior, noted that they still had those projectors when she was in school. Which got me to wondering just when VCRs drove the old-style film projectors out of the schools. Any of you young whippersnappers care to enlighten me?

Those little 'background technologies' are, for me, a fascinating glimpse of history, sort-of a more 'mundane' version of 'Where Were You When. . .?'. I'm not even really talking about the big 'foreground stuff', like how my grandparents were born into a world in which horses were the main engines of transportation and work, and before they died, they saw men walking on the moon. Rather, I have in mind the more 'background' stuff that you don't particularly think about, but that significantly color the day-to-day ways that you live your life. Like my grandma's old wringer-style washing machine, and stuff like that. . .

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My dad is old enough to remember when Rural Electrification (one of FDR's Alphabet Agencies) came to his dad's farm. Which, conversely, means that he's old enough to remember what life was like before his dad's house had electricity - the gas-light spigots on the walls, doing chores by lantern-light, and stuff like that. . . I remember as a kid, being aghast that they didn't have TVs when my dad was a kid (my dad's speech is still full of little idioms like, "Holy mackerel, Andy!" that I found out much later were relics of the radio shows he listened to in his childhood).

This all came rushing back to my mind when my kids were similarly aghast that, when I was a kid, we didn't have VCRs. And how do I explain to them the trips we took to the store when I was a kid, with an armload of vacuum tubes to check on the drug-store's Tube Tester, to find the one that was fritzed, so we could replace it, and get our TV working again?

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Jen and I have tended to be a tad 'behind the curve' when it comes to 'technological innovations' (which at least had the beneficial effect of sparing us from 8-track tapes). It was well into the 90s when, in the space of a year or two, we got our first microwave oven, our first VCR, and our first cordless phone. Most of which was driven by our in-house population boom - microwave ovens meant that we could heat an after-school snack in 30 seconds or so (which becomes more critical when you need four or five of them in quick succession); a VCR meant that we weren't held captive to network TV programming, and a cordless phone meant that Jen could conduct her daily business on the phone without being tethered to within 25 feet of the phone (before we 'went cordless', we bought an extra-long 25-foot cord for the handset, so Jen could reach about half of the main floor of our house). The cordless phone also eliminated the coiled cord snaking through the house for the kids to 'clothesline' themselves on. Although we have found that it's handy to keep an old cord-style phone tucked away, in case the power ever goes out. . .

I still have, stashed away in my attic, boxes of 12-inch black-vinyl discs (and a turntable to play them on, although I'm not sure it would be compatible with my stereo anymore) which constituted my collection of recorded music from my college days. By the early 80s, the market was well on its way over to casette tapes, which were in turn driven out by CDs in the 90s. So, I've rolled over my music collection a couple times. By now, I've got most of my favorite old vinyl albums on CD, but there are a few that haven't been issued on CD yet, and probably never will be. . .

Likewise, my library of VHS movies has mostly been converted to DVDs by now, but there are a few that never will be. We bought a combo VCR/DVD a couple years ago, with the intention of converting some of the old VHS tapes to DVDs, but I think you need at least a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering to program that stuff. But at least the combo unit will still play the old VHS tapes, so as long as it lives, we've still got access to them. . .

With phones, we're already to the point where cell phones are ingrained in our daily lives, and we can't quite imagine how we ever got by without them. I got my first cell phone on a promotional deal from my car-insurance company, when I started commuting an hour one-way to work, figuring that I would be glad to have it if I ever had car trouble 50 miles from home (which I did, and I was). I made maybe a half-dozen 'emergency' calls a year on it, and that was fine. Then, some years back, 4M talked us into getting a 'family plan' so we could all be in closer touch. Of course, he had other things in mind beyond simply keeping in touch with his parents, and we quickly learned that he could receive calls from other people than just us, so we entered into a whole new realm of trying to manage our kids' cell-phone usage. Which I'm not sure we've managed yet; at least, not terribly effectively. Some of our friends have dispensed with their 'land lines' altogether; we're not quite to that point, but it's not an exotic concept to us anymore. . .

It's funny, but I remember when fax machines were this gee-whiz new technology (maybe 15-20 years ago?), and now hardly anybody faxes anything anymore. Mostly because of e-mail. And you can all congratulate Jen, who got her first e-mail account about six months ago, and has finally decided that she really ought to check it, maybe even as often as daily (I think the other day she had something like 75 items in her in-box; so she's getting some rudimentary 'training' just reading and deleting them)

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Here's a kinda cool one - I'm 54 years old; I graduated from high school in 1973. I think that my class was within a year or two of being the last one that was actually taught how to use a slide rule. When I was a college freshman, electronic calculators were still fairly exotic - a high-end 'scientific calculator' still cost something like $750. The Engineering College had one in the library that they kept locked to a heavy table, and you had to sign up for time on it. So you'd systematically work through your homework to get the problems to where they were finished except for the last few calculations that you needed the calculator for.

