4.2 I never did
“OK, I’m going into the bedroom to squirt it in.”
I called to him and Tom sat beside the bed. I asked lots of questions about his family. I was like a child hearing bed time stories for the hundredth time, a child being inculcated into the myths of the family.
“Did I ever tell you about my n’er-do-well intellectual great grandfather?” Tom asked. “Maybe. But tell me again,” I said. “He was trained to be a minister. Those Iowa farmers wanted someone steeped in the traditions they had brought over with them from Germany, so they sent him back there to study. But what those good German-descended Iowa farmers didn’t realize was that time and ideas hadn’t stood still back in Europe. My great grandfather began preaching the new liberal ideas that to them sounded like heresy. They booted him out.” “Really?” “And he never worked again. He went back to school to study something else. Just kept on reading and thinking while his wife kept the family and the six kids together.” ” That’s who you take after!” I teased. “You mean because it has taken me until forty-seven to complete my PhD? I guess I can’t argue.”
I was looking at Tom coolly, like a set of genes. I was happy to hear that his mother’s father, a Herr Doktor physician and professor, lived into his nineties. They were long lived, an antidote to my frail constitutional inheritance; blue eyes to offset my hazel. They traveled back and forth from Europe to America, before my family ever arrived. It wasn’t until two generations later that anyone in my family traveled for pleasure. Even my parents and their generation were lucky if they got to go to New Jersey.
Some people seek those most like themselves, but without ever knowing what I was rejecting in myself or compensating for, I mostly chose something different. I was curious. Maybe it was that idle curiosity of mine that actually left me in my current position: literally, hips propped up and listening to the familial bedtime stories of a man, a former boyfriend no less, who I might have married years ago, but never did.