Puttin' on the Ritz

It isn't often that someone offers you a free trip somewhere, much less housing at arguably the swankiest hotel in Philadelphia.  When Drexel called to invite the Spousal Unit for a campus visit, we expected that they would cover his travel.  What we did not expect was that they would also be covering my travel, or that they would be putting us up in the Ritz-Carlton of all places.  Helloooooo, decadence!  It's hard to believe that yesterday morning I was scrubbing my own toilets and yesterday afternoon I was answering emails from the Ritz about how they could "better personalize your service" and, oh, "what would you like in your honor bar?"  Because those two things go together.  But if Drexel wants to schmooze me too, who am I to argue?

Mario the Magnificent, Dragon Extraordinaire.

Our trip this morning started off with a bang--literally.  On the way to the airport, the Spousal Unit and I had to leave early so we could drop the Resident Diva Dog off at the kennel.  As soon as we got there, I opened the door and turned to grab the dog's leash before she could bolt out the door over me in her excitement to examine the calling cards of the innumerable pets who'd been to the parking lot before her.  As I turned to climb out of the car, I promptly slammed my head into the top of the door frame because I possess all the grace of a drunken rhinoceros (think hippos in tutus à la Fantasia).  Still, I figured if I was going to be a head-banger, then I might as well distract myself from the throbbing dent over my ear by composing a little ditty to the tune of I've Been Working On The Railroad:

Mary smacked the car door this morning,
Then Mary muttered loudly, "Ow, ow, ow, ow."
[And by "ow," I mean "string of enthusiastic swearing."]
Mary smacked the car door this morning...
And rung her personal Liberty Bell.

Mary whacked her head,
Mary whacked her head,
Mary whacked her head and swo-o-ore.
Mary whacked her head, 
Mary whacked her head,
And now her scrambled brains are sore.

Ginger Whack-a-Mole

And because I didn't want to forget these things so I could blog about them later (since that's what I frequently do and why I've been so bad about writing lately), I started dictating them into the notes app on my phone, which resulted in the Spousal Unit looking at me like I had perhaps done more damage to my head than he first thought.  On the one hand, he should be used to such things by now.  On the other hand, it's payback for forgettingto bring his CPAP machine, which basically means that now I'm going to be spending two sleepless nights in a swish Philadelphia hotel while he makes objectionable noises that I can only equate to the sounds a velociraptor might make if it were attempting to mate with a cement mixer filled with hardened chunks of concrete and a pre-oiled Tin Man.

On the plus side, because we had to get the dog to the kennel when we did, we arrived at the airport much earlier than usual, allowing plenty of time to cruise through the interminable security lines and checkpoints.  As usual, the Spousal Unit escaped the TSA Glove of Love™, while I was given the Traditional Pat-Down of Unmitigated Smartasses®.  At least the grope du jour was efficient and unenthusiastic this particular time.  I've got to give the Atlanta airport props; considering how many people go through there (94 million a year, according to our pilot), they're surprisingly good at not letting invasive security procedures get out of hand.

Apple's latest governmental contract:  iPat.

Security: Not just for lonely adults anymore.

Once through security we still had ample time to grab a bite of something to eat other than a reconstituted potholder burger and soggy fries.  After hoofing it down a different concourse, we finally settled for Longhorn Steakhouse.  Generally speaking the food was tasty enough, though my salad was swimming in vinaigrette in spite of my asking for it on the side, and the bread (which you apparently have to request specially at the airport restaurants) was frozen in the middle.  But I chose to Let It Go (see what I did there?)  I was mildly surprised to be given a plastic blade in lieu of a real steak knife but realized that I can now rest easier knowing our national security has been ensured as a result of my sacrifice and that Longhorn's making me feel like I'm eating in an institution out of a Ken Kesey novel is purely coincidental.  Probably.

Keeping steak secure for travelers everywhere.

After lunch we headed back to our gate just in time to begin boarding.  I admit I smirked smugly at the Spousal Unit because I got to board in Zone 1 while he had to wait for Zone 2 because he doesn't have the gold Delta Amex card and I do. Plus Drexel's administrative assistant made our reservations separately.  Clearly I'm a very supportive spouse.

The flight itself was uneventful, aside from a few "woohoos" from the back of the plane as as we took off;  turns out half our plane was loaded with a high school girls' volleyball team on its way to a tournament.  Everyone found them amusing, particularly before we deplaned when one of the attendants wished them good luck (resulting in even more raucous cheering) and welcomed the "other five of you on the plane" to Philadelphia.

As it happens, the volleyball team pretty much dogged the rest of our day.  First, I had to wait in line with several of them in a bathroom with only 5 stalls.  Afterwards, I headed towards ground transportation to get a shuttle to our hotel, which involved me negotiating a rather surly desk clerk.  Eventually the shuttle came, however, and we were loaded up our luggage along with four other people.  The shuttle started to drive off, slooooowly, only to stop a few yards ahead at which point the driver disembarked and promptly disappeared.  Some 15 minutes later he came back and installed one of the many volleyball players on our shuttle. Then he disappeared again.  This time he appeared to be arranging shuttles for the rest of the volleyball team with 2-3 other drivers.  Once again he climbed aboard and started to drive off, only to stop again.  A few minutes later, two more people were climbing aboard.  For a shuttle that's supposed to be running every 10-15 minutes, I found it interesting that no fewer than three vans were stalled across from the terminal for a good 30 minutes.

Can you dig it?

With 9 passengers crammed in like sardines, the driver finally decided to head out.  Just before hitting the highway, he turned to ask where all of us were going.  One by one, voices called out: "Hampton...Marriott...Home2Hilton...Courtyard..."  Then us.  "Ritz-Carlton."  I know it's probably foolish of me, but I was painfully aware of everyone looking at us with raised eyebrows and for the first time in years felt like sliding down in my seat a little to hide.  I imagined everyone thinking, "If you're posh enough to afford the Ritz, then why are you riding on a smelly, nasty airport shuttle??"  Of course they probably weren't paying the least bit of attention, but it still made me feel self-conscious and I had to bite my tongue to keep from explaining, "Someone else is paying...we're not snobs, I promise!"  (Meanwhile, "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong..." kept playing through my head on a loop.)

A couple of minutes later our respective destinations no longer mattered because we all became instant comrades-in-arms when we discovered that our driver could have put any NYC cabbie to shame.  He was whipping through the downtown city streets going a good 20 mph faster than the limit and coming so close to other cars as he pulled in and out of spots to let off passengers that half of us kept our eyes shut while he was doing it.  Since it was clearly going to be an interesting ride I took out my notebook and started to take notes old-school since my phone was out of juice.  Writing on that trip was challenging because it rapidly became clear that this particular shuttle's chassis was not blessed with shock absorbers; we were jounced all through town like small children in a particularly over-inflated bouncy house.  My handwriting resembled that of an arthritic, cocaine-addled physician, and not just because the only pen I in my possession had just moments before chosen to spontaneously dismantle itself.

True story.

