Family

I am not the only writer in my family. My niece started writing fiction at age 12, possibly as a fantasy pressure relief valve for some personal time away from raising her many brothers. She says she's writing scifi but can't cite a single scifi source so I'm a little baffled how that works. I've asked her about influences and she merely cites the French novel by Victor Hugo people are so gaga over. I never cared for it. I prefer Faulkner, Banks when he's writing well (not that often, and never again since he died), Gibson for updating Faulkner despite his obsession with name brands and furniture, James Joyce for inventing stream of consciousness, and Hemmingway for pure masculine belligerence. Fistfights in bars, that was Hemingway. My niece writes frequently, in her novel, apparently. She said she's finding fulfillment in working at a sandwich shop in the nearby town, that watching people is really interesting. Having worked counters myself, I can agree with that. A good writer should have a day job. Both to pay real bills because writing doesn't, and to see more people so you have easy characters based on real people, which you put in your disclaimer that they aren't based on real people. Because everybody knows that's a big effing lie.

My uncle took up writing late in life, in retirement more or less. He's my father's younger brother. He'll be staying here tonight. Grampa was a traumatizing influence, apparently, and as the youngest son, he got a lot of attention he probably didn't want. This meant a lot to rebel against too. I don't have the whole picture because the family is such a confused mess.

You see, my grandfather married, fathered some children, went off to war (WW1), came back years later and found more children he hadn't fathered, so divorced his wife, found a hot girl who was young, bright, and very pretty, and married her, then hopped in a Model T and drove across the country to Orange County in 1921 before the invention of either pavement or freeways, stopping to meet, I believe but I might be remembering this wrong, Pat Garrett who was grandma's friend when she was a child, due to her stepdad having TB and Pat visiting Doc Holliday (?) at the same TB hospital in New Mexico, in the same town where she was born. Yes THAT Doc Holliday. OK Corral? Yeah. Real people. I inherited Grandma's ability to paint, photography, and artistic inclinations. My niece looks remarkably like her.

Well, yesterday morning, reading this article written by my uncle, who was present at Grampa's death in Paris on Bastille Day, I learned I may have another Aunt, and presumably cousins, and probably second cousins and third etc. I need to brush up on my French. Because it gets better. Dad, while he was in the army, was encouraged by Grampa to write to a pen pal, presumably this French woman or her daughter (my presumed Aunt). Since that aunt would have been born around 1918ish, she's probably passed on by now, as that's 95 years ago. We're long lived, but not that long lived. As she likely had kids, and those kids had kids, I probably have 4th and 5th cousins at this point. In normal breeding terms, this could be 20-40 people I am related to by blood.

Dad just brought me his letters, which apparently my Mom found during one of her hunts through boxes of stuff. I traced the address to an Eastern suburb of Paris. Man, that city is densely populated. LA is a village. Los Angeles c'est en village, du comparison.

I really hope my Aunt wasn't traumatized growing up without her father, dear old grampa whom I never met but am told I take after for personality (a statement meant to be insulting, btw), while my brother takes after him for both looks and personality. She exists because Grampa loved her mother, and the time was right. It also means he cheated on his wife, who was cheating on him in return. Maybe that divorce was mutual?

In Biotech, research fantasists like to imagine that every single person and animal gets DNA mapped and tracked, so we know exactly whom is related to whom, and where the liasons in back rooms and broom closets lead to babies, and which families have incest, and which inbred towns get unknowing half-siblings sleeping together because their parents never told them who their parents actually were to hide the shame of their infidelity. DNA researchers love that kind of totalitarian perverted stuff. Remember, I worked with them for 4 years. They love destroying people's snooty attitudes by proving the infidelity. Japan, for example, is massively inbred. All the You Might Be A Redneck jokes aren't funny in Japan because the whole population is a tree without branches. This is an overstatement, but close enough. It does make for great humor.

Human breeding patterns and random encounters make for some amazing variety. Not all bad. An ugly duckling I went through 13 years of school with named Tanya blossomed into full womanhood by age 12. Her dad was from North Africa, Algeria if I remember correctly, and she was stunning. She had hips and curves and full breasts when other girls were still stick-like lesbians, and it did good things for her confidence without crossing over into arrogance. She looked like Cordelia from Buffy, but had a nice kind personality. Her parents were divorced, as they couldn't stand each other, but she existed due to that attraction. And it just takes the once. She was the classic ugly duckling as a little girl, with thick glasses and dark, slightly curly hair that women spend a fortune trying to achieve with various hair care products. When the Puberty Fairy visited, she blossomed. She expressed interest in me, but I did not believe her. I'm such a fool. I really should have dated her. Too late now. She was smart enough to get a Masters in International Relations and ended up at NATO in Paris, full time smoker, French husband. I saw her 10 years after high school, completely by chance in our old supermarket, and she was the same. Unaged, unlike most of my friends. Still very fit. We were both cross country runners. Up and down the mountain slopes and fire roads. I could spot her, without my glasses, at a mile. That's how long I'd known her. I hope she's having a wonderful life. I miss her. She was my first choice. I had to settle for less. That's often the way things go.

Are my French cousins happy? Did they have good lives and families and careers, despite knowing their great grampa was an American soldier who'd abandoned their great grandma to raise their grandma alone, including through the Nazi occupation 20 years later? Or perhaps she married and had more children with her husband? I don't know. Many questions come to mind. I would like to meet them, if they exist, if they really are my cousins after all. I hope they're not as obnoxious as we are. I hope they're creative and fun and serious at the right times and driven to achieve. And able to laugh at the absurdity of life.