Monthly Archives: April 2019

Blue and green and a cat

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We had some dreary and rainy days last week, and then a day with clear, blue skies and new, brilliant green leaves. Spring leaves. I took this picture up into the trees last week on my regular dog walk.

Then we had some more rainy weather, with wind this time. Some places south of here had severe storms and even tornadoes, but not here. And then Sunday dawned clear and cool. The leaves looked pretty much the same as the picture I took last week, so I’ll let that suffice.

But what about the cat? It’s Mollie, as usual.

You can see that her mouth is open. Imagine a cat meowing, and that will not be her. She can barely squeak out a pitiful-sounding mew, and as often as not, nothing comes out.

I’m embarrassed every time I take a picture inside the house where you can see the trim that isn’t completed. I am, though, working this very day on finishing the living room baseboards, so maybe the next time Mollie poses in her toy/catnip box I can take a photo without being embarrassed.

Finding hints of my roots

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About a year and a half ago my brother Henry did an Ancestry.com DNA analysis. As a matter of curiosity I decided to have my own DNA checked, but with another service, 23andMe.com. The results were very similar, but different enough that I wish I could talk to Henry about it.

 It was no surprise at all that my brother’s results showed his DNA to be 98% European, with results going back thousands of years. It was also not a great surprise that his results showed about 2% African DNA going back thousands of years. After all, if you go back far enough, everyone originated in Africa. Where my DNA test differed from my brothers was in how old that African DNA is.

Henry’s results were about 38% western Europe, which includes areas from France to Germany, and about 33% from Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland and France. There was some DNA that was typical of regions in Scandinavia, and possibly eastern Europe. A small fraction was typical of the Iberian Peninsula and northern Africa.

My results showed my ancestry to be 98% European, just as Henry’s. There was no identification of DNA from Scandinavia or the Iberian Peninsula. I did show about a half a percent of Ashkenazi Jewish, which Henry’s results did not show. My results showed 1.3% Sub-Saharan African, that is, south of areas like Egypt and Algeria.

I wondered exactly what that meant, so I searched for the significance of that small percentage. I found a Web site, theroot.com, in which someone asked almost exactly the same question. The answer was given by Henry Louis Gates Jr, and some others. If you have not seen Gates’ PBS show Finding Your Roots, I strongly recommend it. In that show, Gates helps various people, usually famous people, trace their roots, in some cases quite far back. Most African-Americans have white ancestors. Occasionally white Americans find that they have African ancestors.

In the case of the question submitted to Gates, the DNA results also came from 23andMe.

In Gates’ answer, he says, “Those who identify as primarily white can have African ancestry. 23andMe published a study (pdf) based on its own dataset that concluded that approximately 3 to 4 percent of their customers who identified as being of primarily European descent had at least one ancestor in the last 10 generations who could be traced back to Africa.” So I am in a fairly small subset of “white” people who have taken the 23andMe test.

He also says, “the autosomal test that (the questioner) took from 23andMe generally shows more recent ancestry, quite reliably over the last 100 to 200 years—in (the questioner’s) case, since the time of slavery, when this “admixing” most likely occurred.” 

Note: Gates says 23andMe’s autosomal testing shows results from the last few hundred years. My brother’s results indicated DNA ancestry from thousands of years ago. Gates goes on to tell the questioner that “so, you see, it is indeed possible that you have recent African-American ancestors.”

Since my 23andMe results are similar to the questioner, I have to assume that Gates’ comments to him also apply to me. That means it’s entirely possible that I have African ancestors from the recent past (a few hundred years or so). 23andMe indicates that my African ancestry dates from the 1700’s, or possibly earlier. It also shows ancestry from West Africa as well as Congolese and southern East Africa. That means African slaves in America, and probably more than one African ancestor. And that also means that there are probably some African Americans living in Georgia or Detroit or Chicago or some other place in the US that are my relatives.

To look at, I am about as white as a person can be, unless I have spent too much time in the sun, in which case I am about as red as a white person can be. I don’t tan; I freckle at best. Pasty? Yeah, that’s me. But I, someone who benefits from white privilege as much as any white American, except for rich, white Americans, have African ancestors. How convenient for me. I can claim brotherhood with my fellow African Americans without having had to put up with all the discrimination of today and the lynchings of yesterday.

It’s one thing to know intellectually that probably most African Americans have white ancestors, and that a small percentage of people who identify as white have some African ancestors. When that intellectual possibility becomes real and personal, it’s different. It’s different when you realize that some of your own ancestors were almost certainly slaves and almost certainly suffered the inhuman treatment that Americans visited on their slaves. And, since my mother’s family originated in South Georgia, I can also be pretty sure that some of my ancestors were slave owners and were dealing out that inhuman treatment.