The entire trip probably took 45 minutes, 90 if you count the Great Volleyball Transportation Negotiation of 2014.  First we drove through a less savory part of town (at which point I began humming the theme to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in my head), then we passed the famed Reading Terminal at Arch and 12th.  Next, we turned towards someone's hotel and got to watch dubiously as our driver bore down on some pedestrians crossing the road, gesticulating angrily at them to hurry across.  I'm pretty sure he was even revving the engine ominously at them as he kept lurching forward inch by inch.  Once around the corner our drive got close enough to a man waiting to climb in his car that I'm pretty sure he grazed the guy's backside.  Perhaps he was thinking "Buns-zai!" at the time. The remaining passengers exchanged glances of consternation.  At the stop before ours, a lady got whispered to us as she got off that she hoped we made it to the Ritz in one piece and that she hoped we enjoyed it there.  Sadly, she wasn't really joking.

Starring Walter Wait.

Since the Shuttle Ride of Impending Dismemberment, things have gone pretty smoothly.  We are now ensconced on the 15th floor, directly across from City Hall, which I discovered looming over us when I opened the curtain.  And now, as I sit here typing, my window is illuminated by a a glowing orange Big Ben-esque clock tower and a statue of William Penn is presiding over my work.  I guess you could say the Penn is mightier than the Shuttle.

Bigger than your average nightlight.

On the other side of our corner room, directly across, is an apartment building.  Each living room and dining room are made of wall to wall windows that you can look right into, and I can't help wondering if one of them houses an Ugly Naked Guy like in the show Friends.  One of the apartments does house an enormous television, which I can see clearly from my desk and which reminds me of a junior-sized version of the big marquis in Times Square.  Right next to the apartment building is a sculpture of a giant clothespin, which stands there in the middle of Philadelphia as an epic "WTF??" for tourists everywhere.  There are mints on the nightstand, bottles of water with a Ritz-Carlton label, and a bathroom with a glass-encased shower stall and a plush bathrobe.  And there may or may not have been a suspicious shutter click emanating from the toilet stall, to which the Spousal Unit responded with "You just took a picture of the phone, didn't you?" Mea culpa, dude...I guess you can't take me anywhere.  What can I say?  All the free airfare and hotel rooms in the world aren't going to keep me from secretly feeling just a little bit like a fraud who's going to be caught out at any moment.  I simply don't do pretentious well...apparently I'm far too busy embarrassing the Unit by behaving low-class.

Add caption

Still, it's nice to see how the other half lives on occasion if for no other reason than it makes me appreciate even more what I already have and more aware of what I don't really need.  Best of all, while the Spousal Unit gets grilled by Drexel professors for a potential job, I get to traipse all over the City of Brotherly Love on my own, taking in the sights while trying to decide if it's a viable place to live.  Deciding what to do on my day out was daunting, however.  Just looking at the list of available museums was enough to send me squeeing paroxysms of joy, never mind considering all the other arts and activities available both here and nearby.  There's no denying the place has a rich history and lots of potential; the real question is whether or not we could afford a home bigger than a refrigerator box or newer than the clock tower staring down at me.  One step at a time, though...one step at a time.


[Editor's note:  Taking a picture of a phone in the bathroom may be déclassé, but it's still a hell of a lot better than posting one which includes an awkward reflection in the silver toilet paper cover of the photographer in mid-snap while, um, deployed on the throne.  Mercifully, I noticed said reflection moments before I uploaded this post and am therefore not subject to unfortunate memes or plastered across tumblers all over the internet.  Thank heaven for small favors.]

Puttin' on the Ritz

It isn't often that someone offers you a free trip somewhere, much less housing at arguably the swankiest hotel in Philadelphia.  When Drexel called to invite the Spousal Unit for a campus visit, we expected that they would cover his travel.  What we did not expect was that they would also be covering my travel, or that they would be putting us up in the Ritz-Carlton of all places.  Helloooooo, decadence!  It's hard to believe that yesterday morning I was scrubbing my own toilets and yesterday afternoon I was answering emails from the Ritz about how they could "better personalize your service" and, oh, "what would you like in your honor bar?"  Because those two things go together.  But if Drexel wants to schmooze me too, who am I to argue?

Mario the Magnificent, Dragon Extraordinaire.

Our trip this morning started off with a bang--literally.  On the way to the airport, the Spousal Unit and I had to leave early so we could drop the Resident Diva Dog off at the kennel.  As soon as we got there, I opened the door and turned to grab the dog's leash before she could bolt out the door over me in her excitement to examine the calling cards of the innumerable pets who'd been to the parking lot before her.  As I turned to climb out of the car, I promptly slammed my head into the top of the door frame because I possess all the grace of a drunken rhinoceros (think hippos in tutus à la Fantasia).  Still, I figured if I was going to be a head-banger, then I might as well distract myself from the throbbing dent over my ear by composing a little ditty to the tune of I've Been Working On The Railroad:

Mary smacked the car door this morning,
Then Mary muttered loudly, "Ow, ow, ow, ow."
[And by "ow," I mean "string of enthusiastic swearing."]
Mary smacked the car door this morning...
And rung her personal Liberty Bell.

Mary whacked her head,
Mary whacked her head,
Mary whacked her head and swo-o-ore.
Mary whacked her head, 
Mary whacked her head,
And now her scrambled brains are sore.

Ginger Whack-a-Mole

And because I didn't want to forget these things so I could blog about them later (since that's what I frequently do and why I've been so bad about writing lately), I started dictating them into the notes app on my phone, which resulted in the Spousal Unit looking at me like I had perhaps done more damage to my head than he first thought.  On the one hand, he should be used to such things by now.  On the other hand, it's payback for forgettingto bring his CPAP machine, which basically means that now I'm going to be spending two sleepless nights in a swish Philadelphia hotel while he makes objectionable noises that I can only equate to the sounds a velociraptor might make if it were attempting to mate with a cement mixer filled with hardened chunks of concrete and a pre-oiled Tin Man.

On the plus side, because we had to get the dog to the kennel when we did, we arrived at the airport much earlier than usual, allowing plenty of time to cruise through the interminable security lines and checkpoints.  As usual, the Spousal Unit escaped the TSA Glove of Love™, while I was given the Traditional Pat-Down of Unmitigated Smartasses®.  At least the grope du jour was efficient and unenthusiastic this particular time.  I've got to give the Atlanta airport props; considering how many people go through there (94 million a year, according to our pilot), they're surprisingly good at not letting invasive security procedures get out of hand.

Apple's latest governmental contract:  iPat.

Security: Not just for lonely adults anymore.

Once through security we still had ample time to grab a bite of something to eat other than a reconstituted potholder burger and soggy fries.  After hoofing it down a different concourse, we finally settled for Longhorn Steakhouse.  Generally speaking the food was tasty enough, though my salad was swimming in vinaigrette in spite of my asking for it on the side, and the bread (which you apparently have to request specially at the airport restaurants) was frozen in the middle.  But I chose to Let It Go (see what I did there?)  I was mildly surprised to be given a plastic blade in lieu of a real steak knife but realized that I can now rest easier knowing our national security has been ensured as a result of my sacrifice and that Longhorn's making me feel like I'm eating in an institution out of a Ken Kesey novel is purely coincidental.  Probably.

