Yesterday, while dozing off in the sun, draped over a backyard couch and surrounded by the high-pitched sounds of six of my grandchildren and the competing chirps of a few songbirds, I was revisited by the insistent voices of the ghosts of my past.
Every family's history ought to be viewed through the numerical lens of time, in my view. So let's start with the numbers.
Today is the last day of April, 2020, and the world is edging up to its all-time population peak of 8 billion people. When I was born, four generations ago, that figure hovered around 2.5 billion. When my parents were born, it was not yet 2 billion and back four generations before that, when my paternal ancestors arrived from Europe, it was more like 1 billion.
Accordingly, my modest piece of the human story is perhaps one-eighth of what it would have been 175 years ago during the Great Famine in Ireland, or around one-third of what it would have been upon my arrival in Detroit, not long after World War II.
Most families tell stories about who we are and where we come from. Who our ancestors were and what they told us, generation after generation, trickling down through the ages.
Frankly, that amounts to precious little in most cases. A few golden coins might have been a better heritage but it turns out you can't take it with you.
In my case, what I've inherited on my Scottish side is a family with that included national heroes who were swimmers and a contingent on the move that spread across North America from Halifax to Detroit to Vancouver.
Over the years, I've met relatives in all of those places, plus I had the extraordinary experience of meeting a cousin several times removed who was a Scottish actress. She showed up as she was touring the US. in the lead role of "My Fair Lady."
Other traces that remain include the clan's tartan, a fabric that is dominated by the color blue, as well as Scottish meat pies, which I order from time to time from a company in North Carolina.
My father's side includes mysterious undertones. What we know to be true (thanks to documentation) is the Weirs came to Canada from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s, when the potato blight chased both the gentry and the peasants from the land.
Ireland lost perhaps a quarter of its population in a very short time to starvation and emigration. The lucky ones had the resources to leave, and my predecessors clearly were among those.
They carried with them, as Irish people tend to do, a trove of family stories, many of which remain cloaked in rumor and vagueness -- and of dubious veracity. But the family claimed convincingly that it was of French origin and that the English version of the name had been anglicized from de Vere.
Here's where the family story is reduced to a whisper, as if we had been hiding it for cennturies. We believe we are descended from Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. As my relatives related it to me, the family suspected he was in fact the author of the great works associated with a contemporary, minor actor named Shakespeare at a time when royals were precluded by class to take part in the base lot of actors, storytellers, and showmen.
Scholars do believe Shakespeare had a vocabulary of around 66,000 words -- three to six times the average vocabulary of English speakers today!
How can this possibly have been the case? And, if true, where did custody of all those words go? Was there a great falling from grace for the de Veres; did they retreat into the landed gentry that cultivated potatoes in the green hills of Ireland?
Perhaps so.
My sisters and I comfort ourselves from such disquieting myths by noting we are rather good at word games like Scrabble, after all.
So, maybe in the shadows, there is a line of history that reaches back to the 1500s and a tortured wordsmith hiding behind a pseudonym; a man driven to tell stories that were in many ways not his to tell. Rather like a journalist.
***
As you, I and billions of others shelter together, physically or virtually, it can be a time unique in our lives to contemplate matters like these. As I have suggested over and over, our imaginations may become fertile under these circumstances and our pasts may visit us in strange ways, using mechanisms that we would no doubt ignore in the normal sequence of things.
But, for all of us, the natural order has been disturbed. One way to put it is the great potato blight has returned, taking a new form, floating in on the warm afternoon air, urging us to once again get up and move on.
This all makes me shiver, in the pre-dawn night. I have to light the fire, boil water, and pour it over coffee grounds from to warm my hands as they hold the cup. It's not so cold that I can see my breath, but I can see my thoughts.
And now that I've let the word secrets out of the family bag, a new question beckons -- where the hell does my obsession with numbers come from?
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment