resemblance
Jun. 5th, 2008 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Today Dad and I took baby David on his first Jeep ride. It was only a quick ride; Dad was driving the windshield-less black Jeep that Ann and Katy both rolled back in their days, using it to haul some stuff out from the barn, and had to put it away, so I climbed in the passenger's seat with the baby and we growled and chugged in first gear, low range, up the back lane and around the field behind the woodshed before parking it in the barn. I had no shoes on. David watched the steering wheel in fascination.
I told him that my first Jeep ride had been the day before I was born. Well, I'd amended, perhaps there had been earlier ones, but that's the story Mom always tells. Trying to convince labor to start, she'd had Dad take her on a bumpy Jeep ride through the cornfield stubble of that late, hot, awful August.
Ann and I continued looking through Grandma's letters and old photos. She found a picture of "John Kelly. 1918-1978"-- Dad's father-- as a boy, wearing short pants and a jacket and a cap, probably aged less than ten.
All of Dad's siblings look like their own children in the photos we find of them as children. Except the youngest, baby Maggie (born 1952), who looks like my sister Ann. She looks eerily like Ann in photos from 1955 up to the late 70s (when she was Ann's current age), despite being a short, slight brunette with the fragile birdlike bones of her mother, while Ann is five ten and broad-shouldered like our mother, with powerful thighs and wild dark-blond hair. They share similar adaptations of Grandma's oval face, her strong chin and high-bridged nose.
It's interesting. Though in one of the photos of Maggie, who is probably twenty in the picture, she looks uncannily like her sister Judy's son Aleksander did when he was a teenager.
Family resemblance is an odd thing.
David also looks like Ann, most of us theorize. But today, he was recovering from a mild bout of constipation brought on by all that driving, and he kept pausing and straining and grunting, his little face turning deep red and screwing itself into a puzzled/concentrating expression. And during those moments... well, we all think he looks like his father when he poops. For whatever that's worth.
I told him that my first Jeep ride had been the day before I was born. Well, I'd amended, perhaps there had been earlier ones, but that's the story Mom always tells. Trying to convince labor to start, she'd had Dad take her on a bumpy Jeep ride through the cornfield stubble of that late, hot, awful August.
Ann and I continued looking through Grandma's letters and old photos. She found a picture of "John Kelly. 1918-1978"-- Dad's father-- as a boy, wearing short pants and a jacket and a cap, probably aged less than ten.
All of Dad's siblings look like their own children in the photos we find of them as children. Except the youngest, baby Maggie (born 1952), who looks like my sister Ann. She looks eerily like Ann in photos from 1955 up to the late 70s (when she was Ann's current age), despite being a short, slight brunette with the fragile birdlike bones of her mother, while Ann is five ten and broad-shouldered like our mother, with powerful thighs and wild dark-blond hair. They share similar adaptations of Grandma's oval face, her strong chin and high-bridged nose.
It's interesting. Though in one of the photos of Maggie, who is probably twenty in the picture, she looks uncannily like her sister Judy's son Aleksander did when he was a teenager.
Family resemblance is an odd thing.
David also looks like Ann, most of us theorize. But today, he was recovering from a mild bout of constipation brought on by all that driving, and he kept pausing and straining and grunting, his little face turning deep red and screwing itself into a puzzled/concentrating expression. And during those moments... well, we all think he looks like his father when he poops. For whatever that's worth.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-06 05:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-22 06:57 pm (UTC)Yes, family resemblance is a cool thing, and it will be a slight loss to raise a child without that. But there are all kinds of losses and compromises in every life. It's natural to grieve them, of course.
I have the luxury of being the child and grandchild of large families, on one side-- so my father's family is a big sprawling fascinating network of resemblances and funny expressions of the same genes in interesting recombinations. But Grandma was one of only two children, and I don't know her sister's descendants. And my mother's side of the family, the one whose genealogy I know so much about, is mostly dead-ends-- she's the only one of her generation to have kids. So I know the names and dates of hundreds of ancestors on that side, but don't know which of them I inherited my strange toes from.
And my baby sister and I have a genetic defect so we're missing several of our adult molars-- we have no idea where that came from, but she and I both have it almost identically!
I told that to my roller derby team captain-- she's an adopted child herself, and knows nothing of her birth parents (she was found abandoned in a Dumpster at 2 months of age...), and has had several kinds of cancer, and they just can't tell her whether it's from something she was exposed to, or if it's genetic, because they don't know who her parents were.
She was a bit comforted to know that I have something genetic that knowing dozens of generations of ancestors hasn't helped narrow down! It's not as serious as cancer, but still.