And now, from the planet Mars...

Dear Reader, I should warn you that it will take a chunk of your time to wade through these waters – they’re pretty deep. In my defense however, I should point out this great wad of verbiage should be blamed squarely on LegacyStories.org and not on me. After all, they asked the question!

Story prompt: “Describe unique traits that have been passed down to you by an ancestor.”

My family split up when I was about four. It halved itself neatly down the middle, splitting into masculine and feminine poles, with my dad and my brother on one side and my mom and me on the other. The males continued to reside down South; we females moved as far away as my mom could manage to get. The whole subject of my father and the breakup of our home became strictly taboo. I saw my father once for about 20 minutes when I was 17 years old, and again for a day or two shortly before he died. The reasons for this somewhat bizarre history are not germane to this story, but the logistics certainly are: I grew up totally and completely separated from my father and all his kith and kin. They might as well have lived on Mars.

When I reached the ripe old age of 17 and went off to college, the question of “nature versus nurture” was a hot topic on campus. Are people’s personalities, values and actions the result of biology – inherited genes – or of the result of the environment in which they grew up? Myself, I went with the more popular and accepted view: the answer was Environment, of course. No question. All those sociologists must be right. (I could write another treatise the size of Gone with the Wind on this topic, but I’ll spare you for now.)

Time has a habit of passing swiftly, and before you know it I was grown, married and had a child of my own. Motherhood changed me in many ways, but among its more minor effects was a re-kindled curiosity to understand my roots and solve the mystery of just exactly who my paternal relations were at the core. I suspected they couldn’t possibly have been as distasteful as… some people thought.  As my son began to mature from toddlerhood into early childhood, this curiosity sharpened and intensified itself, demanding to be satisfied. I did a bit of sleuthing and located the address of my paternal aunts and before long my son and I were heading South in the car on our first Genealogical Discovery Tour.

If I had been more psychologically astute, the drive through the Appalachian Mountains would have given me my first clue that I had perhaps been mistaken in throwing in my lot with the academic pundits – the further south I drove, the stronger was the eerie mixture of inexplicable familiarity and excitement that coursed through my body. I dismissed this as coincidence. (I have a story on “coincidence” on this website that ties in with this subject, come to think of it.)

When we finally arrived at our destination we were welcomed warmly by my father’s sisters and despite the 30+ years in time and the unfathomably deep cultural chasm that had separated us during those years, I was instantly aware that in some strange way I had just come Home. I knew these faces and the gentle but unmistakable North Carolinian drawl in these voices instantly pierced the deepest part of my soul with a joy that I felt in my heart but could not understand with my mind.

All this happened over 20 years ago and my eyes are tearing up even now as I write just thinking about it. Does this mean I no longer loved my mother and those roots of my family tree that are firmly fixed in Northern soil? Not at all! I knew there had been a war of epic proportions between my parents but despite the fact I was smack dab in the crosshairs, I had never taken sides. I loved them,  both mother and father, equally, and still do. But it was as if half of myself had been MIA all these years and was suddenly discovered and restored. It was as if I had always had 20/20 vision but had always seen the world in black and white; suddenly I beheld it in Technicolor. Although I wasn’t exactly aware of it at the time, my subconscious was already feeling the shock waves emanating from the huge crack just made in the foundational bedrock of the beliefs I’d been taught. No offense to all you Sociologists out there, but you may have missed a few things along the way.

Things I learned from my lovely, precious aunts made sense of some of the difficulties I had had in life. (In all fairness, please allow me to state I also have lovely, precious maternal aunts.)

I offer two proofs (only two, out of respect for your time) to illustrate why I threw away the nurture theory in favor of the nature theory:

#1. I have always loved to read, ever since I was a small child. As I grew, this insatiable hunger for stories morphed from an appetite for fairy tales into an appetite for fiction. Although I love any good story, British Lit is my very favorite of them all. My mom has never understood this. She is an extremely practical, pragmatic person who reads for information rather than pleasure. In fact, her viewpoint is that reading fiction is little more than a waste of time and therefore pretty much a sin. I’ll never forget how disappointed she was when I announced I was going to major in English lit when I went to college.

