Blood Parmesan

As another garbage year comes to a close, we traditionally gather with family and loved ones to count our blessings.

Okay, done.

Actually I had a very blest year and a nice holiday. I lost a few pounds, too, while I was home at the ancestral estate. My manorexia is out of control, which is a blessing.

During my visit I did some genealogy, which is a subject I plan to write about at greater length for Arianna.

When I was a teen I got these giant white poster boards and drew lines in pencil at every inch mark and then typed family members’ names on a typewriter and cut the names out and pasted them to the poster board, then drew family-tree lines to connect people. I did one for my mother’s side and one for my father’s side, naturally. I got all the information from my grandmothers, whose memory must have been extraordinary. They were the last generation to care about people, I guess.

Me, on the other hand… If you held a gun to my head, I still couldn’t even name all my aunts and uncles, let alone their kids. What? Oh, I mean my cousins.

Besides having a sieve-like memory, I’m an unlikely candidate for family historian for another reason that’s obvious to anyone who knows me.

Yet I diligently transferred all the information on those old poster boards into the computer. Hard work. I added it to the information I already had: I’ve traced my genealogy back hundreds of years on both parents’ sides. It’s easy to do now that the pro genealogists have been online long enough that all their work is there, pre-done for you at such free sites as RootsWeb.com and FamilySearch.org.

If you know a great-grandparent’s name (and it doesn’t hurt if the name is kind of unusual; some of my favorite first names in my tree are “Mehitable,” “Deliliah,” and “Chauncey”) and maybe their rough birth/death dates, you’ll be on the road to complete genealogical knowledge faster than you can say “killed by Indians” (a cause of death that crops up a lot in narratives about my family).

Speaking of that… My mom has befriended a neighbor who is, um, reputed to be in organized crime. Basically my parents are to them as the Cusamanos are to the Sopranos. Except my parents aren’t Italian.

(I’m scared to write about this! Luckily the reputed mobster is too old to Google-stalk me. Also, I will remain mute on the identity of my parents and where they live, just in case.)

So she went over there on Christmas Eve to say hello and he gave her this giant block of Parmesan cheese as a present. I had been needling my mom since I got there about being friends with people who may, for all she knows, be murderers, and she kept poo-pooing me in this weird way where I wasn’t sure if she was serious or not (“Nooo. They have very nice kids!” As though that and being in the mafia are mutually exclusive.)

So when she offered me a wedge of the Parmesan to take back to Washington with me, I demurred dourly: “I can’t take that cheese, Mom. It’s blood Parmesan.”

Unlike the big, reputedly mobbed-up family down the street, who had a large family gathering on Christmas, the closest I got to any relatives besides my immediate family during the holiday was seeing their names on those poster boards. That’s just as good as talking to them, though. The alive ones and the dead ones.

When I remember to do it, I derive strength from talking to my ancestors on the other side. They whisper incantations into my ear that I can use against my enemies. And they protect me.