Where I Am From

Family of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, godparents, family friends;
Teachers, salesmen, engineers, deckhands, rangers, firefighters, actors, entertainers, ad mogels.
No two great grandparents were from the same country,
Patched together, a family founded on ideals.

I lived a life full of
Lessons learned the easy way,
Having enough,
Playing with my parents,
A series of catastrophic realizations that I was responsible for what happened to me,
And that no one was as special as they thought.

Love, hate, attitude, history,
These were the choices that you remake every morning;
Hugs, compliments, unqualified success,
These were infrequent and overwhelmingly sincere.

Memories attach to
What car was being worked on out front,
Which sport was in season,
Who had just acquired another strange pet,
Whether Grandma and Grandpa had died yet.

Stories about mythological heroes
Sharing the names of my relatives conflict
Every holiday as family lore contorts.
Reason and structure contain the entropy
Of feeble human memory, not to be
Trusted. A quasi-random replacement is
Sets of explanations justified by poor
Ad hoc pattern recognition, invented
“Old rules, I just made up,” and theories challenged
By indefatigable obsession to
Find meaning in one hundred and twenty one.

I am believed to be dominant:
White, Male, Christian, Middle-Class, Able.
I am the remains of the constant reforging of
A heap of slag, reperfected over and over and over.
I am incorrigibly American.
I’m sorry; I just love my country – and I fear for it.

I have been taught
Language is a powerful tool that in the hands of too many is always a hammer.
Even in choosing what I will hate, I am describing myself.
The end does not always resemble the means.
It is my responsibility to cause my own relevance.
No one is as good as I think I am or thought I was.
“Dad, I’m adding a second major.”
“Please, God, tell me it is Business.”
Sometimes you just need the Doors.

That’s whence I’m.


inspired by Where I AM From ISBN 0-931654-47-5