On this trip I made the astonishing discovery that my father’s father – whom I had never known – was so passionate about literature and poetry he had actually memorized every word Shakespeare ever wrote! Need I tell you I nearly fainted at this? Clearly, the environment in which I had grown up had nothing to do with my love of literature, that’s for sure.

#2. This example arises from another of the arts – music. Now, my mother and her family did appreciate music, make no mistake. My mom and her siblings even had a family band during the 1930s and her brothers, who played drums, saxophone and bass fiddle, even won competitions to play for cruise ships at the time. I had grown up on a diet of popular 1950s music, mostly vocalists like Perry Como (“Guardian Angels”) and Connie Francis (“Fascination”) as well as songs from popular musicals like “The King and I” and “South Pacific.” Amid all these albums, my mom had picked up a series of “Light Classics” on 78 rpm records somewhere along the line, and it was to these I gravitated. The older I got the more clearly defined became my own musical preferences: all things Baroque, Celtic, Bluegrass and the primitive, otherworldly sounding “shape note” music of the Scots-Irish settlers of the American South. Perry Como and all that? It’s all fine; it’s all good, but you’re welcome to it. (Of course, I admit to a fondness for Rock and Roll as well, just like everyone else from my generation. Too bad my folks split up so soon – the one thing they could have happily held in common is the fixed and unshakable belief R&R comes directly from the pit of Hell to corrupt the young. They each held this position, but separately, you see. Oh, well.)

Now the plot thickens a bit.  My husband had brought into our marriage some audiotapes, beautifully boxed to look as if they were books instead of music. One glance told me they were something weird, all in some foreign language and one cover even had the word “Opera” on it. Eeeeeek; fat ladies screeching! Who needs that? I put them high up on a bookshelf, where they performed their dual duty of looking good and fooling onlookers into thinking I was musically educated. (The truth is, I can’t read a note of music.) I never interfaced with them unless it was while wielding a dust cloth. Just why I do not know (was it the curiosity Pandora experienced about her mysterious box?), but one day three or four years into our marriage I decided, on a whim, to take one of these tapes out of its box and stick it into the stereo – which just happened to be on the top of our refrigerator. (That’s important.)

Before I knew what hit me, I was standing completely transfixed, rivers of tears coursing down my face, listening with utter, total and complete rapture to the most incredible, gloriously beautiful music I’d ever heard in all my life. It was as if God Himself had picked my soul out of my body and lifted it up to Heaven. I was absolutely electrified and thrilled to the very core of my being. I’ve never had cocaine, but I guarantee you my high was just as intense as that any junkie ever experienced.  It was as if a thunderbolt of pure beauty had struck my brain, entering directly through my eardrums and lodging in some anatomical-spiritual part science hasn’t yet discovered. It was AMAZING, and when I realized just exactly what it was to which I was listening, I simply couldn’t believe it. Why?  It was, of all things, Opera!! (Those funny words on the cover, I found out later, were translated in English as “The Magic Flute,” which is an opera by none other than the musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.) Well. Hold that thought.

Back to my visit with the North Carolina aunts. In the course of our conversation, I was relentlessly pumping them for information about my father’s mother, who had died before I was born. In answering my endless questions about her, the topic of her love of music came up. My Aunt Mary got up from the sofa on which the three of us were sitting and went to her piano, saying “Here, let me play you some of Mama’s favorites.” As she began to play, my Aunt Martha leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Oh, that Mary! She used to live with us before she was married, and Fred and I would come home on a Saturday afternoon and there she would be, standing in the kitchen with tears running down her face, listening to the Metropolitan Opera program on the radio…”

I still don’t know which to do when I remember that afternoon, laugh or cry. But one thing’s for sure: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, no matter how far away on the map it finds itself.