Geneology

For the last couple months I have let my developing, pretentious, liberal-arts-collegiate mind stew in the notion and presumption that the reason I feel so restless is due to the fact that white people have no culture. I was so stinking proud of my idea.

Earlier today I got to see my 84 year old grandparents at my aunt’s house before I go to France and they go back to Kona. I’ve been working at my Aunt’s house all summer and sometimes, when I’m tip-toed on a stool painting a bathroom, or when she’s holding the ladder for me as I wash the upstairs windows she will begin to tell me about her recent findings into our family history, of which she is the sole scholar. Today at the breakfast table I suggested that she show us what she’s found recently. She ran upstairs, and came back with a few big file boxes and plopped them on the table. My auntie Jan, Captain Jack, Tutu, and I began to flip through a big black photo album that had belonged to my grandpa’s mother. “This is why you always put names and dates on pictures!” said my Aunt exasperatedly, “We only know who 10% of these people are!”

“Look at this here kiddo” said Captain Jack, holding up a black and yellow photo of a man and a woman in front of an old car, “That there is a Model T. My uncle sold it to my brother Billy for guess what? Ten dollars! With how the gas tank was set up you’d lose power going up hills so you’d have to drive the thing up backwards!”

I turned to a picture of a young man leaning forward in a suit, the way superheros do in movie posters. “Is this you Grandpa?!” I asked, he said “Yup!”

“Look at that hair.” added Tutu, ”I just loved that black black hair.”

She then held up a black and white photo of a tiny blonde girl that looked identical to my cousin Christina. “Thats me!” The girl was standing out in front of a shed in what I was later told was Sweden in the dead of winter. During a drive earlier this summer my Auntie Jan had told me the story of the death of my grandmother’s grandmother, my great-great-grandmother. She had died in late fall in Sweden and the ground was too frozen solid to permit any sort of grave-digging. They had instead laid Granny on a table in the wood shed behind the house to wait until the ground softened in spring. Auntie Jan said that Tutu has memories of looking through the slits between the wooden walls and seeing her frozen-solid grandmother and asking why she wasn’t coming inside to eat with them.

As we got deeper and deeper into the photos and the two older generations at the table began to sink into their stories and ask questions of one another, I started feel the proud supports of my young convictions snap apart. I saw pictures of the warship that my grandfather had served on in the Korean War, that had turned two years into a lifetime of repeated stories. The same ship was later used as target-practice for nuclear weapons testing. I was steeped in baby pictures, heavy skirted women, frozen grandmothers and backwards driving cars. My family has come from all over the globe and we are returning from whence we came, we always have and we always will. I may not feel any less restless and I may have to come up with new ideas.

But I have a culture.