Keeping steak secure for travelers everywhere.

After lunch we headed back to our gate just in time to begin boarding.  I admit I smirked smugly at the Spousal Unit because I got to board in Zone 1 while he had to wait for Zone 2 because he doesn't have the gold Delta Amex card and I do. Plus Drexel's administrative assistant made our reservations separately.  Clearly I'm a very supportive spouse.

The flight itself was uneventful, aside from a few "woohoos" from the back of the plane as as we took off;  turns out half our plane was loaded with a high school girls' volleyball team on its way to a tournament.  Everyone found them amusing, particularly before we deplaned when one of the attendants wished them good luck (resulting in even more raucous cheering) and welcomed the "other five of you on the plane" to Philadelphia.

As it happens, the volleyball team pretty much dogged the rest of our day.  First, I had to wait in line with several of them in a bathroom with only 5 stalls.  Afterwards, I headed towards ground transportation to get a shuttle to our hotel, which involved me negotiating a rather surly desk clerk.  Eventually the shuttle came, however, and we were loaded up our luggage along with four other people.  The shuttle started to drive off, slooooowly, only to stop a few yards ahead at which point the driver disembarked and promptly disappeared.  Some 15 minutes later he came back and installed one of the many volleyball players on our shuttle. Then he disappeared again.  This time he appeared to be arranging shuttles for the rest of the volleyball team with 2-3 other drivers.  Once again he climbed aboard and started to drive off, only to stop again.  A few minutes later, two more people were climbing aboard.  For a shuttle that's supposed to be running every 10-15 minutes, I found it interesting that no fewer than three vans were stalled across from the terminal for a good 30 minutes.

Can you dig it?

With 9 passengers crammed in like sardines, the driver finally decided to head out.  Just before hitting the highway, he turned to ask where all of us were going.  One by one, voices called out: "Hampton...Marriott...Home2Hilton...Courtyard..."  Then us.  "Ritz-Carlton."  I know it's probably foolish of me, but I was painfully aware of everyone looking at us with raised eyebrows and for the first time in years felt like sliding down in my seat a little to hide.  I imagined everyone thinking, "If you're posh enough to afford the Ritz, then why are you riding on a smelly, nasty airport shuttle??"  Of course they probably weren't paying the least bit of attention, but it still made me feel self-conscious and I had to bite my tongue to keep from explaining, "Someone else is paying...we're not snobs, I promise!"  (Meanwhile, "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong..." kept playing through my head on a loop.)

A couple of minutes later our respective destinations no longer mattered because we all became instant comrades-in-arms when we discovered that our driver could have put any NYC cabbie to shame.  He was whipping through the downtown city streets going a good 20 mph faster than the limit and coming so close to other cars as he pulled in and out of spots to let off passengers that half of us kept our eyes shut while he was doing it.  Since it was clearly going to be an interesting ride I took out my notebook and started to take notes old-school since my phone was out of juice.  Writing on that trip was challenging because it rapidly became clear that this particular shuttle's chassis was not blessed with shock absorbers; we were jounced all through town like small children in a particularly over-inflated bouncy house.  My handwriting resembled that of an arthritic, cocaine-addled physician, and not just because the only pen I in my possession had just moments before chosen to spontaneously dismantle itself.

True story.

The entire trip probably took 45 minutes, 90 if you count the Great Volleyball Transportation Negotiation of 2014.  First we drove through a less savory part of town (at which point I began humming the theme to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in my head), then we passed the famed Reading Terminal at Arch and 12th.  Next, we turned towards someone's hotel and got to watch dubiously as our driver bore down on some pedestrians crossing the road, gesticulating angrily at them to hurry across.  I'm pretty sure he was even revving the engine ominously at them as he kept lurching forward inch by inch.  Once around the corner our drive got close enough to a man waiting to climb in his car that I'm pretty sure he grazed the guy's backside.  Perhaps he was thinking "Buns-zai!" at the time. The remaining passengers exchanged glances of consternation.  At the stop before ours, a lady got whispered to us as she got off that she hoped we made it to the Ritz in one piece and that she hoped we enjoyed it there.  Sadly, she wasn't really joking.

Starring Walter Wait.

Since the Shuttle Ride of Impending Dismemberment, things have gone pretty smoothly.  We are now ensconced on the 15th floor, directly across from City Hall, which I discovered looming over us when I opened the curtain.  And now, as I sit here typing, my window is illuminated by a a glowing orange Big Ben-esque clock tower and a statue of William Penn is presiding over my work.  I guess you could say the Penn is mightier than the Shuttle.

Bigger than your average nightlight.

On the other side of our corner room, directly across, is an apartment building.  Each living room and dining room are made of wall to wall windows that you can look right into, and I can't help wondering if one of them houses an Ugly Naked Guy like in the show Friends.  One of the apartments does house an enormous television, which I can see clearly from my desk and which reminds me of a junior-sized version of the big marquis in Times Square.  Right next to the apartment building is a sculpture of a giant clothespin, which stands there in the middle of Philadelphia as an epic "WTF??" for tourists everywhere.  There are mints on the nightstand, bottles of water with a Ritz-Carlton label, and a bathroom with a glass-encased shower stall and a plush bathrobe.  And there may or may not have been a suspicious shutter click emanating from the toilet stall, to which the Spousal Unit responded with "You just took a picture of the phone, didn't you?" Mea culpa, dude...I guess you can't take me anywhere.  What can I say?  All the free airfare and hotel rooms in the world aren't going to keep me from secretly feeling just a little bit like a fraud who's going to be caught out at any moment.  I simply don't do pretentious well...apparently I'm far too busy embarrassing the Unit by behaving low-class.

Add caption

Still, it's nice to see how the other half lives on occasion if for no other reason than it makes me appreciate even more what I already have and more aware of what I don't really need.  Best of all, while the Spousal Unit gets grilled by Drexel professors for a potential job, I get to traipse all over the City of Brotherly Love on my own, taking in the sights while trying to decide if it's a viable place to live.  Deciding what to do on my day out was daunting, however.  Just looking at the list of available museums was enough to send me squeeing paroxysms of joy, never mind considering all the other arts and activities available both here and nearby.  There's no denying the place has a rich history and lots of potential; the real question is whether or not we could afford a home bigger than a refrigerator box or newer than the clock tower staring down at me.  One step at a time, though...one step at a time.


[Editor's note:  Taking a picture of a phone in the bathroom may be déclassé, but it's still a hell of a lot better than posting one which includes an awkward reflection in the silver toilet paper cover of the photographer in mid-snap while, um, deployed on the throne.  Mercifully, I noticed said reflection moments before I uploaded this post and am therefore not subject to unfortunate memes or plastered across tumblers all over the internet.  Thank heaven for small favors.]

