2000-06-10
Dear Diary:

����Well, as Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet, that old cop show I used to watch when I was a kid, "Nothing but the facts, ma'am..."

����So here's all the facts I know about my great-great-grandparents, Daniel and Eliza Ann, first owners of the ugly house plant, bits of which have been in my family since 1872.

����She was the daughter of a wealthy judge, he was the son of a poor Irish immigrant farmer. They married far from home, not long after Ann Eliza's 21st birthday. Under Quebec law you couldn't get married without your parents' or guardian's permission if you were under 21. Their first child was born three days after they got married. There are many stories about his side of the family handed down in my family and none about hers.

����So here's what I'm guessing happened, because the real story was hushed up in my family.

����Ann Eliza fell in love with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Her father would not let her marry this guy, and until she turned 21 she could not get married unless she had her father's signature. I will never know if she got pregnant on purpose to force her father's hand, or if it was an accident, but either way it looks like her father preferred the thought of an illegitimate grandchild to having a dirt poor Irish son-in-law.

����Almost as soon as they could legally marry, Daniel and Ann Eliza eloped. After they did, her family had nothing to do with her, and one of the last pieces of her old life was a houseplant given to her by a sister.

����This is my best guess as to what might have happened.

����The one other concrete fact I know about them is that they found happily ever after in their marriage. It was such a happy marriage that bits of the houseplant Ann Eliza was given as a wedding gift are still handed out in my family five generations later as a sort of talisman, a hope that we will all get a piece of their happiness.

����So why am I doing this, why do I try so hard to piece together the lives of the people who make the chain of begats that end with me? Why should it matter to me what they were like as people?

����Because I would like to understand myself better, and I don't think I can know myself and not know them. Sing along with me, use that old Beatles' song, "I am the Walrus":

����I am they
����And they are me
����And we are me
����And we are all together

����AND while we await the gentlemen with the oversize butterfly nets who will shortly arrive to take Marn to the place with the large padded room where they will speak to her in soothing tones and feed her lots of chocolate pudding ... that place ... let's talk about the question of nature versus nurture, shall we?

����There's a lot of controversy about how much of us is hardwired into who we are (nature) and how much the way we are raised shapes us into the people we become (nurture).

����Ever since Mendel mucked around with his peas, we've known about the physical side of heredity. Mendel figured out that there are dominant and recessive genes and that they explain why things such as blue eyes travel in some families and not in others.

����So it came to be accepted that physical characteristics were hard wired into us, that they are part of our genetic code. Mendel explained why some things disappear and then re-appear in families generations down the line, how recessive genes await pairing with other recessive genes to bring back traits.

����More research, more digging, and it was gradually proven that some diseases are hereditary. For instance, there are forms of diabetes you can inherit, and they skip a generation. In my family that matters because my father's grandmother, Letitia, died of this diabetes, my father had it, and there's a chance that my daughter may be at risk because she's the skipped generation below my dad ...

����More research, more digging, and now there are questions being raised about whether some illnesses that were considered mental illnesses (and perhaps caused by nurture), are actually also part of our genetic heritage. There are studies underway to see if there is a genetic link to depression, if some folks are born with faulty receptors in their brains, that they don't handle the natural mood altering chemicals our bodies make as well as most folks do.

����That matters in my family because we have three generations of suicide now on my mother's side. Some of it can definitely be laid at the feet of a poor environment, poor nurturing, but now I also wonder if along with my dad's blue eyes and my mom's wavy hair, if part of my genetic code contains the seeds of someone else's destruction.

����Now here is where it gets truly spooky. A few years ago I was reading in the New York Times magazine about a researcher who had managed to track down a small number of identical twins who had been separated at birth and adopted by different families.

����In theory we are talking about people with identical hardwiring, so they are potent tools in the study of what is nature and what is nurture. They grew up in very different environments, yet as adults turned out to be startlingly alike. Two brothers both became firemen, smoked the same semi-obscure brand of cigarettes, liked the same foods � oh my.

����So just what IS hardwired into us, then?

����Maybe more than we know.

����Okay, say you don't want to consider that our genetic code contains any more than our physical code, that's fine with me, because like I said a lot of this stuff is still speculation.

����So that leaves the next question I've been asking myself. Can I ignore nurture? Does it matter if my great-grandparents were good parents?

����I mean, I know that all these people funneled their genetic code down through the generations into me. Does the way they treated their children affect the way I was raised, the person I became?

����Do bears poop in the woods?

����What do you think?

--Marn

Old Drivel - New Drivel


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Want to delve into my sordid past?
She's mellllllllllllllting - Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012 - Back off, Buble - Monday, Dec. 19, 2011 - Dispersed - Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 - Nothing comes for free - Monday, Nov. 21, 2011 - None of her business - Friday, Nov. 04, 2011 -


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