Category Archives: life

Which came first, the bunny or the egg?

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Which came first, the bunny or the egg? It is a question which has baffled philosophers1 since the dawn of time4.

The real question is: which came first, the quaint custom surrounding a particular commemoration or the highly unlikely5 explanation of its origin which insists said tradition is far more ancient than it could reasonably be? Which may seem a silly question, because obviously the post-dated fantastical explanation of a custom or tradition wouldn’t have any need to be concocted until after the custom or tradition had come into existence, right9?

I don’t have a good answer, other than to say there is no such thing as too many excuses to indulge in chocolate22.

Notes:
1. Or at least preschoolers2.

2. And smart-ass bloggers3.

3. Who, maturity-wise, often lag far behind the average preschool child.

4. Or, at least since the 19th Century, which is when the first contemporaneous reports of giving children decorated eggs at Easter are found, as well as the invention of the first “Easter Card” when one publisher first offered for sale stationary pre-printed with a drawing of a bunny and an Easter greeting.

5. Don’t get me started on just how ludicrous the various Ishtar/Mithra/Ēostre6 explanations are.

6. Bede’s Latin was superb and he is generally considered a good historical source, don’t get me wrong, but he wrote De temporum ratione with at least two political agendas in mind: a) the unification of the various ethnic groups of Britain into one nation7, and b) his animosity to the British method of calculating the date of Easter8.

7. Which was far from a foregone conclusion in the year 725 AD when Bede wrote that treatise.

8. A controversy which has divided the church for much of its history. Just last night our waitress, who was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church, was commenting on the fact that her relatives back home aren’t celebrating Easter until May 5, as the resolution adopted at the Summit of Alepo, Syria by the World Council of Churches in 1997 has still not been put into effect.

9. Trying to inject logic into a discussion like this is clearly a fool’s errand10.

10. Mind you, as foolish as it may be, it can also be a lot of fun. Not unlike the debate about whether Jesus was a Zombie or a Lich which my husband interrupted my writing to give me a play-by-play of11.

11. At the time, the Lich partisans were deeply engaged in a discussion of what object functioned as his phylactery1216

12. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons form of a horcrux13.

13. The Harry Potter-verse version of a muo-ping14.

14. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer-verse version of a soul jar15

15. A container or object which holds all or part of a person’s soul (or life, or heart) outside of their body, thus makes that person immortal and/or invulnerable so long as the Soul Jar remains intact.

16. The leading candidates being the Cross itself, the chalice that caught his blood, or the enchanted bread17 he fed his disciples at the Last Supper. All of which are, of course, incorrect20.

17. Which had spawned a mini debate about whether that meant that each of the 12 disciples as a Soul Container, or was the bread enchanted somehow to be indigestible21.

18. In which case, is the real reason Judas hung himself19 to try to thwart Jesus’ revivification?

19. Assuming you believe he did hang himself. Or was it murder?

20. Because obviously the place he hid his soul was the Keys that he gave to Peter. Why else has the elaborate system of selecting who gets to hold those keys evolved into the bizarre ritual of the Conclave of Cardinals that gather to select a new Pope?

21. Which leads to gross implications that I do not want to contemplate!

22. Make mine dark, please!

Skewed polls and secret money

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A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them three-to-one. Just a week earlier he had been insisting that the polls which were all predicting passage of the referendum were skewed. “People are reluctant to say what they really feel to a pollster, because the pro-sodomy side has tricked the media into calling support of traditional marriage as bigotry. But when those voters are in the privacy of the voting booth, they will vote their true feelings.”

They did vote their true feelings. Fortunately for those of us who believe in equality, they had also been telling their true feelings to the pollsters. Surprise, surprise!

Sadly, I believe it was a complete surprise to the opposers. It shouldn’t have been. They had other evidence, and it was right there in that hypocritical comment he made about spending. It was hypocritical because it had only been four years before, during the Proposition 8 campaign in California that the anti-gay side had been doing the outspending. And for years before that, each ballot measure that came up in any state related to marriage equality or civil unions, it was the anti-gay side that always seemed to have the money advantage.

This time around, in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, the forces of hate came up short both in the ballot box and fundraising. And it wasn’t simply a matter that suddenly our side was better at raising money. No, the big story is that they have, in just the last few years, experienced a serious drop in donations.