Genealogical Serendipity

Most people grow up having some sense of their history--who they are, where they came from, who they look like--what their overall heritage is.  When you grow up adopted things are different, or at least they were several decades ago when most adoption records remained sealed.  Of course I knew some of my adoptive parents' heritage; for example, my mother was Dutch all day long.  But I also knew that didn't mean I was.  Nor did I ever look like anyone in my family.  I was always just me, unique and wholly myself for better or worse.  Still, there is a certain advantage to that sort of anonymity and might in part explain why I always seemed to look like someone's uncle's cousin's babysitter's dog walker.  Since I never quite looked like anyone in particular, I instead looked like everyone.  Or so it seemed.

Naturally I had a history like everyone else but as far as I knew mine didn't begin till I was born.  There was never a sense of what had gone before because there simply wasn't a before.  Again, there are advantages to that, such as the ability to start out life with a clean slate.  After all, you can't be held accountable for whatever stupid things your ancestors may have done if you have no ancestors.  Life becomes what you make it, perhaps even more for adoptees than for everyone else.

More than a few times over the years I've wondered how I would fare in one of those "nature vs nurture" studies; how could I help but wonder how many traits I'd inherited from my birth parents vs how many I absorbed from being around my adoptive parents?  I've always known I picked up several habits (some good, some not-so-good) from my mother and, like my dad, I can be both a huge goofball or someone who talks big but who is really a giant softie underneath.  But which of my various traits were the result of my unknown genetic heritage?

Now that I've met NJ and we've been corresponding regularly for the last couple of months I'm starting to figure out what some of those traits are, and it's been freaky illuminating.  You know how sometimes in the news there are stories about twins separated at birth who grow up on different continents or in different cities in wildly disparate conditions and circumstances from each other?  And who, despite these divergences, still end up liking all the same foods or playing the same instruments or both running track or both flunking algebra?  Yeah, well, I'm starting to feel a bit like that too. Obviously my birth mom and I are not identical twins, but the number of similarities that we have thus far uncovered is a little scary.

What gets me, though, are not the commonalities themselves but the specificity of some of them.  For example, a lot of people could easily say they liked chocolate (who doesn't?), but how many would then qualify this declaration by stating that they prefer their chocolate to be broken up by other things, such as mint or wafers or Rice Krispies or whatever so that the chocolate will be less rich than if it were solid?  Apparently we both do that, just as we both abhor chocolate with coconut in it.  Well, I abhor coconut in anything really, but still.  Similarly, we both prefer hard candies to chocolate in general, but we also both chew the candy rather than sucking on it like normal people (a habit which drives the girlie bonkers, I might add).  Now really, how likely is it that we'd both do that?  A lot of people like Lifesavers, but how many of those people feel a need to pummel said Lifesavers to candy dust inside their mouths?  When I told B last night that NJ liked to chew her candy his eyes widened.  I'm the only other person he's ever known to do that consistently.  There are other coincidences, too.  And while there are physical similarities like our ultra-fine hair or big rack or dental issues, it's the little things--the unique quirks--which make this all so very real to me.

But it goes far beyond that.  Years ago, when my family traveled to England, we started out in London.  B was a royal pain, no doubt because of the sensory overload there.  A few days later, however, we got on an express train to Inverness.  The closer we got to Scotland, the more he relaxed, which made the girlie and me relax more as well.  Much of the countryside seemed grey and overcast, yet at the same time there was a palpable feeling of going home, of finding a place you belong, just because.  We all felt it.  Not surprisingly, we had a great time in Inverness and then Edinburgh, though sadly we didn't get to spend as much time in Edinburgh as we would have liked.   This journey with NJ is becoming a little like that as well.  While certainly it doesn't change how I felt about my adoptive parents in the least, I can't deny that there is a certain element of "coming home" to all of this discovery.

I'm learning that context is everything.  For example, I've been mildly obsessed with King Arthur and the legends surrounding him, both the old romances and more modern incarnations, for the majority of my life.  I wrote term papers on aspects of Arthurian legend in both high school and college.  I found it all terribly fascinating--not just the romantic idea of chivalry, but the concept of a unified government, where all men were essentially equal because they sat at a round table with no head and could therefore be equally heard.  I liked the philosophy of "right, not might."  Plus you've gotta love the sci-fi/fantasy aspect of some random Welsh dude getting a sword from a woman in a lake if for no other reason than because it spawned one of the most epic parody movies ever made courtesy of Monty Python.  So while I always thought King Arthur was pretty cool, I never expected to be tracking a line on my family tree one day and run smack into a whole cadre of Welsh forbears.  After all, I'd always assumed that I was part Irish or Scots rather than Welsh (though I may yet be once all the threads on my family tree have been traced).  Soon I began seeing familiar place names and familiar people--names I've read about in the Arthurian legends for years.  It was unexpected and exciting and remarkable.  Suddenly my lifelong affinity for Celtic mythology and artwork also started making more sense because, unexpectedly, there was a precedent for it--a genetic tie--just from a different Celtic nation than I'd anticipated.  To make things even more interesting, one of the Celtic names I've been randomly considering for my SCA persona is "Angharad," which turns out not only to be Welsh in origin but also turns out to be the name of about 10 of my Welsh ancestors.  Go figure.

As surprising as all this newfound Welsh heritage is, I was still stunned the other night to find the name "Anna Morgawse"--and especially the name of her father Uther Pendragon--in my family tree.  Uther Pendragon.  As in King Arthur's supposed father.  In most of the legends, Morgause is Arthur's half-sister, but according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the primary source utilized by Ancestry.com for Britons that far back, Anna Morgawse is actually Arthur's full sister.  This would make Uther Pendragon my 45th great-grandfather and King Arthur my 44th great-grand-uncle.  I was flabbergasted...fantasy meets reality.  Sort of.

Now don't get me wrong; I know that the likelihood of this connection being at all accurate is astronomically small.  I'm not an idiot.  After all, good old Geoff was about as scrupulous in his record-keeping as an amnesiac crack-head shooting up Drano would be.  And of course there are the chronological discrepancies between when the King Arthur of legend was supposed to have existed and those of the potential historical kings who could have been the basis for said legends.  Sure, I can plausibly trace my line back to Rhys ap Tewdwr and Rhodri Fawr (or Mawr, depending on which source you use).  But the Pendragons?  Yeah, that's a bit more of a stretch.  Doesn't mean I'm not gonna milk it, though, however unrealistic it might be.  More to the point, I find it remarkable that the possibility of relationship to King Arthur should arise at all after a lifetime of fascination with the king in question.  What are the odds of that, really?  I'm pretty sure Ancestry.com isn't charging for wish fulfillment.  Or maybe they are...who knows?

At the end of the day it doesn't matter that my "connection" to King Arthur is almost certainly bogus. There are enough legitimate Welsh kings back in my line that one or the other of them was bound to have been related in some way, however distantly, to whomever the real King Arthur was.  And I'm cool with that.  Either way, I've still gained more of a context for all my assorted interests and quirks.  I'm building a better understanding of how I became some of who I am, which is far more precious than any purported relationship to King Arthur. In other words, I'm finding my way home.

