Late at night at my grandparents’ house in Santa Maria my Dad was relating to me the events about the day that his father Mel passed away.  It was a heavy subject for my already exhausted mind, and I was trying to maintain eye contact to focus on what he was saying. 

His face in itself was a distraction to me.  I soon found myself studying its features, fascinated by the similarities to my own.  The eyes, that very particular shade of honey brown, the crease in his cheek from the dimpled smile we share, and the thought what is my mouth doing on his face?! I have seen those lips in the mirror every day of my life, but never on another person.  Mentally I began tracing his lips with my lipliner pencil and filling them in with my favorite lipstick shade, and then I tried to stifle a giggle.

“I’m pouring my heart out to you, and you’re laughing?” he protested. He was only pretending to be mad.

I apologized lamely and had to explain that, while I hadn’t meant to be completely heartless, in fact I was.

In my defense, however, this seeing myself in someone else is no small thing to me.  My Dad has mentioned that my looks are familiar to him; he sees in me his mother, his cousins.  I, on the other hand, have searched the faces of my relatives all my life looking for something to connect us and, with perhaps the exception of the shape of my mother’s face, have searched in vain. 

 I don’t mean to be melodramatic and self-pathetic about that, nor do I want to make anyone feel guilty, as if my family had any control over whose genes dominated my looks and personality. I just feel the need to say it, having kept that thought and its accompanying sadness like a jar of moths inside me.  It feels good to let it out and let it go. 

Now I have a jar of fireflies of all kinds of little connections I see in my father and his family. The first time I saw my father’s toes I had to take a picture.  Our right toes are almost identical! I had a similar experience the first time I saw my Grandma Betty’s hands, my uncle David’s eyes, my cousin Janelle’s smile, my great-aunt Lottie’s tiny frame. It’s not just the physical things that astound me. Even our life’s experiences mirror eachother. My Dad and I have both been fired by employers who thought we were stealing because we cannot do math and hence cannot count cash (my job was at a shoe store, his was at a casino). Neither of us can float in water.  We both have a sense of smell so poor that sometimes things that should smell bad actually are quite pleasant-we both secretly like skunk, for example, which often smells to me like freshly ground coffee.

That night in Santa Maria we scoured my grandparents’ bookshelves for a bedtime story for my Dad to read to me. (If you have never heard him read, you are truly missing out!) We each pulled down a book, thumbed through it and stopped.

“I got one,” I said. “How about Mark Twain? I love him.”

He looked up in disbelief. “I picked Mark Twain!” he said, and if he hadn’t held open the book in his hand to prove it, I wouldn’t have believed it either.

What an amazing invention DNA is! And how clever of our Creator to program our genes to cause us to produce offspring that connect us to the past and remind us of someone we love, that person possibly even being ourselves. That, along with common experiences, creates a bond that makes it understandable why for many people family becomes a religion in itself.

(This sense of connection with those who look like us appears even in our love of animals.  Did you know, for example, that while many animals are routinely euthanized, chimpanzees are not?  There are actually special retirement homes set up for them. It seems that the more human an animal appears, the more we relate to them.  Which is why I haven’t the slightest qualms about eating a fish or a chicken but would never consider eating a chimpanzee. The difference, I explain to my dear friend Sara, who is a strict vegetarian, is that fish and chicken don’t have facial expressions.)

Of course, the entire human race is connected by DNA, which is why it is possible for any human of any color to breed with another human.  Often very different combinations result in a similar product, and for that reason I have had a great variety of nations claim me as their own: Spanish, Italian, Filipino, Vietnamese, you name it.  I embrace them all, happy to feel a sense of connection with anyone, anyone at all. A Japanese modeling agency pursued me for a while; they were particularly interested in Asian-looking models with creased eyelids.

Each year on our anniversary I pick a cultural theme. Cameron and I dress up in costumes of different nations, eat their traditional food and do some cultural activity.  One year we did Hawaiian, another year Persian, another Mexican. At the international convention in Prague in 2006 we dressed like cowboys and Indians (or, as Dad likes to say, “cowboys and Chinese”, as it might have been if Columbus had been looking for China.) “It’s all part of my ongoing identity crisis,” I would tell my friends.

I was shopping in Little India in Norwalk one day when the store owner approached me and asked, “Are you Indian?”

At the time I thought I was and told him so.

“I knew it!” he said with delight.

We got to talking. His name was Babu (I remember thinking to myself, Is it possible my real father’s name was not ‘Bob’ but ‘Babu’? ) He tried to talk me into entering the local Miss India Pagent. Now that I know that I am not in the least bit Asian Indian, it is amusing to realize that, based on my true bloodlines, my academic record (college dropout), financial goals (none) and my failure to reproduce, I would almost surely be dumped at the bottom of the caste system. India, of course, is infamously fixated on skin color, and now knowing my black heritage, I’m almost disappointed I didn’t run in the contest, just so I could say later, “Hey, India, the joke’s on you!”

Believing that there is a Creator who can use the science of DNA to both create and re-create the human family, I am looking forward to one day meeting my Grandpa Mel. When I do, I promise to try to pay attention when he tells me stories and to not be distracted by his honey brown eyes and dimpled-cheek smile.

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