It isn’t just the amount of money. What’s more significant is the number of donors. The national organizations have been very secretive about their funding. They have refused, again and again, to reveal their donor lists, even when they appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost, they have tried to keep that secret. Eventually, some details are beginning to emerge:

Each year, according to [the National Organization for Marriage]’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns.

My emphasis added. Whoever those mysterious top two donors are, their donations have became a larger and larger proportion of the pot, as the thousands who gave less than $5000 dollars a year have dwindled to hundreds.

Statistics tell us the the most vehement opposition comes from the oldest voters, so a percentage of that drop off represents to reality of demographics. As elderly opposers die off, without a compensating proportion of supporters coming up in younger generations, some of that is just inevitable. But the drop off in support to the anti-gay cause in the last three or four years is far in excess of what could be accounted for by mere demographics.

People are changing their minds.

There will always be a hardcore group opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people. Just a couple weeks ago at the big conservative conference a guy stood up and argued in favor of slavery because he believed it was a self-evident truth that whites were superior to blacks. He wasn’t an invited speaker, and to their credit, panelists and audience members challenged him on it, but during the ensuing back and forth he also made a comment to the effect the women shouldn’t have the right to speak up in public, either. So, just like that unrepentant racist and misogynist, there will always be homophobes among us.

But as more of the moderates and non-hateful conservatives come around, that view will be limited to the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

In the months since the vote in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota went our way, the opposers’ spokespeople have gone from saying that they were outspent 3-to-1 (which turned out to be a small exaggeration in our state) to claiming they were outspent 4-to-1, then 5-to-1… the last quote I read was “more than 7-to-1.” I believe their exaggerations get worse due to desperation. They hope that skewing their claim of victimhood will prompt more people to donate more money, which they think can turn the tide.

What they don’t understand is that the only skewed “polls” were their own. They fell into the common trap of thinking that because most of the people they know and like agree with them, that it absolutely must be the case the most people, period, do so. They think that since they still manage to raise a lot of money that there is still a lot of support, ignoring the fact that it’s a smaller and smaller number of people sending in the money. Because they are convinced of the truth of their cause, they believe that the only reasons polls and voting can be going against them is some kind of chicanery. They think that calling us pedophiles, comparing our relationships to bestiality or incest is “civil discourse,” but if we call them bigots we’re being bullies.

Most of all, many of them believe all the lies and distortions that they tell about us. Lies that other people can no longer believe once they get to know us:

Forgotten or Unknown?

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Our collective memory can be frightfully shallow.

Take, for instance, an on-line discussion I was in recently where there were people who weren’t aware that not that many years ago it was illegal to be gay. By which I don’t just mean that the notion of gay marriage didn’t exist, but that if the authorities found out you were gay, they could send you to prison. I had to tell them of an acquaintance who had been arrested for indecency back in 1970 for kissing his boyfriend in the wrong neighborhood. That meant that he didn’t just have a criminal record, but a sexual offense (albeit a misdemeanor).

Note that he was not arrested for rape, attempted rape, or anything like that. Chris was 21 years old, his boyfriend was 24, they were consenting adults who had just left a gay bar together. It was late at night, and they were making out in the boyfriend’s car near Chris’s dorm at the University of Washington. Yes, they were here in a city with a reputation as being ultra liberal. But they were two men kissing, and that was something society could not abide in 1970!

If I recall correctly, Chris said his boyfriend lost his job because of the arrest, and had a difficult time finding a new one. Chris didn’t begin to run into problems getting hired himself until a few years later, after he graduated and started looking for more substantial jobs than the starving-student-type of employment he’d had before.

He wound up working as a hair stylist, saved up his pennies, and eventually opened his own shop. It hadn’t been what he’d meant his career to be, but he made do.

Contrast that with something I witnessed during my own college days (some years later): one of my dormmates convinced a bunch of us to go with him one night to a park that was near the school. I have completely forgotten what the purpose of the excursion was, now, but we got a bit lost and stumbled upon a guy and a gal who were having sex under a tree.

It was long after dark, they were off of any paths, behind some bushes, and they were clearly trying not to be seen or heard.

We hurried away before the angry guy could do more than yell at us.

Not much further, we encountered a cop, who stopped us and asked us what we were doing in the park after dark. There was a point where I thought we were all going to be showing him our student IDs or something, but something one of the guys said made the cop grin and ask us if we had run into anyone doing something they oughtn’t. And then he made a reference to the size of the girl’s breasts.

