A pedigree is a tree-like, root-structury sketch story of the genetic relations of a family. Stories lurk in gnarled additions or cross linkages which - before Ancestry [dot] com and 23 and me required painstaking research or sloppy tongues. My good friend from college, an amateur genealogist, connected her father to his previous family, unearthing secret siblings a generation older than she is who make the best blackberry cobbler I’ve ever eaten, and landing us all at the ‘weird table’ at the fairy tale wedding of a man named North.
Pedigrees imply extramarital parentage and blank spaces, lines which tangle generations, even in innocent ways. My favorite version of this is told by a good friend regarding a relation he refers to as his “sister-cousin,” a woman who shares a father with him and whose mothers are sisters.
Clearly, there is a story there.
In the ancient ways of noticing familial trends, it was common to see traits which skipped generations, with mothers passing x-linked traits to their sons and to some daughters as carriers. Those sons would have unaffected sons, but their daughters would mother sons with the trait reappearing. Apparently, we’ve studied this phenomenon as long as we’ve kept track of who might belong to whom, but it hasn’t been until quite recently that we understood why.
Families also seem to pass hobbies and proclivities, gendered roles and nonbinary preferences, and my family is no different. My father buys cars the color of precious metals and passes them to me. My mother’s taste is less specific, and her cars often land with my brother.
At the age of 42, I am slightly embarrassed to report that I just purchased a used car from my parents. In the year 2000 when I purchased my father’s champagne-colored Accord, which I named Zha-Zha, I mostly felt very fortunate. In 2007 I bought my own silver-colored Fit, Hector, (which I still drive), and in 2014 I purchased his pearlescent white Outback, named Pooga. It was a dark time in my life, and it felt important to me to have two cars, as I was recently divorced and feeling very mortal and uncomfortably human.
Pooga is the Lithuanian word for ‘blizzard,’ and it carried me through a stormy epoch indeed. I was sad and cautious to sell it, my non-binary car, but 2021 was a year that required much simplification and more liquid assets. And so off it went, to a kind older man who I hope has had smoother sailing.
In the increasing complexity of my pursuit of medical school, I have realized that I will need to get some form of clinical job, likely this fall or winter, and that this job is unlikely to be a walkable distance from my home. Hector is swift and easy to both park and tow, but is perhaps not as savvy at navigating ice, and so again I consulted my father as he has meandered the topic of our weekly conversations in the direction of desiring an electric vehicle as his current Subaru has outlived its warranty.
There is formality now at the dining room table, with a bill of sale and temporary tags atop laminated placemats amid piles of mail after dinner. While this is the third car I have purchased from my father, I do not recall pomp and circumstance in prior transactions, likely because historically, he did the paperwork on my behalf. I come from a profoundly privileged pedigree of which I am the biological dead end, a fact that has crushed me into guilt-ridden paralysis in years and decades past, and only in the last two have I leaned into the possibility of a legacy of ideas and work rather than one coded for in a classical, biological pedigree.
My genes won’t go on any further than my flesh, and so I’ve started to think of them in the same way.
How else can I matter?
As I handed over my check and they handed me the title to sign, I asked her name, this car which may very well be the last I purchase from my father - a fact he repeats incessantly.
”W,” my father said.
”Tungsten,” added my mother the chemist, with a sparkle in her eye.
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