We Americans are so screwed up.

On a somewhat lighter note, part of my results included a long list of DNA relatives. They found 1132 DNA relatives. One was my nephew Thomas. They didn’t find my other nephew, presumably because he has not done the 23andMe DNA test. There were a lot of second cousins. Some shared family names with me, like Carnes, on my father’s side. One had a family name of Bethel, the name of my mother’s half brother. Many of my DNA relatives are located in Georgia, where my mother’s family lived, and Texas, where my paternal mother’s family lived. At least one was in Britain, which might come in handy if I ever manage to visit there (Hey cousin! Can I stay with you for a week or so?)

I wish I could talk to my brother about these results. When my brother sent me a summary of his results back in July 2017, he promised to send more. Unfortunately, he was not able to do that, so I don’t know any more details about his results.

I know none of my 1132 DNA relatives except my nephew. My mother’s sister did a lot of genealogical research years ago, but my father’s family history hits a dead end at his father on one side and his grandmother on the other side.

But even without knowing names, it’s moving to see the path from there to here. When I signed up with 23andMe, their web site warned that DNA testing can yield results that can be upsetting. These results don’t upset me, and I’m sure would not have upset my brother. I wonder, though, how some of the older generations might have reacted.

All flesh is grass

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We got a call on Sunday from my cousin telling us that my Uncle Tommy had died.

It was a surprise, like death often is, even though we knew it was coming. Leah and I had seen him at his gun shop just a few weeks ago. He was tired and weak, but seemed like he was going to keep plugging along for a while yet. He had been slowly declining for several years with same condition that was partially responsible for my father’s death, pulmonary fibrosis.

Pulmonary fibrosis reduces the ability of the lungs to oxygenate the blood. In my father’s case, acid reflux had caused scarring in his lungs. I don’t think the cause of Uncle Tommys’ condition was ever identified. He had worked for a number of years as an electrician at a power plant construction site, and in the past, industrial construction sites were a prime source of lung irritants.

He opened his gun shop as a sideline while he still worked as an electrician. After about five years of working out of a little building in his back yard, he opened a gun shop in a strip mall, and he kept the store there for more than 50 years. He tried for a couple of years to sell the shop, but couldn’t find a buyer. He wanted to avoid forcing his wife to inventory and close the shop. When we last saw him, he was doing some inventory work, but he still had a lot of guns left in the shop.

Uncle Tommy was my father’s half brother, born 19 years after my father, almost exactly the same time that separates their deaths.

Uncle Tommy was my father’s last surviving sibling.

A Sam scare

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Sam gave us a scare Friday night. Around 2 am I woke up to the sound of dog legs banging our bed frame. It was Zeke, who was fleeing his and Sam’s bed because Sam was in the throes of some kind of seizure.

After I managed to turn a light on, I saw Sam wallowing about halfway between lying on his side and lying on his back. He was arching his back one way and then the other. It wasn’t a rapid jerking, but a slow, metronome-like movement. I spoke to him but didn’t touch him for fear that he would bite. After about a minute, which seemed much longer than that, he slowly rolled into the Sphinx position, but he continued to sway. He swung his head in a wide arc back and forth. That went on for another long minute or so, gradually slowing to a bare shudder in his head.

At that point I was petting and comforting him. He was making a licking sound, like dogs do before they vomit. After a few minutes, he vomited up about half of his dinner. I was torn whether to take him to Rome’s new emergency vet clinic or wait until morning to take him to our vet. After he settled down, I decided to wait. He vomited up a foamy mess once more, then seemed OK, lying against the wall on his bed.

Saturday morning I took him to the vet. She said that my description of his behavior did not sound like a typical seizure, but that at this point we can really only wait to see whether it happens again. There is anti-seizure medication, but she said the goal of its use is to keep seizures to a maximum of one per month, so if he only has one per month, they don’t give the medication.

He seems perfectly normal now. He went for his usual two-mile walk and was as energetic as always. I suspect that it was not an epileptic seizure, but I really have no idea what it could have been.

The good news about Sam is that he made it to the vet and back without vomiting in the truck.

On the stray dog front, we learned that someone had picked up the gray pit bull mama dog I fed on Thursday. We hoped it was the same people who took her puppies, but it seems not to have been. Now we are hoping the puppies are weaned, and that the mama gets adopted.