It was clear he had seen them, as well, but had decided not to do anything about it. I think he implied that he had been sent to the park because of complaints about such activity, and he thought it was a waste of time, since no one was being hurt.

I suspect the cops reaction would have been very different if it had been two guys.

I’ve been running into a lot of people, when discussing issues such as marriage equality, the Violence Against Women Act, or wage disparity, who are completely unaware of just how recently things that they currently think of as mere fruatrations were either mandated or at least aided and abetted by the law.

For instance, up until the mid 70s, a married women did not have a legal right to withhold sex from her husband. Even if they were living separated, in the midst of divorce proceedings, and he had been witnessed physically abusing her many times, if he forced her to have sex she couldn’t get him convicted of rape. Heck, most of the time she couldn’t get him charged. Finally, a woman who had attempted to get the rape included in the assault charges against her husband (ex-husband by the time it went to trial), managed to appeal the decision not to include the charges up to a federal judge who agreed: if she says “no,” it’s rape.

That didn’t cause a sudden change in the law or practice in this regard, but it was the very first recognition that in the U.S. legal system that a wife’s body wasn’t literally and entirely the property of her husband to do with as he pleased. And that only happened a mere 36 years ago.

There are still laws on the books related to that notion. My favorite are the “alienation of affection” laws. If you look up the topic online now, all you will find are articles that refer to the versions of the laws as they have been altered in response to legal challenges. So wikipedia, for example, says that the laws allow a spouse to file a lawsuit against a third party alleged to be responsible for the failure of the marriage.

The original laws allowed only the husband to file a lawsuit against another person for “malicious conduct that contributed to or caused the loss of affection.” The most common malicious conduct was, of course, seducing her into having an affair. For a long time a wife could not file a similar lawsuit against someone she believed she could prove had acted to alienate her husband’s affections. In the last several decades, most of these laws that have remained on the books have been revised to be gender-neutral, which I suppose is an improvement.

The problem is that while the original justification of the laws was assumption that a wife’s body (and affection, et cetera) were the property of the husband and he could expect the legal system to protect his property rights, the gender-neutral versions still assume a property rights relationship. If you need the law the force your partner to love you, that is not love. Okay, successful lawsuits under these laws don’t end up with orders to anyone to go back to loving their spouse, but when the law is able to inflict punishment because someone has fallen out of love, the principle is the same.

There’s going to be a lot of talk on the news and around the web this week where people are emphatically insisting the marriage has been an unchanging institution for all of human history, and that’s pure nonsense. In the last five decades alone in this country we have redefined marriage in several ways:

  • so that it includes interracial couples,
  • so that it includes persons previously considered less than full citizens because of certain mental and medical conditions,
  • so that even prisoners on death row must be allowed into the institution if they want, and,
  • so that a wife’s body is not treated as the legal property of her husband.

Over the course of five decades before that we have legally redefined it so that a couple who have realized the marriage was a mistake could end it without having to prove that one spouse was abusive, or go through other legal hoops to satisfy society that the marriage was over.

In the century before that we have legally redefined it so that people didn’t have to get the approval of a church (and before that, the official state church) in order to get married, allowing people who were raised in different faiths to get married, as well as allowing those of no faith at all in.

In the last few centuries we’ve redefined marriage in a way that almost no one realizes was never an integral part of the institution: we made marriage about love. For most of human history marriage has been a matter of creating/reinforcing family alliances, securing the orderly inheritance of property, and/or politics. The notion that two people would meet, fall in love, and decide all on their own to get married has only been around for a few centuries.

So any so-called defenders of traditional marriage who mention a relationship of mutual love and respect is not talking about a very old tradition, at all.

Yes, the notion that two people of the same gender might be the ones who fall in love is new for a lot of people, but when looked at in comparison to all the other ways that marriage has changed, it’s actually only a very minor refinement.

Part and parcel

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A pop musician or movie star gets arrested for driving under the influence and being in possession of an illegal controlled substance. When he or she is sentenced to nothing more than some hours of community service, there may be a bit of an outcry from the public, but thousands still attend the concerts, buy the music, see the movies.

If questioned, the fans might claim that you have to separate the art from the artist. They’re more likely to simply say, “Yeah, but I love the music/movie.” But it’s the same argument. Things that an artist does in their real life has nothing to do with the quality of product itself. Just as it would be inappropriate to claim that a painting is less than worthy of appreciation because the artist happens to be a member of a race other than the majority, a particular piece of art should stand upon its own merits, alone.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that the celebrity doesn’t deserve special treatment before the law. We can compare the punishment given to the celebrity to those typically given to non-celebrities charged with the same crime. We can point out that this prominent person was given a punishment at the very lowest end of the first-offenders sentencing range, even though this is their fifth or sixth or twentieth run-in with the law over substance abuse issues.