But you still have to start bowing.

Genealogical Serendipity

Most people grow up having some sense of their history--who they are, where they came from, who they look like--what their overall heritage is.  When you grow up adopted things are different, or at least they were several decades ago when most adoption records remained sealed.  Of course I knew some of my adoptive parents' heritage; for example, my mother was Dutch all day long.  But I also knew that didn't mean I was.  Nor did I ever look like anyone in my family.  I was always just me, unique and wholly myself for better or worse.  Still, there is a certain advantage to that sort of anonymity and might in part explain why I always seemed to look like someone's uncle's cousin's babysitter's dog walker.  Since I never quite looked like anyone in particular, I instead looked like everyone.  Or so it seemed.

Naturally I had a history like everyone else but as far as I knew mine didn't begin till I was born.  There was never a sense of what had gone before because there simply wasn't a before.  Again, there are advantages to that, such as the ability to start out life with a clean slate.  After all, you can't be held accountable for whatever stupid things your ancestors may have done if you have no ancestors.  Life becomes what you make it, perhaps even more for adoptees than for everyone else.

More than a few times over the years I've wondered how I would fare in one of those "nature vs nurture" studies; how could I help but wonder how many traits I'd inherited from my birth parents vs how many I absorbed from being around my adoptive parents?  I've always known I picked up several habits (some good, some not-so-good) from my mother and, like my dad, I can be both a huge goofball or someone who talks big but who is really a giant softie underneath.  But which of my various traits were the result of my unknown genetic heritage?

Now that I've met NJ and we've been corresponding regularly for the last couple of months I'm starting to figure out what some of those traits are, and it's been freaky illuminating.  You know how sometimes in the news there are stories about twins separated at birth who grow up on different continents or in different cities in wildly disparate conditions and circumstances from each other?  And who, despite these divergences, still end up liking all the same foods or playing the same instruments or both running track or both flunking algebra?  Yeah, well, I'm starting to feel a bit like that too. Obviously my birth mom and I are not identical twins, but the number of similarities that we have thus far uncovered is a little scary.

What gets me, though, are not the commonalities themselves but the specificity of some of them.  For example, a lot of people could easily say they liked chocolate (who doesn't?), but how many would then qualify this declaration by stating that they prefer their chocolate to be broken up by other things, such as mint or wafers or Rice Krispies or whatever so that the chocolate will be less rich than if it were solid?  Apparently we both do that, just as we both abhor chocolate with coconut in it.  Well, I abhor coconut in anything really, but still.  Similarly, we both prefer hard candies to chocolate in general, but we also both chew the candy rather than sucking on it like normal people (a habit which drives the girlie bonkers, I might add).  Now really, how likely is it that we'd both do that?  A lot of people like Lifesavers, but how many of those people feel a need to pummel said Lifesavers to candy dust inside their mouths?  When I told B last night that NJ liked to chew her candy his eyes widened.  I'm the only other person he's ever known to do that consistently.  There are other coincidences, too.  And while there are physical similarities like our ultra-fine hair or big rack or dental issues, it's the little things--the unique quirks--which make this all so very real to me.

But it goes far beyond that.  Years ago, when my family traveled to England, we started out in London.  B was a royal pain, no doubt because of the sensory overload there.  A few days later, however, we got on an express train to Inverness.  The closer we got to Scotland, the more he relaxed, which made the girlie and me relax more as well.  Much of the countryside seemed grey and overcast, yet at the same time there was a palpable feeling of going home, of finding a place you belong, just because.  We all felt it.  Not surprisingly, we had a great time in Inverness and then Edinburgh, though sadly we didn't get to spend as much time in Edinburgh as we would have liked.   This journey with NJ is becoming a little like that as well.  While certainly it doesn't change how I felt about my adoptive parents in the least, I can't deny that there is a certain element of "coming home" to all of this discovery.

I'm learning that context is everything.  For example, I've been mildly obsessed with King Arthur and the legends surrounding him, both the old romances and more modern incarnations, for the majority of my life.  I wrote term papers on aspects of Arthurian legend in both high school and college.  I found it all terribly fascinating--not just the romantic idea of chivalry, but the concept of a unified government, where all men were essentially equal because they sat at a round table with no head and could therefore be equally heard.  I liked the philosophy of "right, not might."  Plus you've gotta love the sci-fi/fantasy aspect of some random Welsh dude getting a sword from a woman in a lake if for no other reason than because it spawned one of the most epic parody movies ever made courtesy of Monty Python.  So while I always thought King Arthur was pretty cool, I never expected to be tracking a line on my family tree one day and run smack into a whole cadre of Welsh forbears.  After all, I'd always assumed that I was part Irish or Scots rather than Welsh (though I may yet be once all the threads on my family tree have been traced).  Soon I began seeing familiar place names and familiar people--names I've read about in the Arthurian legends for years.  It was unexpected and exciting and remarkable.  Suddenly my lifelong affinity for Celtic mythology and artwork also started making more sense because, unexpectedly, there was a precedent for it--a genetic tie--just from a different Celtic nation than I'd anticipated.  To make things even more interesting, one of the Celtic names I've been randomly considering for my SCA persona is "Angharad," which turns out not only to be Welsh in origin but also turns out to be the name of about 10 of my Welsh ancestors.  Go figure.

As surprising as all this newfound Welsh heritage is, I was still stunned the other night to find the name "Anna Morgawse"--and especially the name of her father Uther Pendragon--in my family tree.  Uther Pendragon.  As in King Arthur's supposed father.  In most of the legends, Morgause is Arthur's half-sister, but according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the primary source utilized by Ancestry.com for Britons that far back, Anna Morgawse is actually Arthur's full sister.  This would make Uther Pendragon my 45th great-grandfather and King Arthur my 44th great-grand-uncle.  I was flabbergasted...fantasy meets reality.  Sort of.

Now don't get me wrong; I know that the likelihood of this connection being at all accurate is astronomically small.  I'm not an idiot.  After all, good old Geoff was about as scrupulous in his record-keeping as an amnesiac crack-head shooting up Drano would be.  And of course there are the chronological discrepancies between when the King Arthur of legend was supposed to have existed and those of the potential historical kings who could have been the basis for said legends.  Sure, I can plausibly trace my line back to Rhys ap Tewdwr and Rhodri Fawr (or Mawr, depending on which source you use).  But the Pendragons?  Yeah, that's a bit more of a stretch.  Doesn't mean I'm not gonna milk it, though, however unrealistic it might be.  More to the point, I find it remarkable that the possibility of relationship to King Arthur should arise at all after a lifetime of fascination with the king in question.  What are the odds of that, really?  I'm pretty sure Ancestry.com isn't charging for wish fulfillment.  Or maybe they are...who knows?

