Aunt Elaine & my father as kids AND another big sister and brother goofing around 2 generations later - Emily & Leo
I've been sifting through old family photos and scannning them for posterity. I'm suppossed to have been doing this for years, now, but something more urgent always intrudes on documenting my vast family tree. I only got this last batch done because there was a deadline: my Aunt Elaine's Oregon memorial service this past weekend. I didn't attend, but my parents did, and my mother read my Blog Entry tribute to her in my stead as some of the scanned photos flashed behind.
Who's the Mom? Both. My Mother as a kid, and my sister as a kid.
I find myself most drawn to images of my father as a child. We've only seen a few choice photos of his youth over the years, but the latest batch my Aunt Carolyn mailed to me was a treasure trove of goofball and formal poses of all my aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents - even a few of my sister & I. It never stops to amaze me when I see the same eyes staring back from an antique picture and a modern shot of my nieces and nephew.
The Tanta (years before Abigail's birth) and her vivacious first niece
Do our bodies naturally find the same poses, our faces contort into the same genetic smiles, our familial spirits steal out of the eyes? I know that I hold my chin in my hand identically to my father, and I see the same gestures in my cousins - so it's a trait with deeper roots than my immediate blood, but perhaps a learned/observed behaviour passed on in practice rather than a double helix.
I know that many an ill-health gene made it down the family line, too many to count, unfortunately - and some I hope that never make it, too. I've had more than my fair share of illness, but I just assume that the gene for Endometriosis probably sits on the same chromosome as the gene for screenwriting. They're DNA neighbors for better or worse. I believe that holds true for all my creative, health-hobbled relatives. Breast cancer must be next to the drawing gene in my Aunt Elaine. Bad-back/slipped disk disease snuggled-up next to the designing experiments gene in my father. And on and on. My only hope is that fewer medically disastrous genes make their way to the next generation. So that my nieces and nephew are left with only the spark of creation and the good health to stoke its flames - and that same smile passed down from Snyder & Borko to Kastenberg and beyond.