We can demand that the special treatment stop. Yes, maybe that movie we’ve been waiting for will have to be delayed (or more likely, made with a different actor), but crimes and irresponsible actions should have consequences, and sometimes those consequences impact people other than the perpetrator.

The aforementioned situation is pretty clear, and not likely to draw a lot of argument on the principles.

It gets less black and white if the actor, musician, or artist is arrested for assault, or worse. How much that changes our perception of his or her work depends upon the nature of the crimes and the nature of their work. It may become difficult to listen to a singer crooning love songs when you know he has been convicted multiple times of domestic abuse against multiple partners, for instance.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.—Salvador Dali

So far our hypotheticals have been about what an artist does during aspects of their lives that would otherwise be private. What happens when it happens on the stage? Say, for instance, that you’re a C- or D-list singer-songwriter who, early in your career, made statements indicating you were lesbian, and for a couple of decades your fanbase has been predominately lesbian, and you’ve continued to cater to that fanbase even though in your private life you’ve married a conservation fundamentalist Christian man and joined an evangelical church.

And then one night, on stage in a city that most of the world equates with gay people, in between songs you start going on a long, screaming rant about how gay marriage is going to destroy the world, how decriminalizing abortion is the signal of the collapse of civilization, and screaming at the audience members who start walking out that “God hates fags!”

I don’t think anybody would argue that other venues you were scheduled to appear at are within their rights to cancel your shows. Politics aside, no one wants to deal with all those angry customers.

Issuing statements afterward that it was meant to be ironic (yet another assault on that poor, abused, misunderstood word), or taken out of context, afterward isn’t going to undo the damage. Particularly with the full video available on the internet and it is quite clear the the context is only hate, hate, more hate, and crazy.

And you can insist you have freedom of speech all you want. Freedom of speech means that you can say what you want without intrference from the government. It doesn’t mean freedom from people being so offended that they choose to stop listening to and buying your music. It doesn’t mean freedom from being criticized. It doesn’t mean freedom from being seen to be a hateful hypocrit whose career is based almost entirely on milking an ambiguous statement that you might be a member of a group of people you despise. Nor does it mean freedom from being labeled a self-loathing closet case in addition to the hypocrit charge.

Assaulting your audience and essentially admitting that you’ve been scamming them for years is another case where things are pretty black and white. There is no reason to separate the art from the artist, because the art is an inherent part of the crime the artist committed.

While I think that Ms Shocked’s tirade was deplorable and revealed that she is a reprehensible, malicious, vulgar louse deserving of our scorn, that wasn’t her biggest crime.

The most awful thing she has done is to produce all that disingenuous music. It is a sin to be a hateful bigot. It is a bigger sin to intentionally produce crap that you don’t believe and call in art.

Things out of our control, part 2

life,

I was just laying down to take a nap last night when the phone rang. The name on the screen was a friend who very seldom calls, but when he does, it’s important. So instead of letting it go to voice mail and laying back down, I answered.

He was at a hospital, outside a room where his dad lay unconscious and not expected to recover.

I didn’t know my friend’s dad well. I had met him a few times. I had admired his father’s artwork many times before I met him, because he’s kinda famous. So when my friend introduced me, I made the mistake of calling him “Mr. J——.” He shook his head and told me, “No! I’m Bud.”

It was fun getting a tour of Bud’s studio from the man himself, complete with a few amusing stories about his son, my friend. Some years later I had the privilege of hearing him play fiddle at his son’s wedding.

My favorite moment with Bud occurred during a barbecue one Fourth of July. My friend was setting up some fireworks. Some bottle rockets and the like. Bud came over and told his son to aim them up at one particular tall tree. “There’s a wasp’s nest up there I’d like to get rid of.”

What followed was a debate about the pros and cons of firing fireworks into a tree that loomed over the house, and happened to be infested with wasps. Bud almost talked his son into it. Almost.

All of that flashed through my mind as his son told me, “We’re taking turns saying good-bye.” I asked him what I could do. He said that he just needed someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t there and crying.

I managed to gulp back the tears and tried to be someone who wasn’t crying.

