Stories

I know there are arranged marriages and all manner of things like that, but...

Isn't it marvelous to think that each one of us exists because of an interlocking network of love stories? Some of them are bittersweet, and some of them are tragic, but some of them make fairy tales look pale in comparison. 

I look at my little tree on Ancestry.com and I'm reminded of all the stories I've been told over the years. The bittersweet story of my maternal great-grandparents, the tale of a man who loved his wife true even as she became an invalid and could no longer recognize him. The tragic and courageous story of my paternal grandmother, who for her children endured a challenging marriage. The classic, old-Hollywood romance of my maternal grandparents, married 60 years in just a few days, a marriage that created four children who have each become the love of someone's life, and from whom 8 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren have come.

I wonder about the stories I don't know. A few clicks and I can see the jerky little line with its gradual slope, linking a man of world renown, from a time before things like French and firearms and Great Britain existed down, down, down to a College student halfway across the world who grew up on a goat farm in a world he would never recognize. I'm humbled as it occurs to me that if I were to follow his line another way, eventually I would find myself face to face with a dear friend of mine.

And I hope. I hope that someday someone looks back with interest and a little bit of awe at my ordinary life, because without it they would not exist. I hope they're just as fascinated by my own seemingly insignificant self as I am by all the hundreds of people without whom I would not be. I know one thing. I'm going to start keeping a detailed journal. Maybe not every day, but at least when important events happen. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have an old, brittle handwritten account than all the beautifully-designed scrapbooks in the world.

Before He formed me in the womb, He knew me. I can't even fathom it. Gloria in excelsis Deo! That my God could know, even back in the 700s, who I would be and what I would do in 1990 and beyond is so over my head I can't even try to understand it.

But I do understand that I am the sum of all the stories that have gone before me. Through Medieval France and Renaissance England, Puritain New England and the Colonial South, through the Confederacy to the Land Runs of Oklahoma one line of that man's blood has come. And just in the twentieth century a man named Dee, through whom I went on this crazy adventure through ancient records, fell in love with a woman named Opal who still misses him like mad.

And they had a daughter named Charlene who fell for a man named Jerry.

And they had a son named Jay who, for a time, loved a woman named Carrie, who has an impressive Family Tree, herself.

They had one child. Just one.

And she has a blog and an Ancestry.com account.

(And caffeine-induced insomnia)