Ha, God, I’m Such a Wimp

So, I had two goals today. One, complete a whole day of work. Which I failed at. Because, America, when you sleep for nine hours, go to work, drink two pops, and still fall asleep at your desk, you are too sick to be at work.

The other was to broach with my parents the the wisdom of them retiring to Georgia. You’ll be amused to know that this was accomplished by me just blurting out, “Please retire near a child who will take you to the doctor!” which was met with dead silence.

So…

Um…

Yes.

The Butcher’s method was to drive them around really beautiful places with one-level homes.

I imagine that might work better.

Navel Gazing through History

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this discovery that parts of my family have been here since shortly after English-speaking people started arriving here. It’s a little disconcerting, because our family myth has always been basically “Somehow we arrived fully formed in the Midwest, land of values and some small amount of ridiculousness.”  I didn’t think of us as completely recent arrivals.  I knew we’d gotten here before the turn of the last century.  But I imagined some 19th century arrival for us all, where we landed and then ran straight for the midwest.

And I thought of myself as a person of German descent with a little weird strain of Swedish pride.  After all, my one grandfather comes from German folks. My other grandmother comes from Germans and Swedes. And who knows or cares about the rest?

Ha, well, yes, so that was stupid.

I don’t know. It’s weirder to discover that the stories you’ve been told about your family are more propaganda than truth, than it is to discover the truth, if that makes sense.

And I wonder about the strangeness of that being the strand of both my mother’s and my father’s families that wasn’t repeated over and over again and told as a story about who we are.

I’m also really glad to have been out to Boston a few times, since so many of my people are from there.  Ha, I don’t know. It’s cool, but I have 511 other great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfathers besides Grandpa Putnam, so it’s not like it’s actually that small a pool.

Okay, wait, I have to take that back, because we had some cousin marrying on my dad’s side, so Grandpa Putnam is probably one of closer to 510 than 512.  And that’s without figuring out how the Bradstreets on my dad’s side are related to the Bradstreets on my mom’s side. Ha, you know that your family tree has to be shaped like a diamond, spreading out until a certain point, and then starting to shrink back up, not to a point, but to a relatively small pool.  It’s just weird to see it in action.

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not suddenly struck by a “we” with the Putnams.

(Although, I do feel a strange fondness for the Mehetabels I keep coming across in my family tree. That must have been the Elizabeth or Anne of its day–Mehetabel–because I have a shit-ton of Mehetabel ancestors. Now? I’m not even sure how you’d pronounce it.)

Two Links for Your Enjoyment

1.  I wrote a thing at Pith. The comments are fun.

2. Check out Steve and Christian! Yes, fine, the discussion is very interesting, but if you want to hear a good Southern accent peeking through, you have to check out what Steve sounds like in this video. I believe he manages a 2-1/2 syllable “pole.”