There’s nothing we can do in times like that, other than be there for each other.

This year has been a bit of a challenge. My last grandparent died a month and a half ago. If the doctors are right, this will be the fourth parent of someone I know who has left us since I lost Grandma B.

They’re not connected. I know that. Because of my age, and because many of my friends are of a similar age, our parents are “getting up there,” as one friend put it.

But it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t take anything and especially anyone for granted. Make sure you tell people you care about how you feel. Now. Because we never know which conversation with them will be our last.

Tilting at windmills

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For some reason this year the time change is messing with me more than usual.

I’ve been going to bed early, falling asleep, and so far as I know sleeping soundly through the night. Yet when the alarm goes off in the morning, either I just lay there unconcious until Michael gets up and turns it off, or I stumble over, turn it off, and collapse back into bed for another hour.

I keep my alarm clock at the far side of the room precisely so that I have to get out of bed to turn it off. If I keep it on the bedside, I will just hit snooze again and again and again some days. I also have the clock radio portion set to turn on news about an hour before the alarm. Ordinarily, this nudges me toward wakefulness before the alarm goes off.

We used to have Michael’s alarm clock set to go off about a half hour after mine, just in case. Maybe we should go back to doing that, at least until we both stop feeling so dead in the mornings.

Neither of us are morning people, can you tell?

I’ve always felt a little guilty that I don’t hate Daylight Saving Time as much as some of my friends do. It’s the kind of thing you would expect me to rant about: the supposed energy-saving practice that actually decreases productivity, causes measurable increases in injuy-causing accidents, measurable increases in illness (usually attributed to stress), and so on.

If I keep feeling this crappy every morning for much longer, I’m going to to stop being so resigned and equanimical about Daylight Saving Time.

Not that anyone else’s rantings about it have had any effect. I’m feeling like that version of Rimmer from the first Emohawk encounter on Red Dwarf, wanting to organize a committee and bring out the big guns: a full on leafletting campaign.

Who’s with me?

Catching-time

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According to the Shropshire Word-Book, written by Georgina Jackson and published in 1879, “It is called catchin’ time when in a wet season they catch every minute of favourable weather for field work.”

We have a weird relationship with time. When I was a kid, adults in my life put a lot of importance on how early one got up in the morning. If you were the sort of person who regularly got up at dawn (or earlier), you were obviously a morally upstanding, productive member of your community. If you slept in a bit later, but still got up “early” and started your workday sometime well before 9am, you were still a good person, though perhaps not quite as good and hard-working as the people who got up earlier. If you slept in until “all hours of the day,” there was something seriously wrong with you, and you were clearly leading a life of decadence bound for a (deservedly) horrible end.

Exceptions were made for people who had jobs that required them to work “graveyard” shifts, and the like, but even then, there were implications that this was only-just tolerated as a necessary evil.

I became especially cognizant of this in my early twenties, when I was juggling part-time college with multiple part-time jobs, one of which was a night job. A number of my relatives could not understand why I thought it was all right to sleep in past nine just because I had worked late, then stayed up to finish homework, and didn’t have to be at class or work until afternoon. They would quote folk proverbs and Bible verses at me about how early risers were healthy and successful, and only the wicked “slept the day away.”

Which, unless one is working in agriculture or some other vocation where sunlight is literally necessary to the work at hand, is nonsense.

While the human wake-and-sleep cycle is moderated by sunlight, it is part of a complex system of neuro-chemicals and hormones. The release of some of those chemicals are stimulated by the detection of sunlight, but it isn’t exactly the same in every person. There really are some people who are biologically wired to be morning people, some that aren’t, and even some who are definitely night people.

I am not one of those morning people. Getting me up and about before sunrise is a seriously unpleasant chore, no matter how early I go to bed. Even when I do get up regularly at a particular hour after a good night’s sleep, my brain never feels as if it is firing on all cylinders until a couple of hours after sunrise. In the summertime that’s no problem, but in winter—when sunrise at my latitude doesn’t happen until nearly 8 am—that makes working a 9-to-5 office job less than ideal.

Which is why I’m grateful that at least some flextime is fairly standard in my industry for my kind of work.

The flip side is that in the summer, when sunrise is much earlier, it’s a lot easier for me to get into the office and productive earlier in the day, and more likely that I will leave the office earlier, so that I can enjoy the sunny evenings.

