Of Round Numbers, DNA and other Spooky Stuff

                        

Top left: my mother circa 1940, about age 19.

Lower photo: 1954. The baby on my mom's lap is my older sister Carla. I wouldn't come along until the following year. Carla was the apple of her mother's eye. I wasn't the apple of anyone's.



"There is nothing more sad or more glorious than generations changing hands." -- John Mellenkamp, from the liner notes to his album Scarecrow, 1985

I was out driving my cab tonight when the Mexican national anthem began to play on XLNC-1, the classical music radio station here in San Diego which serves San Diego and northern Baja California, announcing classical pieces in Spanish and then, when they're over, back-announcing them in English.

That's how I know it's midnight: XLNC-1 always plays the Mexican national anthem, Hymno Nacional Mexicano at midnight.

And these days (or I should say, nights) I am usually still driving around at midnight when the music plays, picking up and dropping off for Red Cab of San Diego.

My anecdotal life: the cherry on the sundae of my evening tonight was ferrying two drunks back to the La Quinta Inn after midnight. The police turned them over to me after a fracas outside the Star Gazer, a noisy bar on Broadway. A third member of their party, their buddy, had apparently been severely kicked, pounded and stomped in some difference of opinion which may have been racial (the Star-Gazer's regular Saturday-night clientele mixes drunken black guys with drunken white guys: you do the math) and was at UCSD Medical Center. No doubt they had been involved in the fracas as well. They were both as plowed as beanfields, and I handled them with extreme care. It was okay, though; when I dropped them at the La Quinta, they tipped me.

Anyway, when I heard Hymno Nacional Mexicano tonight, I knew not only that it was midnight, but also that it was now, officially, April 3rd.

April 3rd is the birthday of two members of my family. It's the anniversary of the birth of my mother, Sheila Marjorie Winrow Dupuis, born April 3rd, 1921. I say "anniversary of the birth" because my mother isn't with us anymore. She died on October 1, 2000 at age 79.

It is also the birthday of my cousin Melissa Gray Billon Thirloway, born April 3rd, 1951, who hasn't spoken to me in 30 years.

That is correct. My mother and my cousin Melissa were born 30 years apart, to the day. Of the implications of this, more in a moment, as Nabokov said in Transparent Things. (He, too, for reasons that will soon become obvious, fits into this little narrative.)

It is only Melissa's birthday, by the way, not (and I hope not until I'm "anniversaried" myself) an "anniversary." Melissa is still with us, and as far as I know, so are my other Billon cousins, her older sister Shari and her younger brother John. Melissa and I, while we do not share a birthday, do have that one thing in common: both of us were the middle child in a set of three.

I've always been partial to the Billons, but I'll get to that some other time. (I will, too. My uncle Pete Billon, Shari, John and Melissa's father, was a real character. I loved him, but he was a character. We had that in common, Uncle Pete and I. Two characters, we. We came to blows once, Uncle Pete and I. That happens when two "characters" split a bottle of Scotch. I don't care; I loved him anyway.)

Of his wife, Jessie Winrow Billon, I could, and hopefully will, say a great deal more some other time. I adored my Aunt Jessie.

It took some digging, but I found two older photos of my mother. My cousin Melissa appears to the right. She looks more like her father than she does like her mother. (And by the way, has more of her father's personality than her mother's. Believe me, I know. I knew both her and her father very well. She's the female version of him. No wonder I could never get along with her. )

I also decided to throw in a picture of a butterfly. Hey, it's my blog. I can stick butterflies on it anywhere I want.

My mother was quite beautiful. So were her younger sisters, my aunts Jessie and Bernice. Grandma Winrow had a framed photo on her piano of my Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken on their wedding day in 1944. It looked like a shot from some hokey home-front movie that Hollywood might have churned out during the war. My Uncle Pete, (whom I always thought looked a little like James Arness, TV's Marshal Dillon) was dapper in his flyer's uniform, and I swear my Aunt Jessie looked like June Allyson.

Atop the old upright were also a tinted photo of my mother, aged about 18, and a little, framed red-white-and-blue sampler that said "America, Love It or Leave It."

I'm not making any of this up.

The "baby" of the family, my Uncle Bert Winrow, (1927-2008) got the richest dollop of all this DNA. He was movie-star handsome, which you can see in a photo of him taken during World War II when he was in the Navy.

There he is, in his sailor suit, looking like a member of the cast of Leonard Bernstein's On The Town. It'd be positively queasy-making if he weren't my beloved uncle.  But he was.