The college bookstore still carried a full line of slide rules when I arrived as a freshman; by my junior year, they were gone. My freshman roommate had a very basic 'four-function' calculator (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), and we would have a steady stream of guys on our floor, coming to our room to use my roommate's calculator. Until one of the other guys on the floor came back from Christmas break with one that had a square-root key; then everybody (including us, when we needed to calculate a square-root) wore out the path to his door. My junior year, my folks got me a 'scientific calculator' for Christmas (which cost around $60; which shows how the 'market' had changed in just a couple years). And of course, now banks give away calculators - the size and thickness of a credit card - as a 'bonus' for opening a new account (or was that a few years ago, and utterly lame by now?). . .

My dad retired in the late '80s. One Christmas, a couple years after that, we were down at my parents' house for Christmas. All the gifts were handed out, and we were all sort-of sitting back, watching the grandkids play with their presents. My dad stood up, excused himself, and walked back down the hall. He returned a couple minutes later with an oblong black rectangular package. "You might as well have this," he said. "I don't suppose I'll be needing it much anymore." I immediately recognized it to be the leather case containing his slide rule. It was like an old warrior handing down his sword. I didn't know what to say; I was incredibly touched. Jen was in tears at the 'symbolic significance' of it. I still have my dad's slide rule; in fact, I've made a few minor repairs to the black-leather case. I still know how to use it; I suppose I should teach my own kids, if any of them are interested.

I know that, even now, it's mostly a museum-piece. But it wasn't that long ago - within my own lifetime, much less my dad's - that those little sticks of wood-and-ivory were the work-horses of scientific and engineering calculation. . .

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So - what about you all? What 'gadgets' do you remember that were common-as-air, once-upon-a-time, but have long-since gone by the board?