Which is why I have a lot less hatred for the arbitrary annual movement of the clock forward and back than many of my friends. I understand perfectly well that the amount of sunlight we get in the summer is the same, no matter what any of us arbitrarily set our clocks to. But, because the official business world does follow that convention, and even in a flextime environment, one is expected to stay at the office until that hour hand creeps into the vicinity of the 5, the artificial temporary movement of that hour to earlier in the solar day gives me more time to appreciate and enjoy the sun when I am awake and out of the office.

So, it works for me. I’m sorry that it does nothing more than annoy some others.

Things I never believed I would see

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A lot of gay news blogs are sharing the video below this week. And to most people it probably just seems like a kind of silly video with these two guys talking.

But to folks like me? Gay men who no longer can be described as “young” by any definition? It’s amazing. I literally never believed I would see the day when someone would so casually create a show about them self that included the phrase “Your Favorite Gay Marine.”

The fact that Russ and Matt are just two adorable young guys in love, who just happen to both be in the Marines, and happen to be in love with each other, and how matter-of-fact they can be in this very public way is just mind-boggling for an old fart like me:

Public notions

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My old bus route was replaced recently with a so-called Bus Rapid Transit. I say “so-called” because it’s still in with the rest of the traffic, which means it is not true rapid transit. It is merely slightly more rapid bus.

They achieve the faster trips through several clever tricks, one of which is having pay stations at several of the bus stop (it’s supposed to be at every bus stop, but they haven’t gotten them all installed yet), so people who have bus passes can just board through any of the three doors on the bus without waiting in line behind the people paying cash. It really does make loading the bus go much faster.

As I was taking a seat on one bus recently, a lady in a nearby seat was ranting to the guy next to her about how the new buses must be rampant with cheating. “Us honest folks are paying for the other riders! Look! Look! How can they tell which people have actually paid before getting on! It’s such a waste!”

Since I could hear her clearly through my headphones, I knew she was talking very loudly, so I didn’t feel that this counted as a private conversation. I leaned forward and said, “Random fare inspections.”

She looked utterly shocked that a stranger would actually talk to her, though the guy next to her just grinned and said, “See, he’s got your answer.”

She blinked and said, “What?”

“They have guys that come on board with a scanner and ask to see everyone’s card or transfer. I’ve had it happen several times. They can scan your card and verify that you paid. So cheaters get caught.”

She nodded. Then she said, “Wow. Don’t you think Seattle is getting too Big Brother? I mean, scanning your card…”

Just a second before she was angry because she thought people were taking advantage of the public transit she was paying for. But rather than get into an argument with a stranger (I really had just been trying to be informative), I said, “Oh, no! Not at all!” And pulled my headphones back up onto my ears.

She shook her head, said, “You don’t?” Then turned to the guy and went back to talking. But I couldn’t help but notice that she’d switched to an indoor voice. So I guess my attempt to enlighten had at least made her think about how loudly she was talking.

I understand that relying on an honor system means that some people will cheat. On the other hand, I have seen Fare Officers remove someone who hadn’t paid from the bus. I know that when they do that they write you a ticket and it’s handled like a traffic fine. So there is a penalty that cheaters risk facing.

I’m sure some cheating still happens, but similar systems in other transit systems collect an awful lot of fees matching fairly closely to ridership numbers gathered other ways, so the honor system isn’t a failure. And mathematic models have shown that the savings from the shorter trip times more than make up for the theoretical revenues lost through uncaught cheaters.

And in what way is verifying that passengers on the bus have paid through random sweeps “being Big Brother”? She had just been angrily ranting about how “they” have instituted a system that she thought wasted tax dollars because “they” weren’t making absolutely certain that each and every passenger had paid. “They” should do better!

It’s like the people who scream about “guv’ment regulations” hindering business, who then scream “how can they let people sell that?” if there is a salmonella outbreak and their favorite food is being recalled.

Confirming that someone has paid for the bus ride they are currently taking hardly counts as “Big Brother.” And if you think it does, I shudder to think what sort of aneurism you’ll have if I explain to you precisely how cellphone companies figure out which signals are coming from authorized phones. Or how quickly your position can be pinpointed, even on old, cheap phones that know nothing about GPS. Hint: In order to get your 9-1-1 call to a local emergency operator, they have to be able to figure out your position before you hear their first ring.