I've seen the photos from my parents' wedding in 1950. Uncle Bert, aged 23, was one of my dad's groomsmen. He looks like the smiling punk he was. (I can get away with saying that; my cousin Steve Winrow, one of my favorite people in the world, has also seen those wedding photos and he agrees with me that his dad did indeed look like a punk that day.)

How I came out looking like I did is anybody's guess. I'm not beautiful, or anything remotely approaching it. I don't think I look like either of my parents. Neither did my late sister Lynn, and she was beautiful when she was young, before depression, booze, painkillers and junk food swelled her up and killed her off at age 47.

The only one of us Dupuis kids who even remotely resembles one of our parents is my sister Carla. She has Dad's nose. (All I got was his personality, which no doubt has much to do with the fact that I've been divorced twice and currently live alone. I don't look like my father, but my mother told me often enough that I sure as hell sound like him. )

Great. I seem to have inherited the personality of the man with whom I had the most problems. (See Three Flies Up: My Father, Baseball and Me, by me, Outskirts Press, 2008.)

But this isn't about me. It's about my mom and Melissa, the two birthday girls. Yes, my mom was beautiful when she was young, and Melissa was a stunner at 22 or so. Now it can be told, as they used to say: when I was 18 and Melissa was 22, I had a perfectly horrific crush on her. (Actually, I made this confession to Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete 25 years ago. Uncle Pete's only comment: "Call her.")

Melissa and her husband Jeff have two (I think) fully grown children: daughter Briana and son Tyler. I think the Thirloway "children" would both be in their thirties now, but I haven't seen a photo of either of them since they were babies, and I've never met either of them. Not long after they were married in 1977, Melissa and Jeff took up residence in Seattle. I've spent my share of time in the state of Washington, but believe it or not, I have never been to Seattle. To me, Washington always meant Spokane.

But I'm sure that Briana and Tyler Thirloway must be favored of the gods. Their mother was gorgeous, and their dad was a very handsome fellow who, I think, might even still have hair. (Lucky Jeff; I got my dad's hair, which is to say I don't have any, and haven't since I was about 30. I first had noticeable hair loss at 20. My father, taking me out for dinner on my 20th birthday in 1975, poo-poohed my worries: "You don't have my hair, you have your mother's hair," he said. Well, if I do, I hope someone can find it.)

Now. When James Watson and Francis Crick broke the genetic code back in the early nineteen-fifties, all they did was scratch the surface of what are far, far deeper mysteries.

I'm going to tell you an anecdote. It was a flash-and-gone moment in my life, but one that I have never forgotten, because it would have made me think of Vladimir Nabokov if I had known his work at the time this moment occurred. But I was going-on 18 that day and had not yet discovered Pale Fire, Lolita, or one of my all-time favorite books, Speak, Memory.

I didn't start reading Nabokov until a few years later. But his curiously intense visual sense led him to be unusual among writers. Nabokov was the most "visual" of writers, and he had a way of treating narratives as though they were chess problems. (He loved chess and composed many chess problems, by the way.) Nabokov noticed things, things that most of us usually miss. A quarter of a century ago we would have called him "right-brained." He liked to stick little puzzles in his narratives and challenge his readers to notice them.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote novels the way he
played chess. Nobody else has ever done this,
that I know of, anyway.

And...here comes coincidence number two (coincidence number one will come shortly): there was a popular book in the mid-1980s called Drawing On The Right Side Of the Brain. It put forth the idea that the right sides of our brains handle things like spatial relationships, while the left sides handle the conceptual stuff, language, grammar and all that. It was a "how-to" book; it showed  you how you could become good at drawing by trying to "shut off" the left side of your brain, the part that handled ideas and concepts, and liberate the right side, the part that processed visual images and spatial relationships.

An interesting concept, discredited now I think. But I was trying to draw in those days...and so was my Aunt Jessie, who lent me her copy of the book. I tried its exercises.

"Pay attention," as Nabokov might have said (if he'd thought to say it.)  "Pay attention" was Nabokov's "message," the only message his writings would ever send. Small wonder that he was derided for so many years as a writer who supposedly had "nothing to say." He had plenty to say: "Pay attention" is one hell of a message.

So pay attention: my Aunt Jessie lent me this book.

(About now, if you know Schubert, the early bars of the piano part of his Erlkonig should be sounding in your head: "doodley-doodley-do, do-do," etc. )

I would expect that Melissa would "get" this, by the way. When we were young, I wanted to be a poet and Melissa wanted to sing opera. She knew Schubert's music. I was discovering it. She had just graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles when we started talking about music. She had thought that she wanted to major in choral conducting. Then she decided she wanted to sing. We started writing letters to each other.  (No e-mail in 1973.) Pretty soon we got into an argument. Then we kissed and made up. Then we got into another argument. Melissa and I simply do not get along. And I adore her as much as I adored her mother. But in the hard-to-get-along-with sweepstakes, Melissa would blow her mother away in the first round. So would I.