All is quiet on the Sylvester front. He has not reappeared as of Saturday evening. I looked back at some earlier cat posts and found that he disappeared once before for several days, so we haven’t completely given up hope. But we have scoured the neighborhood and we have spoken to the people whose outdoor, stray cat Sylvester often visits, and no one knows anything.

Mollie’s feet were very sore on Friday. We called the vet, who said the antibiotics had not had time to work. She limped along on three feet all day. But on Saturday apparently the antibiotics kicked in; she started putting weight on her right front foot and seems close to normal. She’s due back at the vet’s in two weeks, but we are afraid she may be stuck inside for two months.

Aside from that, there was two additional pieces of good news. What we thought was another stray dog turned out to be a wanderer from down at the bottom of the mountain. His owners found him and took him home. And another dog that may or may not be a stray, but probably is, has taken up at a neighbor’s house. They say they will keep him unless someone comes to claim him.

So, as of now, there are no unaccounted-for stray dogs up on the mountain, one recovered seizing dog, and one missing cat. We’re hoping for a period of calm after this.

A year after

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My brother Henry died a year ago today.

That point in time is a discontinuity for me. There was my life before, when there seemed to be some kind of stability in the world, at least on a smaller scale. And then there is my life after that, when I found myself in a new position, the last living member of the Paris family.

Henry and I weren’t close in a lot of ways, but there was always a sense of belonging. The nuclear family was long gone, of course. Our father died in 2000, and our mother in 2013. But those are the kinds of deaths that any mature person has to expect. My father’s death made me into a different kind of person, one for whom the words, “My father is dead” had an actual, gut-level meaning. I joined a kind of club then, the club of people who have lost a parent. When I talked to other people who had lost a parent, there was a kind of unspoken understanding between us. My brother and I both looked to our mother then, not as a person to lean on, but as a person who needed someone to lean on. We could both count on the other to be there when necessary.

And then, when our mother died, there was a sense of finality. Now it was just me and my brother … forever? Well, that was in the back of my mind. I knew at some time both of us would die, but I aways thought it would be far in the distant future, and, for some reason, I always assumed I would die first, even though Henry was older by almost three years. I guess it was because I thought Henry was strong, competent and reliable. He would be there because he knew he should be there.

Then there came the call just before Thanksgiving, when he told me that his doctor had found suspicious spots on his liver. It wasn’t long before he found out that it was pancreatic cancer, and that the prognosis was dim at best. Not really dim — black.

I went into a period of, not denial, but intellectual distance. Henry and I were both pretty smart people, and we were both scientists. I went into disinterested scientist mode. Not uninterested, but standing off a little and looking at the situation unemotionally. I took in every little bit of new information and fitted it into my model of how things would go. I knew there was a very high probability of what would happen eventually, but I chose not to conclude anything until all the facts were in.

Maybe most people do what I did but call it something different. Probably denial.

At the end, even when I saw Henry lying in bed, barely conscious, wasting away, I didn’t accept that his death was a foregone conclusion. It was not until his son called and said he had died a day after my last visit to him that the reality hit me.

Only it never did really hit me. For me, it’s a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. A part of me is aware of and comprehends that Henry is dead, and there is another part of me that simply hasn’t acknowledged that. I can still feel his presence in my life. I’m sure that’s a characteristic of the human brain.

I have spent a lot of time over this last year trying to figure out just what the reality is, at least for me. Among other things, the reality is a new awareness of death, the end of things. I never really believed Henry would die. But he did. And I guess that means I will, too.

But I’m not sure that’s what really bothers me. I’m not just sad because Henry is dead, although he had a lot left to live for, and I’m not just depressed because I know I’ll die sometime. I think it’s more about the last link with my family being broken. I spent a lot of years feeling like part of my emotional foundation was my family. Now that’s gone.

We all spend our formative years growing up — that’s a tautology, of course. But in our formative years, we are the younger generation, and our parents are the older generation. Things will be different for us because … well, because we’re young. If you have children, you have to admit that there is another generation coming along behind you, but if you have no children, that realization might not quite occur.

Late last fall, before Henry got so sick he couldn’t walk, his two sons and his new daughter-in-law came to Chattanooga to visit. We decided to take a walk around the block. We all started off together, but the youngsters gradually pulled ahead of me and Henry, as the two of us talked and looked around.

That image, of three 30-somethings walking ahead and the two old guys walking and falling slowly further and further behind, seemed to me a perfect metaphor for life. That’s when I began to see myself and Henry as the last generation, fading away while the next generation takes its place. Only for me, there is no next generation.

I wish I could feel like there is something useful that could come out of the way I feel now, but, at least for the time, I can’t see it.