Efforts at speech

At the funeral, everyone kept telling me that I look like my dad. The odd thing is that neither he nor I could ever spot the likeness. I remember how we once talked about family resemblances and he said that he didn’t think I looked much like either him or my mother, and that probably I’m the spitting image of some ancestor from another century, but we’ll never know. My eyes are definitely my mother’s, but the rest of my features are harder to identify.

But now, I’m seeing resemblances all over the place. My tendency to worry and fret and be pessimistic comes from my father’s side of the family (not just him, but generations of Scottish Presbyterians). But he also gave me my taste for movies and theater and visual spectacle of all kinds, and a lot of my sense of humor comes from him as well. My love of language is from both of my parents, jointly; my mother’s family is full of Scrabble-players and makers of terrible puns, and she read to me every night of my childhood until long after I could read on my own. My father told me long, elaborate stories when I was growing up, and when I was too old for stories he talked about books with me and gave me his back issues of the New Yorker. My wavy hair is like his, and so (according to family friends) are some of my characteristic hand gestures.

It’s hard to tell how much of us is in the DNA we get from our parents and their parents, how much is in our upbringing and the circumstances that shape us, and how much is random or inexplicable. One of the things my dad’s friends gave me was a sheaf of research he’d been doing on the Scottish side of his family; he’d gotten all the way back to an ancestor born in 1771 in Lanarkshire. Someday I may go there to see where my great-great-great-great-grandparents came from.

I think I’m starting to see now why people have children. It’s as if somehow, if you can see how your parents and grandparents continuing, even in something as small as the shape of an eyebrow or a tilt of the head, you haven’t completely lost them, even if you’ll never see them again. And you hang on to that, because you have to.

It’s still difficult to write anything, but when I think of where I got my fondness for spinning words together, it helps, somehow.

3 Responses to “Efforts at speech”

  1. Clancy says:

    I’ve been thinking about you, Amanda. I don’t know firsthand, but it sounds like, as Mike said, the writing is helping. I hope so.

  2. dale says:

    Well, no, that’s not why we have children. We have children because we’ve got no sense.
    But it is passing strange, sometimes pleasing, sometimes scary, always a little spooky, to see your physical and mental and spiritual self peeping out of another body.
    I think we’re all passing on a good deal more than we ever imagine. That’s doctrine for me, of course — tendrel, interconnectedness — but I don’t think you have to get all mystical and otherworldly to see that we’re all the time spilling attitudes and emotions and thoughts and habits of mind into the world — all the time. Just the way we meet or don’t meet a stranger’s eyes on the street, or the enthusiasm we show or don’t show at receiving a mocha from a barrista’s hands. We’re leaving inheritances all the time.
    It sounds to me as though a lot of good things have flowed into you from your father, and I know (as one of the recipients) that they’re flowing out of you as well. Sometimes I think we’re really mostly just strainers, that our only moral job is to clear the way for good things to flow on through us.
    Anyway, this is by way of saying that you shine, wherever it comes from 🙂

  3. Amanda says:

    “Strainers” — I like it. For some reason I’m getting this mental picture of someone sitting next to a stream with one of those nets people use to filter leaves out of swimming pools. 🙂
    I think I said something very like your point about interconnectedness once while giving a presentation in a psychoanalytic theory class: that we all leave traces of ourselves in other people, and are marked by other people’s traces in turn. It wasn’t exactly mystical and otherworldly the way I put it, but maybe it was, in a way.