Margie’s interest in genealogy knows no bounds. None at all.
Living a somewhat solitary life, Margie had always dreamed of one day finding her roots and kept a large burlap sack around just in case this happened.
The questions haunted her: Was she related to anyone famous? Had any of her ancestors come over on the Mayflower? Could tracing her family tree help clear up the mystery of why she often had a disquieting yen for sorting moist yams by lump size?
For many years the questions burned in her mind like a smoldering wick in soft wax, yet beyond mumbling to the drapes in discontent, she took no perceivable action. Then, one morning just after bathing, the wax melted full away and the wick fell with hungry intent upon the inflammable material of her instincts: she HAD to find her roots. The drive was unavoidable, worse than holding back excess urine or the urge to ride Dick Cheney around the White House grounds like a cheeky pony. Had it been the extra bowl of sugar frosted lamb goiters she’d eaten that morning? Or was it the way her rubber ducky had bobbed up and down in the sudsy filth of her bathwater, winking at her with sly sarcasm:”no roots, eh?” She couldn’t say.
Remembering that lost things are often found both under your nose and where you least remember leaving them, she wiped the fog from the mirror and stared deep into her reflection’s mouth. Tipping her head this way and that, she attempted to peep behind every molar and would have been at it a good while had she not become conscious of the woman on the other side of the glass giving her a similar, yet somehow disquieting, inspection.
The realization that it was very unlikely her roots would be found in the house came when she opened the medicine cabinet and saw only one toothbrush, which she recognized as her own. Clearly, she would have to take her search outside the walls of her home. “I’m just wasting my time looking around here,” she thought, one toe flipping up the edge of the sodden bathmat just in case.
Having eaten, bathed, and dressed, Margie took the back path past Mrs. Pheek’s fir trees, and boarded a passing trolley to town. There were others on the trolley and, while most sat quiet and thoughtful upon the cool contours of the provided fiberglass seating, some were more exuberant. The man on the seat next to her grunted continually and claimed to be working on the rough draft of his thesis on the intricacies and origins of Norwegian lapel mites. Up the aisle, a woman in a clear, plastic babushka was slapping her thighs and hollering “creamy biscuit!” every time the trolley hit a join in the track.
“These are some interesting people,” Margie thought. “I wish I was. Maybe, when I find my roots, they’ll be interesting … and then I can be!”
Reenergized by the thought, Margie pulled the bell, exited the trolley, skipped a full three blocks until she caught up with the trolley again, boarded it, and rode it around the city for several hours, her mind now consumed with the likely horrible penmanship of ferrets.
Tiring, she hopped off the trolley at Ave. St., nearly spraining her ankle and knocking an old man to the sidewalk in the process. After recovering from her mishap and fondling the oldster in the pretense of helping him up, she entered a large, grey brick building, noting that it was composed mainly of large, grey bricks, and took the nearest elevator with the intent of returning it later that day.
Farther down the block, she paused at Stan’s Wild Fruit Cafe and Plumbing Supply where she bought lunch and a spool of clear plastic tubing through which she later planned to see.
After lunch and a good game of mumbledy peg with some street kids, in which one child’s left foot was impaled to a Welsh terrier, Margie finally reached the Library and asked to see a book on family trees.
The librarian, shown here wearing only a wax plug in her navel, led Margie to books on what she called “genealogy”. Genealogy, it seems, is the study of genes and genes are apparently what people use for roots.
Margie became exited with the act of learning and ate a handful of pocket lint; an unfortunate event as it took hours to collect and wasn’t hers.
Though banned for life from the library (“I’ll come back when I’m dead, then” she cackled) she collected enough information about tracing one’s roots to start her own search and, so armed, set off towards a place where she suspected she might be able to find some clues regarding her ancestry: back home.
Sure enough, there, under her phone in the bedroom, sat a phone book. Eagerly tearing through it, she destroyed the book’s legibility and had to begin afresh with one from the shrink-wrapped pallet-load of them in her closet.
Once again, more carefully this time, Margie paged through the crinkly leaves of the soft-bound phone book, licking her fingers as she flipped through the pages and, alternately, licking the pages as she flipped through her fingers. It was thus that she found not only her own name, but that of her parents as well.
What do you know? She’d always wondered if they weren’t related.
Triumphant, she ordered a pizza but the thing just lay there, obstinate.
cae 1995/2013
This post is set in virtual Trebuchet,
a saucy little font with a history of
being used to hurl missiles, such as
medium-sized boulders or the
severed heads of enemy combatants,
over the high stone walls of castles
to the great dismay and often
egregious injury of those on the
other side.
It has since gone on record as
being sorry about those early,
rambunctious days and was taken
at its word even though the hint
of a cruel smile played about the
edges of its lips as it spoke.