At the end of the day it doesn't matter that my "connection" to King Arthur is almost certainly bogus. There are enough legitimate Welsh kings back in my line that one or the other of them was bound to have been related in some way, however distantly, to whomever the real King Arthur was.  And I'm cool with that.  Either way, I've still gained more of a context for all my assorted interests and quirks.  I'm building a better understanding of how I became some of who I am, which is far more precious than any purported relationship to King Arthur. In other words, I'm finding my way home.

But you still have to start bowing.

Ancestry and Adoption

In February of this year, Ancestry.com was featuring a 2-week trial to encourage people to get hooked try out their services.  After thinking about it, I decided "what the heck" and signed up to give it a whirl, figuring I could always cancel two weeks later.  After all, two weeks should be plenty of time to suss out a family ancestry, right?   I spent probably 3 days straight staying up till 4 am filling in little links in my husband's and daughter's family trees.  I stayed up late several other nights as well, though perhaps not quite till the wee hours.  A week and a half in, I looked at B and told him point-blank that we would be needing to continue the membership because there was absolutely no way that I would ever be done in time because his family never ended.

Eight months or so later, I'm still not done.  Granted, I haven't exactly been working around the clock on it because my in-laws' line goes on freaking forever--and that's just on the one thread I've followed through so far.  Heaven only knows where the other threads will lead once I've sifted through them all and clicked on every little green leaf waving wildly at me with yet another "ancestry hint."  The damn things are like kudzu; just when you think you've knocked them all out you find them swarming somewhere else.

"Ku-ku-KUDZU!"
"Gesundheit."

So far it's been an interesting journey; turns out my lovely girlie and my spouse are related to any number of European royalty (assuming of course that Ancestry.com is at all accurate), including but not limited to several Plantagenets (including the king who signed the Magna Carta), Robert the Bruce--High King of Scotland, Brian Boru--High King of Ireland, Llewellyn the Great of Wales, William the Conquerer, Eleanor of Aquitaine (think "Lion in Winter"), not to mention assorted other nobles and a few Crusaders as well.  That's the funny thing about genealogy; once you get far enough to connect with one royal, suddenly you're connected with metric crap-ton of royals because they were forever intermingling families for political reasons.  Also--bonus--there is a heck of a lot more recorded information about them.

My grandmother-in-law was big into genealogy and spent years tracing her husband's (B's grandfather's) family history long before the magic Google and interwebs came into being.  She even journeyed to England to look at old records and eventually wrote a book of family history going back several generations.  This record has proved invaluable in my own research efforts.  For example, she insisted that there was a family story that Bonnie Prince Charlie was, in fact, one of her husband's relatives.  The problem was that she could never find any proof.  Years ago I looked into it, but it never seemed entirely plausible because the timelines didn't jive.  There was essentially a generation off between where she'd traced back and where Charlie's line came forward, making it extremely unlikely that the family is directly descended from him (never mind the fact that he was far too busy begetting illegitimate children while in exile in Rome to be taking ship to Virginia where the hubby's relatives first came over).

Interestingly enough, I solved this mystery just the other night, some 20 plus years after I'd first heard the legend.  Turns out there was a relevant Charles in the family tree, just not that Charlie.  Still, good old Chuck was fairly important after all, because he largely bridges that generation gap between documented family history and royal descendents rather nicely.  Good to know that my husband is apparently the 20 gabillionth in line to the throne of England.  (I'd better start packing my pointy hats...)

Pointy Hat of Scotland

This history is fascinating and exciting and intriguing and even a little depressing, at least for me.  When I start with the girlie on the family tree, I can see her dad's name and his family line shooting off across the room on a genetic rocket and back into the middle ages.  It's impressive, really.  Meanwhile, I look down at my name on her tree and see the great, white nothingness that follows it because I was adopted when I was only five weeks old (yay, me!).  I've never had any complaints about being adopted; I always figured I probably came out ahead in the bargain and could only imagine how torturous the decision to give me up must have been for my birth mom even if she was a knocked-up college student as seems to have been the case.   Because I knew I was adopted before I was old enough to really comprehend what that meant, I didn't grow up with any random identity crises or anything like some kids do.  Sure, I sometimes wondered where my various attributes originated--like who in my family had blue eyes or red hair or liked to draw or sing or read.  I also wondered what my ethnicity was, though given my pale complexion it was easy enough to rule out most countries.  But that still didn't stop me from making up nationalities as the mood suited me.  Sometimes I was Irish (hello, red hair and freckles!) if for no other reason than that I was born on St. Patrick's Day.  Sometimes I was French, because I liked the language and because "LaRue" is French.  Being French somehow seemed exotic, at least until some kids at school asked one day what "LaRue" meant.  When I told them it was French for "the street," my darling classmates promptly decided what I'd actually said was "the streak."  Lovely.  I was "Mary the Streak(er)" for the rest of that year.  Kids.  Sigh.

For the most part, though, I never really thought much about finding my birth family.  As far as I was concerned, I already had a family so I didn't seem to be missing anything, nor did I have any great desire to upend either my life or that of my birth parents.  Besides, it's hard to miss what you've never known, and I'm pretty used to the anonymity of my past.  When my girlie was born, I thought more about digging into my past because  a family medical history suddenly seemed infinitely more relevant.  It was one thing for doctors to scrawl "ADOPTED" and slash lines through the family medical history section in all my medical charts, but I didn't want them doing that to my daughter.  Unfortunately, all I could ever uncover was "non-identifying" information, most of which I already knew from the records my mom gave me when I was in my 30s.  These records helped me fill in a very few blanks, such as the height and hair/eye color of my birth mother and "putative" father (it feels so special to know someone was "alleged" to have sired you...as though your existence were somehow a crime).  Because Indiana law does not allow for open adoption records at the time of my birth and because I wasn't in a position to hire someone to pry open the records back then, I filed the new bits of information away and went on about my life in relative peace, at least till I had to keep staring at that giant abyss of blankness behind my name on Ancestry.com while hearing the voice of Duncan MacLeod (of the Clan MacLeod) on a loop as he repeatedly demanded of his adoptive father "Where do I come from?  WHERE DO I COME FROM????" from one of the Highlander episodes.

Who cares where you come from, so long as you come over here.

Perhaps part of my renewed interest is because my adoptive mom passed away in April and I am now (sort of) orphaned.  Suddenly I find myself wanting to know more about who I am and, like the hot Scot above, where I come from.  Everyone deserves to know who they are and what their history is.  Not only do I want to fill in the pieces and thus satisfy my own curiosity, I also the information for my girlie who likewise has a right to know the half of her history she's missing.  So recently, when Ancestry.com started offering limited invitations to DNA testing, I jumped at the chance.  I realized that for a paltrey $100 their testing is not likely to be as thorough or complete as I might like, nor exactly was it gonna turn me into the next Alex Haley.  And that's okay.  But I figured any information about me at this point is far better than the none I currently have.