Romanticizing the exotic

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My Great-uncle Lyle used to tell the story of how his grandparents (my great-great grandparents) married. Great-great-grandpa had been raised a good Irish Catholic boy. He wanted to marry a Native American girl. His priest didn’t believe in interracial marriage, so they ran off to Kansas until they found a minister who would marry them. And that’s how we ended up being Baptists.

Once he told that story within earshot of his brother, my Great-uncle Roy. Roy said that wasn’t quite right. He’d been told that the state they lived in when they met didn’t allow interracial marriage, they’d had to run off to Missouri to marry, then settled in Kansas.

Lyle shrugged, said that great-great-grandma had said it was the priest. Then they both started speculating that it might have been something a bit less noble, such as that they were already living together, so the priest didn’t approve for non-racial reasons.

There are a few problems with the story. One: Missouri didn’t repeal it’s law against interracial marriage until the 1950s. Now, some of those laws only prohibited Whites from marrying Blacks, and didn’t specifically mention Native Americans. I haven’t been able to find out the specifics of Missouri’s law back in the 1880s, but it renders that part of the story a little suspect.

The other is that there’s some doubt about great-great-grandma’s ethnicity. Clearly she told her grandsons that she was full-blooded Choctaw. In the couple of photographs that have survived of her she certainly could pass for Native American. One of my cousins who is into genealogy has found contemporary documents that list her race as either Indian or Choctaw.

But going back one generation further, we find that at different times in his life her father claimed to be from the Choctaw tribe, and other times from the Cherokee. Her mother apparently told at least one person she was “half Indian” at least once. No official records list them as such, but then, since great-great-grandma’s father was born only four years after the passage of the Indian Removal Act, if they had recent Native ancestors, their families would have had reason to keep it secret, or at least minimize it.

Also, the geographical location of the families of both of great-great-grandma’s parents for several prior generations in northwestern Virginia, doesn’t make the Choctaw connection very likely, as the tribe’s traditional territory was south of Virginia.

Finally, records indicate Great-great grandma was born in Kansas in the county where she married Great-great grandpa. No indication of an elopement at all. He was born in Ohio, and appears to have met her after coming out west to “seek his fortune.”

A lot has been written about why some U.S. white families claim some Native American heritage when little evidence exists, and also why virtually no U.S. whites ever admit any African ancestry. I’m sure those sociological reasons play into our family’s excursion into this genealogical conjecture.

The whole thing amounts to a personal “just-so” story—an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative to explain a tradition, a biological trait, or a behavior. For instance, my Great-grandmother I. wanted white hair as she got older. Her hair stubbornly remained black, with only a very modest sprinkling of silver right up to the end. She always attributed it to “Mother’s people,” saying that her mother and maternal grandmother had dark hair that never went gray. My two great-uncles both took pride in their versions of the story because it seemed to cast our ancestors as independent people unfettered by societal conventions. Great-uncle Lyle usually brought up the story whenever someone in the family made any sort of racist comment, and concluding with an admonition against racism.

My amateur-genealogist cousin has uncovered a lot of family stories indicating that other descendants of our great-great-great grandparents would bring up the supposed Native American heritage as an excuse for being short-tempered; a bit less noble than my great-uncles’ take, but not really any more sensical.

For a long time I thought of the story as a sort of affirmation of my own non-heterosexuality. If these ancestors could defy the social and legal forces that condemned their love, raise five daughters who all went out to have families of their own (all seeming to live happy lives as productive members of society), then no one in my family had the right to condemn my love.

The narrative each generation of the family wove fit their own sensibilities, projecting our own notions about what is right and proper (and whether “proper” is a good thing or a bad thing) onto the previous generations’ stories. I don’t think that’s wrong, per se. I loved and admired my grandmother, great-grandparents, and great-uncles for various things they did while we were together, and am happy to keep their memories alive now that they’re gone. They were each attempting to do the same thing for the previous generations that I didn’t get to meet personally, and hoped that perhaps I would help keep those memories alive, too.

Memory isn’t the same thing as fact. Even in our own lives, so we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that memories passed down have taken on a life of their own that strays away from the purely factual.

Did my great-great grandparents elope? Doesn’t look like it. Was Great-great grandma Native American? Can’t verify it. Was Great-uncle Lyle correct to condemn racism? Absolutely.

Maybe his facts weren’t right, but the point he always made was that despite appearances, we’re all descended from the same big, tangled family tree. That it doesn’t matter where some of the intervening ancestors came from, because ultimately we’re all human. And that’s truth, which sometimes is different than fact.