"Opposites attract" may be a truism, but it doesn't apply in this tale. Melissa and I are too much alike, that's our problem. Or it was until we both got too old to care.

Dateline: Pasadena, California. Time: late summer, 1973. Melissa had just graduated from "Oxy" as it's called; I had graduated from high school in June and was about to start college myself.

On an impulse (I had access to the family Chevrolet) I hauled myself up to Altadena (near Pasadena) where Melissa was sharing an apartment that summer with her equally-beautiful friend Peggy. I sometimes wonder whatever became of Peggy. The last time I saw her was at my cousin John's first wedding in 1976.

My unannounced arrival left both of them a little nonplussed. I suppose that was the idea. It was a Saturday night. I don't remember many details, but Melissa and I talked rather late into the night, then I bunked on the living-room couch. I think we managed to avoid quarreling; don't ask me how. I do remember that Melissa was wearing a flowing dress of some mauve-gray color when I barged in, and was barefoot. I still had hair, was parting it in the middle as fashion dictated in those blow-dried days, and was also sporting an ugly gash on my nose. My boss at the Union 76 station where I was pumping gas that summer had a black labrador, who bit me on the very day I quit. I still have the scar on my nose.

I think I was wearing a light-blue turtleneck sweater, jeans and Hush Puppies. Well, maybe my memory is better than I thought. Take note, shade of Nabokov (who, by the way, named the dead poet of his novel Pale Fire "John Shade." Clever.)

I arrived on Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon Melissa clearly didn't know what to do with me. I was getting ready to leave, though probably not as quickly as she and Peggy would have liked. Anyway, she suggested we go out and have lunch.

There was a popular delicatessen in Pasadena in those days, whose name escapes me now. It was a mouthful, no pun intended: "Rumpelmayer's," or something like that. Melissa and Peggy agreed that this would be the best place for us two cousins to go and get a bite to eat.

We went there, Melissa driving the ponderous white Ford Thunderbird she drove that summer (Uncle Pete picked it out -- don't ask.)

As teenagers will be, (especially if they're in the incubation period of painful crushes), I was extremely self-conscious. We stood at the counter in this deli, Melissa and I, looking at the menu. All of the sandwiches they served were named after celebrities. This was where my self-consciousness kicked in: I just couldn't make myself order a "Mickey Rooney" or a "Robert Redford." It was too embarrassing.

Melissa noticed my discomfort and suggested we might go somewhere else. We did. She drove us to a coffee shop which was called...oh, hell. The Pepper Mill? The Salt Shaker? Something like that.

We sat opposite each other in a booth and ordered lunch. And it was while we were waiting for our food that Nabokov's butterfly flew through the room. (Oh, yes. For the uninitiated, Nabokov was a lepidopterist as well as a writer; butterflies are a regular presence in his work, and now I suddenly understand why I chose to stick a butterfly at the top of this posting.)

So we're sitting there. We're chatting. Melissa is gorgeous. I'm shy. There's a long, embarrassed pause in the conversation. She winks at me.

That was when that butterfly (here it is, folks: coincidence number one) landed on my shoulder. I've never forgotten it.

Melissa's wink was a long, slow one accompanied by an affectionate grin, a sort of tightening around the mouth. The kind of grin you give someone with whom you share a secret.

My mother's grin. My mother's wink. I swear to God, for one fleeting nanosecond there I had the unmistakable impression that I was sitting in that booth with my mother. The way Melissa looked at me, grinned and winked, was exactly, right down to the twitch, the way my mother would grin and wink at me. It was eerie. And it only lasted a fraction of a second. But somehow, in that Augenblick, the Billon genes and the Winrow genes and the Gray genes and all the rest came together and struck The Lost Chord. For a second, Melissa became Sheila. Melissa became my mom.

Oh, sneaky, sneaky DNA. So on-target in its knittings and weavings, so on-the-mark in its splashes of watercolor. It would have done Nabokov proud, that moment. But I was a few weeks shy of 18 and hadn't read him yet. In the years since, having read his stuff over and over, I know that I participated in a truly nabokovian moment that afternoon. And I'm deeply, profoundly grateful.

Here's to you, maestro. Happy Birthday to the shade of my mom, who I'd like to think is sharing a snicker with you as I write this. And Happy Birthday, dear Melissa.

And here's to DNA, and life's most precious, sometimes-fathomable mysteries. (If you pay attention!)

I love you all very much.

Kelley