Eventually the test packet arrived; instead of being provided with cotton swabs with which to scrape my cheek, I was given the dubious pleasure of hocking up a nice juicy loogey into a little plastic test tube, after which I was required to dump in a stabilizing agent, seal it in the provided envelope, and send it off.  Once I'd closed the package I started to get paranoid because I realized belatedly that I wasn't supposed to eat or drink anything for 30 minutes before performing my spit-take, which was suspiciously tinged pink.  Hello, Crystal Light!  I feared that I'd screwed up the test and that the scientists over at Spit Genes backward R Us would be sitting around wondering why I'd felt the need to bleed fruit punch into my sample and would ultimately charge me for another one.  Whoops.

Afterwards, I checked the Ancestry.com site every couple of weeks to see if any results had been posted, which they never were.  Watched pot, and all.  I was supposed to get an email when they were ready, which I also never received.  Then one day I happened to be playing around with the family trees and I happened to look over at the testing section on a whim. I was stunned to see their little pie chart all colored in and with percentage numbers emblazoned on the page, informing me that 60% of my DNA was genetically tied to the British Isles and 34% to Northern Europe.  Probably not surprisingly, there was also listed a  6% of "unknown."  Heh.  As if I needed confirmation that I've always been an "unknown quantity."

Is it just me or does that pie chart look a little like a blue Pokemon?

On the one hand, this information is not in the least surprising.  As I've already mentioned, my physical appearance fairly screams Irish or Scottish, and I've had several people over the years comment that my coloring and build also resembles someone from Northern Germany.  Maybe Boris Becker is my long-lost cousin.  So yeah, DNA peeps, good call on those percentages.  On the other hand, even though this information was not exactly earth-shattering news, I was still not prepared at all for the wave of emotions which hit me the moment I saw those results.  It's one thing to make up crap over the years about where you're from, but another thing entirely to have it confirmed in reality.  And it's yet another thing to see the names and faces of people who are genetically tied to you.  I have 4th and fifth and sixth cousins--blood relatives.  Who knew?  Obviously I knew I had relatives somewhere, but before it was always too abstract to take seriously.  Now it's real, and that kinda blows me away.  Mind you, I can't exactly run over to their profiles and start comparing branches on the family tree because I still don't have birth names to share.  Until I do, contacting any of these people to hunt down members of my family tree is largely pointless.  But I'm not gonna lie...just knowing there are actual people out there in the world with my DNA blew me away.  I cried.  I did.  I felt a little like a fool doing so, but I still did.

Now I want even more to pursue my history.  I want more than just a vague "you were here" red dot on a map.  At 47, I don't necessarily have a burning desire to meet or start up a relationship with my birth parents, even assuming they could be found (I'll cross that bridge if and when I ever come to it), but I do want information.  I would like to find out their names and backgrounds so I can plug it all in at Ancestry.com and maybe have a prayer at long last of making all those connections for my own line.  I want to build my own history as a gift both to myself and to my daughter.  I want to be able to stop hiding behind all the masks I've made for myself over the years and discover instead those bits of myself I've been missing all this time.  What would it be like to see my face on someone else for the very first time in my life?  I've never looked like anyone before, not really, even though I'm constantly hearing from strangers that I look like their ex-wife's cousin's brother's mailman or whatever.  But that's not the same.  What must it be like to exchange a lifetime of pseudo-anonymity for a better understanding of one's own history?  Likely nothing will come of it all, but who knows?  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?  Chances are I won't be related to royalty like the girlie and hubs; more likely I'll descend from a McDonald's fry cook or from a long line of people who spent time in the stockade for being a wise-ass.  Wouldn't that be poetic justice?  Still, I'd take it all in a heartbeat, just for the luxury of knowing one way or the other.  Perhaps someday.

In the meantime, the following is a poem I found a long time ago and have always loved; it's dedicated to all my fellow adoptees out there.

Ancestry and Adoption

In February of this year, Ancestry.com was featuring a 2-week trial to encourage people to get hooked try out their services.  After thinking about it, I decided "what the heck" and signed up to give it a whirl, figuring I could always cancel two weeks later.  After all, two weeks should be plenty of time to suss out a family ancestry, right?   I spent probably 3 days straight staying up till 4 am filling in little links in my husband's and daughter's family trees.  I stayed up late several other nights as well, though perhaps not quite till the wee hours.  A week and a half in, I looked at B and told him point-blank that we would be needing to continue the membership because there was absolutely no way that I would ever be done in time because his family never ended.

Eight months or so later, I'm still not done.  Granted, I haven't exactly been working around the clock on it because my in-laws' line goes on freaking forever--and that's just on the one thread I've followed through so far.  Heaven only knows where the other threads will lead once I've sifted through them all and clicked on every little green leaf waving wildly at me with yet another "ancestry hint."  The damn things are like kudzu; just when you think you've knocked them all out you find them swarming somewhere else.

"Ku-ku-KUDZU!"
"Gesundheit."

So far it's been an interesting journey; turns out my lovely girlie and my spouse are related to any number of European royalty (assuming of course that Ancestry.com is at all accurate), including but not limited to several Plantagenets (including the king who signed the Magna Carta), Robert the Bruce--High King of Scotland, Brian Boru--High King of Ireland, Llewellyn the Great of Wales, William the Conquerer, Eleanor of Aquitaine (think "Lion in Winter"), not to mention assorted other nobles and a few Crusaders as well.  That's the funny thing about genealogy; once you get far enough to connect with one royal, suddenly you're connected with metric crap-ton of royals because they were forever intermingling families for political reasons.  Also--bonus--there is a heck of a lot more recorded information about them.

My grandmother-in-law was big into genealogy and spent years tracing her husband's (B's grandfather's) family history long before the magic Google and interwebs came into being.  She even journeyed to England to look at old records and eventually wrote a book of family history going back several generations.  This record has proved invaluable in my own research efforts.  For example, she insisted that there was a family story that Bonnie Prince Charlie was, in fact, one of her husband's relatives.  The problem was that she could never find any proof.  Years ago I looked into it, but it never seemed entirely plausible because the timelines didn't jive.  There was essentially a generation off between where she'd traced back and where Charlie's line came forward, making it extremely unlikely that the family is directly descended from him (never mind the fact that he was far too busy begetting illegitimate children while in exile in Rome to be taking ship to Virginia where the hubby's relatives first came over).

Interestingly enough, I solved this mystery just the other night, some 20 plus years after I'd first heard the legend.  Turns out there was a relevant Charles in the family tree, just not that Charlie.  Still, good old Chuck was fairly important after all, because he largely bridges that generation gap between documented family history and royal descendents rather nicely.  Good to know that my husband is apparently the 20 gabillionth in line to the throne of England.  (I'd better start packing my pointy hats...)