Roots

I have a somewhat 'manic' personality. Which is to say, that when I become interested in something, I tend to jump in with both feet, so to speak. When I bought my first touring bike, it wasn't long before I was going on tours, riding centuries, and piling up miles at the rate of thousands per year. I read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion all in one month. In the first year of our marriage (Yeah, I know. . .) Heck, once I started begetting children, I didn't stop until I had eight of them. So, you can see the full scope of my situation. It was back in the spring of 1986 that I was bitten by the genealogy bug. I'm not sure exactly what set it off - I recall my dad sending me a short account of our family history, which his aunt had compiled, and it was utterly fascinating to me. Of course, I could remember my grandparents, but Aunt Mildred (who was my grandfather's sister) had taken things several generations farther back than that, to a fellow who'd been born in 1780, only four years after the Declaration of Independence, in New York state (it turns out that the large bulk of the immediate-pre-statehood settlement of Michigan was from New York, the more-or-less direct result of the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825). This early ancestor had ten children (seven sons), and the fourth of those sons had three children, the youngest of whom left New York and came to Michigan. His oldest son was my great-grandfather, who died a decade or more before I was born, but I could recall seeing his name painted on the side of the barn on what had been his farm, next door to my grandfather's farm in rural Michigan. And of course, my dad had known his grandfather, and would occasionally tell us stories about him. I had a friend at work, and we often used to sit together in one or the other of our offices, talking about this or that or the other thing, on our lunch hours; he was quite a bit older than me (in fact, he was the father of a girl I'd known in college). So when my dad sent me the little hand-typed genealogy from Aunt Mildred, I showed it to him. And he just lit up. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed, and he began telling me about his recently-taken-up hobby of genealogy. When I told him that it all sounded quite interesting, he promised to take me with him the next time he went to the library to do some genealogical research on his lunch hour, which he did. At first, he just pointed me to the reels of microfilm for the US Census, and encouraged me to start by just documenting what I already knew. There was something fascinating about looking at those old census records, from 1880, or 1850, or even earlier, and seeing the names of my ancestors written there, and realizing that the page I was looking at represented a census taker standing on the front porch of my great-great-grandfather's house, talking directly to him (or, more likely, my great-great-grandmother). And it wasn't long before I'd branched out, and begun documenting other parts of our family than just the succession of fathers who all shared the surname that I still bear. It was amusing to find my great-grandmother in the census, at age 18, just a couple entries away from my 17-year-old great-grandfather, knowing that just a few years after that record was taken, they'd be married to each other; and also just to realize that they'd grown up in pretty close proximity to each other. There was a period of time when I was spending a fair bit of effort on cemeteries - if I knew that a particular ancestor had lived in such-and-such a town, but didn't know when they'd died, I could get a listing of the nearby cemeteries, and go looking for their gravestone, which would almost certainly tell me what I needed to know. Usually, I would plan out my cemetery visits as part of a trip we were already making; many of the cemeteries in question were not too terribly out-of-the-way on a trip to Chicago, for instance. I didn't think it was all that big a deal, but after a while, when we were on a road trip, the kids would point out the cemeteries we were driving past, and ask why we weren't stopping. Before long, I'd done all that I could (for the time being) with the census, and I'd graduated to the published genealogies, and the old town records. Several of my family lines, especially from my dad's mother, went back into New England; and New England town records - most towns in New England kept records of every birth, death, and marriage, all the way back to the founding of the town, usually in the 1600s - are an amazing storehouse of information, and in short order - within a year or two - I'd extended what we knew of our family tree, in several directions, and in several cases, 'back to the water's edge'. In a few cases, I was able to reach back across the ocean, and establish connections in 16th-century (or even earlier) England or Germany. In 1987 we planned out a vacation to upstate New York, so I could do a bit of on-site research (and check out some of the cemeteries in New York). As it turns out, the part of New York our family is from is very close to Cooperstown, so we could include a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And when I told my dad about it, he decided to do likewise, and he and Mom stayed at the same resort we did. Looking back, Jen still gets a wry chuckle from the way I sold that vacation to her - "We can go check out some cemeteries in New York! And visit the Baseball Hall of Fame!! And my parents are coming, too!!!" But we had a great time, even so (and I won't even mention the possibility that 3M may have been conceived on that trip). Those of you who recall my 'book posts' from last summer might recall that, at one point in my young life, I went on a bit of a James Michener binge. And doing genealogical research was a lot like making my own Michener novel (only 'in reverse'), for our family - tracking the progress of various of our ancestors, from New England to New York, to Ohio/Indiana, to Michigan, all in the context of the history that was happening around them. I found, for instance, that a couple brothers of one of my ancestors had been thrown in jail during the Revolution, as suspected Tory sympathizers. And apparently, they had been firm in their Loyalist convictions - after the war, they took their families and went to Canada. Which I learned when I was contacted by a distant cousin living in California, who shared my surname, who had traced his own ancestry back across Canada, where he'd stalled; and I could then connect him to the family in New York. Another of my ancestors (my 2g-grandfather, mentioned above) had left New York, and gone to live with his father's cousin in Indiana, in 1863, under circumstances that could look suspiciously like draft-dodging (which, of course, my own 'boomer' generation thinks we invented). . . When I searched for my birth-parents, the skills I'd honed doing genealogy came in really handy, looking through various public records and compiling the information I'd need to find them. And of course, once I'd found them, I had whole new chunks of family to track down (my birth-father's family was from Mississippi, and included a few slave-owners; which is something I'd hoped never to find, but alas. . .) Sometime in the early 90s, my duties to the 'production side' of the family tree made it nigh-unto-impossible for me to devote time to furthering the research effort, but when my dad retired, he took up where I'd left off, and has 'pushed things back' a bit further. Of course, now, much of the information that I'd gone to the library for, is available online, and in place of the large 3-ring binders that I'd spent years compiling, I now have a CD-ROM, and genealogy software to keep track of things for me. Aside from the brute facts of who all my ancestors were, and of their 'march through history', I think that genealogy also fosters a 'sense of continuity', and a certain kind of 'existential humility'. At the most basic, earthy level, it reinforces the point that each of us, and every person who has ever lived, is the product of an act of sexual intercourse between our birth-parents (I sidled up to this idea in this earlier post). None of us is here by our own choice; each of us exists because of the choices and actions of other people - a whole chain of them, in fact, stretching back beyond recorded history. And that reinforces the idea that our lives are not simply our own; we have duties (on an 'existential level') to both past and future generations. . . Simone Weil, I think, had some poignant things to say about 'the need for roots', and that resonates with me. I recall one of my uncles expressing a degree of astonishment that I, who am not even blood-related to my family, would dig in to the family tree so vigorously. A friend of mine, a psychologist, told me that he thought I was subconsciously searching for my birth-parents (and, given the timing of how things turned out, he may even have been right). But honestly, it's not so mysterious as all that - it's my family; it's where we came from, and how we got to where we are today. And it's utterly fascinating. . .