Dear Son,
Our Family Tree has survived through centuries of civil wars in Europe and America, through what Charles Dickens would call “the worst of times and best of times.” Or was it “the best of times and the worst of times?”
In the face of political and religious persecution, enslavement and genocide, our ancestors somehow survived the storm. Not always the innocent victim, they were also capable of being the vicious transgressor. There are places in time when one branch of our family butchered branches that included: Huguenots in the villages of France, Royalist ancestors in the wake of our Cromwell Roundhead family, and Irish victims of the British inflicted genocide of the Catholic masses. I have found evidence that one side of our family, the British instigators of the Irish plantation system, destroyed another, the Irish Fitzgeralds. With each generation, our Family Tree continues to grow and multiply in permutations and combinations.
It gets dark here at night in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and the universe is vast. Stars unfold in the night sky and reveal the eternal heaven that mankind seeks in our journey on Earth. I feel small beneath the canopy of constellations, I am a dust particle filled with awe and wonder. When Nancy and I lived in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in Montana your Máthair and I studied the layers of sedimentary rock laid down over the course of billions of years, billions and billions of years. My time on this planet is but a moment in the eons: A nanosecond, a milli-micro nanosecond. No. Using SI (the International System of Units, 1960) I am but a yotta micro nanosecond. Look it up. I am a flyspeck on the wall of Spanish Arch pub on Quay Street in Galway. And I’m okay with that if Alalé is playing on stage.
The Crow Chief, Crowfoot, once observed: “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of the buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.” My name is lost in the phone books of life, my image is a photon in a vacuous cosmos. “A butterfly flits across the meadow and is gone.” If you are looking for a Higgs Boson particle, I have been hiding it in my soul for some time now. I will give it to you, along with this day pass to Riverview Amusement Park in Chicago, should it ever open again.
And yet, my life has purpose and meaning. Each of us leaves a footprint, a shadow on the wall of life, a vapor of gas, if nothing more than a good fart. We have impact through the life that we live and the family that we become. I believe that we have a greater understanding of who we are if we understand those who came before us and the efforts that they made on their journey thru our universe. I have come to appreciate our forefather’s struggles for survival and a better life and I have come to forgive them if the manner in which they succeeded came at a cost to others: Those who owned slaves and those who broke the bondage of slavery through violence, those who killed in the name of God and those who killed God, those who sought new lands and those who took their lands from others whether in Prussia, Ireland or our New World. From the Norman conquerors and Viking warriors to the peasant Irish farmer and the Welsh King, I find that each generation has a story to tell and I will listen and learn. I will gather their stories and leave them for future generations to say, “Nah. That didn’t really happen. Did it?”
Each ancestor adds to the cellular structure, the DNA, that has become this man. I think therefore I am (Descarte). I breathe therefore I live. I watch the Chicago Cubs; therefore, I suffer. (Ooooops! They finally won the whole thing in 2016). No more suffering! Other than the arthritis. Well, there’s the stenosis, the triglycerides, the Ankylosing Spondylitis, the loss of hearing … Did I mention the number of times I have to get up in the middle of the night to relieve myself? Enough of my medical history! Let’s move ahead and climb into my father’s tree.
Love, Dad
P.S. The internet is broken here again. When can you come home and fix it?