Pointy Hat of Scotland

This history is fascinating and exciting and intriguing and even a little depressing, at least for me.  When I start with the girlie on the family tree, I can see her dad's name and his family line shooting off across the room on a genetic rocket and back into the middle ages.  It's impressive, really.  Meanwhile, I look down at my name on her tree and see the great, white nothingness that follows it because I was adopted when I was only five weeks old (yay, me!).  I've never had any complaints about being adopted; I always figured I probably came out ahead in the bargain and could only imagine how torturous the decision to give me up must have been for my birth mom even if she was a knocked-up college student as seems to have been the case.   Because I knew I was adopted before I was old enough to really comprehend what that meant, I didn't grow up with any random identity crises or anything like some kids do.  Sure, I sometimes wondered where my various attributes originated--like who in my family had blue eyes or red hair or liked to draw or sing or read.  I also wondered what my ethnicity was, though given my pale complexion it was easy enough to rule out most countries.  But that still didn't stop me from making up nationalities as the mood suited me.  Sometimes I was Irish (hello, red hair and freckles!) if for no other reason than that I was born on St. Patrick's Day.  Sometimes I was French, because I liked the language and because "LaRue" is French.  Being French somehow seemed exotic, at least until some kids at school asked one day what "LaRue" meant.  When I told them it was French for "the street," my darling classmates promptly decided what I'd actually said was "the streak."  Lovely.  I was "Mary the Streak(er)" for the rest of that year.  Kids.  Sigh.

For the most part, though, I never really thought much about finding my birth family.  As far as I was concerned, I already had a family so I didn't seem to be missing anything, nor did I have any great desire to upend either my life or that of my birth parents.  Besides, it's hard to miss what you've never known, and I'm pretty used to the anonymity of my past.  When my girlie was born, I thought more about digging into my past because  a family medical history suddenly seemed infinitely more relevant.  It was one thing for doctors to scrawl "ADOPTED" and slash lines through the family medical history section in all my medical charts, but I didn't want them doing that to my daughter.  Unfortunately, all I could ever uncover was "non-identifying" information, most of which I already knew from the records my mom gave me when I was in my 30s.  These records helped me fill in a very few blanks, such as the height and hair/eye color of my birth mother and "putative" father (it feels so special to know someone was "alleged" to have sired you...as though your existence were somehow a crime).  Because Indiana law does not allow for open adoption records at the time of my birth and because I wasn't in a position to hire someone to pry open the records back then, I filed the new bits of information away and went on about my life in relative peace, at least till I had to keep staring at that giant abyss of blankness behind my name on Ancestry.com while hearing the voice of Duncan MacLeod (of the Clan MacLeod) on a loop as he repeatedly demanded of his adoptive father "Where do I come from?  WHERE DO I COME FROM????" from one of the Highlander episodes.

Who cares where you come from, so long as you come over here.

Perhaps part of my renewed interest is because my adoptive mom passed away in April and I am now (sort of) orphaned.  Suddenly I find myself wanting to know more about who I am and, like the hot Scot above, where I come from.  Everyone deserves to know who they are and what their history is.  Not only do I want to fill in the pieces and thus satisfy my own curiosity, I also the information for my girlie who likewise has a right to know the half of her history she's missing.  So recently, when Ancestry.com started offering limited invitations to DNA testing, I jumped at the chance.  I realized that for a paltrey $100 their testing is not likely to be as thorough or complete as I might like, nor exactly was it gonna turn me into the next Alex Haley.  And that's okay.  But I figured any information about me at this point is far better than the none I currently have.

Eventually the test packet arrived; instead of being provided with cotton swabs with which to scrape my cheek, I was given the dubious pleasure of hocking up a nice juicy loogey into a little plastic test tube, after which I was required to dump in a stabilizing agent, seal it in the provided envelope, and send it off.  Once I'd closed the package I started to get paranoid because I realized belatedly that I wasn't supposed to eat or drink anything for 30 minutes before performing my spit-take, which was suspiciously tinged pink.  Hello, Crystal Light!  I feared that I'd screwed up the test and that the scientists over at Spit Genes backward R Us would be sitting around wondering why I'd felt the need to bleed fruit punch into my sample and would ultimately charge me for another one.  Whoops.

Afterwards, I checked the Ancestry.com site every couple of weeks to see if any results had been posted, which they never were.  Watched pot, and all.  I was supposed to get an email when they were ready, which I also never received.  Then one day I happened to be playing around with the family trees and I happened to look over at the testing section on a whim. I was stunned to see their little pie chart all colored in and with percentage numbers emblazoned on the page, informing me that 60% of my DNA was genetically tied to the British Isles and 34% to Northern Europe.  Probably not surprisingly, there was also listed a  6% of "unknown."  Heh.  As if I needed confirmation that I've always been an "unknown quantity."

Is it just me or does that pie chart look a little like a blue Pokemon?

On the one hand, this information is not in the least surprising.  As I've already mentioned, my physical appearance fairly screams Irish or Scottish, and I've had several people over the years comment that my coloring and build also resembles someone from Northern Germany.  Maybe Boris Becker is my long-lost cousin.  So yeah, DNA peeps, good call on those percentages.  On the other hand, even though this information was not exactly earth-shattering news, I was still not prepared at all for the wave of emotions which hit me the moment I saw those results.  It's one thing to make up crap over the years about where you're from, but another thing entirely to have it confirmed in reality.  And it's yet another thing to see the names and faces of people who are genetically tied to you.  I have 4th and fifth and sixth cousins--blood relatives.  Who knew?  Obviously I knew I had relatives somewhere, but before it was always too abstract to take seriously.  Now it's real, and that kinda blows me away.  Mind you, I can't exactly run over to their profiles and start comparing branches on the family tree because I still don't have birth names to share.  Until I do, contacting any of these people to hunt down members of my family tree is largely pointless.  But I'm not gonna lie...just knowing there are actual people out there in the world with my DNA blew me away.  I cried.  I did.  I felt a little like a fool doing so, but I still did.

Now I want even more to pursue my history.  I want more than just a vague "you were here" red dot on a map.  At 47, I don't necessarily have a burning desire to meet or start up a relationship with my birth parents, even assuming they could be found (I'll cross that bridge if and when I ever come to it), but I do want information.  I would like to find out their names and backgrounds so I can plug it all in at Ancestry.com and maybe have a prayer at long last of making all those connections for my own line.  I want to build my own history as a gift both to myself and to my daughter.  I want to be able to stop hiding behind all the masks I've made for myself over the years and discover instead those bits of myself I've been missing all this time.  What would it be like to see my face on someone else for the very first time in my life?  I've never looked like anyone before, not really, even though I'm constantly hearing from strangers that I look like their ex-wife's cousin's brother's mailman or whatever.  But that's not the same.  What must it be like to exchange a lifetime of pseudo-anonymity for a better understanding of one's own history?  Likely nothing will come of it all, but who knows?  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?  Chances are I won't be related to royalty like the girlie and hubs; more likely I'll descend from a McDonald's fry cook or from a long line of people who spent time in the stockade for being a wise-ass.  Wouldn't that be poetic justice?  Still, I'd take it all in a heartbeat, just for the luxury of knowing one way or the other.  Perhaps someday.

In the meantime, the following is a poem I found a long time ago and have always loved; it's dedicated to all my fellow adoptees out there.