This past Wednesday night, eight of us sat around a table meant for six, smearing cream cheese on our bagels and swapping stories of childhood mischief that grew increasingly ridiculous. Kitchen escapades, pyromania, sibling warfare--our family has probably never been labelled with the adjectives "quiet", "peaceful", or "pleasant", at least not on my father's side. A spoonful of crazy (if one can describe a shovel as a spoon) goes with the name, the hair, and the distinctive tendency toward narrative embellishment.
Mid-reminisce, my great-aunt turned to me and told me I should be writing this all down, or better yet, recording it. "You've got the start of a story right here," she insisted. I smiled politely and nodded my head, and refrained from pointing out that so far, nothing that had been mentioned was really worthy of being recorded for posterity, and certainly wouldn't pull in a cent for the schmuck who bothered to try. Sure, we've done some silly stunts, but nothing that anyone outside the family would care to hear about. Hell, not even everyone in the family is interested in hearing about it.
Family legends and anecdotes give us something to share, some common conversational web on which we can all perch on our infrequent meetings. It allows us to pretend, for a brief moment, that we're not just an assemblage of individual misfits, as different from one another as a grain of sand is from a snowflake. I may share half my DNA, on average, with each of my brothers, but it's as if we come from completely different galaxies, let alone planets. Yeah, my grandmother once accidentally set a shed on fire, but hey, that doesn't make my own love of fires any less my own quirkiness or any more of a cute inherited trait. Older relatives are fond of pointing out things like that, along with characteristics like large foreheads, wiry hair, beak-like noses, or the habit of nail-biting, and ascribing deep, mystic significance to them. "He's just like his father." "He has your eyes, dear." "Oh, your grandfather used to love to read, too!"
At this point, dear reader, you may think I'm a misanthropic, family-hating, reclusive, ill-mannered wretch: the sort who'd shove his parents in a dingy nursing home, or burn the family portraits while reading Hobbes or Nietzsche. And maybe you're partly right (Nietzsche, though? seriously? spare me, please) but what I'm getting at is this: there's an almost unavoidable tendency in families to look for any and all means of assuring themselves that they are, indeed, one and the same. It's not enough to share as much as half of our unique genetic variability; it's not enough that when it comes to it, I'd donate blood, marrow, organs, and hell, even a cup of coffee (two, though? forget it) to help a member of my family; no, on top of all that, all our little foibles, silly misadventures, and every single trait or tendency have to be pinned and crucified on the cork-board of clannishness. Anything that makes any of us different has to traced back to some ancestral well-spring, validated and stamped by dynastic determinism.
And the really funny thing is, probably every family does it, to some extent. And if every family sees itself, comprised of all its individual members, as a single vein, a "chip off the old block", and each chip, in reality, contains flecks and specks and whorls of every metaphorical mineral or element in the catalog of human habits and desires--then all families are just one big family, and we're all the same, not because our great-grandmother had our hair or our grandfather had a taste for poetry, but because a few million years ago, a curly-haired apish-looking creature awkwardly shuffling on two legs tried her hand at iambic pentameter. Or something like that.
At least, in theory.
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