The roots of a love affair

When I was a pre-teen, I read a book about Doug, an American teenager immersed in hot rod culture. The story was about Doug finding himself, but was full of descriptions of bored-out V8s and chopped and channeled old Fords, accompanied in my memory by Chuck Berry songs,

“. . . Cadillac a-rollin’ on the open road; Nothin’ outrun my V8 Ford . . . Maybeline why can’t you be true? You done started back doin’ the things you used to do.”

In a barn, Doug discovered a pristine 1948 MG TC, a British Racing Green roadster with wire wheels and saddle brown leather seats. The TC had a four cylinder engine, one third the horsepower of his friends cars and couldn’t compete on a straight away, but would lose any car on curvy roads.

Doug soon tired of drag racing preferring to go “motoring” with his new girl Deb, top down to sunshine and wind in their hair.

This began my unrequited love affair with old British sports cars. I’ve lusted after Jaguar XK-120s, MG As and Bs, Triumphs for much of my life. I drove my cousin’s Austin Healey 3000 on farm roads when I was thirteen and a friend’s Healey Sprite Midget when I was sixteen.

I have never owned any of these cars, but I’ve imagined the motoring joy of them. When I went to business school in England, I discovered the Morgan Car Company, which has been building cars like these continuously since the 1930s. The car in the bottom right of the picture above is a 1957 model, but they build a car that looks exactly like that today.

Reportedly the stiff suspension and ash wood body frame makes a Morgan an uncomfortable ride, but the light-weight aluminum body makes even the four cylinder quite quick.

People want fast cars and so Morgan obliged. They introduced the Plus 8 in 1968 with 4.5 liter Rover V8, and neck-snapping acceleration. Mick Jagger owned one. In 2000 Morgan produced the Aero 8 pictured in the upper left. The Aero even looks fast, but it leaves me cold. I think it might create the g-force face bending of astronaut centrifuge training, not exactly a “happy motoring” experience.

Most guys want the “fast” driving experience. I fantasize about the “slow” experience.

Let’s be clear. I drive ten miles-per-hour over the speed limit on interstates and use Ez-Pass for tolls like everyone else.  I don’t want to return to before President Dwight D. Eisenhower built GM president Will Durant’s plan for a “network of highways stretching from sea to sea.” I do fondly remember country road drives reading Burma Shave signs.

Is faster better?

What prompted this fast-slow rumination?

My LinkedIn and BizCatalyst 360 connection Charlotte Wittenkamp shared an essay by Rory Sutherland, entitled “Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?” Mr. Sutherland is the former creative director of U.K. Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency part of the WPP marketing conglomerate.

Mr. Sutherland now runs Ogilvy Consulting, which applies human behavioral science to business problems. His essay humorously makes the point that the default criterion for innovation has become speed, even though that might not be what the customer wants.

Fast train schedules, bullet trains, even faster non-stop flights, instant email, Amazon same day delivery, quicken our lives unnecessarily – Don’t order a Guiness, it takes forever to pour. “Some things are worth waiting for,” he quotes the Ogilvy Guiness ad to drive home his point,.

This got me thinking. Is this a conspiracy? Or is this the way humans are wired?

In his book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, Daniel Kahneman posits that human brains have two systems of processing thoughts.

• System 1 is autopilot, subconscious thought used 90% of the time. It makes decisions and takes actions we have done before. It recognizes patterns and gambles on the frequency those patterns have been seen before. It is incredibly fast, like an algorithm.
• System 2 is focused, conscious thought. It is very powerful, but slow. It can only do one thing at a time.

When people say they’re good at multitasking, their skill is switch-tasking, moving rapidly between System 1 & 2, and, yes, some people are better at that, but most of us just think we are good at it.

Automobile, air traffic control accidents, chemical or oil spills and explosions are frequently caused by someone whose brain was in System 1 when it should have been in System 2. Someone was thinking fast when they should have been thinking slow.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will save us time

Sutherland says that we don’t always actually want efficiency. He suggests that AI, which is being built on the speed and efficiency model might be trained to slow down, give us a series of suggestions for a trip to Greece over a two month period allowing for contemplation, discussion.

Google, Amazon Ads, LinkedIn, and my writing software is constantly popping up a dialogue box, “Would you like to use AI to write this?” Mentally I answer. “NO DAMMIT! I’M TRYING TO BECOME A WRITER.” (This is sometimes my out loud voice, according to my wife.)

Speed and efficiency rarely help learn a skill. It’s why when I’m woodcarving, I don’t use power tools. I want to keep the digits I have.

In my late thirties I decided to run a marathon. I had been running twenty-five seven-minute miles a week for about ten years, but never more than five miles at one time. I just started doubling my long runs at the same pace. I hurt myself.

A fellow runner said “Alan, remember LSD!”

“I  don’t do that anymore and I am NOT going to start again.”

“No man. Long Slow Distance. Reduce your speed to run longer. A nine minute mile pace for your first marathon is quite respectable.”

Since the Industrial Revolution humans have focused on the relationship between speed and cost. Faster is better, because the more quantity you can produce for the same overheads, the cheaper each unit is.

New technology performs one function more rapidly. GPS gets you from point A to point B faster than maps, but it doesn’t show you what else you might see along the way. Remember AAA Triptiks, that told you attractions at every exit you pass? AAA still makes Triptiks, but very few members order them.

There is an inverse relationship between quality and speed. A designer once told me, “Good, fast and cheap. Pick any two. If it’s fast and cheap, it won’t be good. If it’s good and cheap it won’t be fast. If it’s good and fast, it won’t be cheap.”

Some activities benefit from going slow: eating, customer service, international diplomacy, research, sex, weight loss, learning, and any art or craft. With thinking and editing time, this little post took longer than I’d like, but I am still learning to write.

Gustav Stickley, the Arts & Crafts designer, embossed on the copper fireplace hood at his home in Morris Plains, NJ:

“The Lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

Slow down. Feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. Happy motoring.

First Love

My first girlfriend was named Coke, not what you’re thinking. We weren’t fifteen year-old white powder fiends. Her real name was Carolyn. The nickname came from her first attempts at saying her name, but it stuck and she introduced herself, “Hi my name is Carolyn, but I’m called Coke.”

We hung out after school, and drank Lime Rickey’s at Brigham’s Ice Cream. Pre-driver’s license, I rode her high school bus and took a public bus home.

The Car

In the fall of 1962 my father was replacing the family wing-finned ’59 Chevrolet. He engaged me in the selection process. I was ecstatic. I subscribed to Road & Track and Car and Driver and owned a ’53 Dodge tinker-car.  We went to dealers together and brought home brochures. I had read about the new engine; Pontiac had sawed a 389 V8 in half, a big-bore slanted four cylinder motor. My Day ordered a ’63 Pontiac Tempest, one of the first US front-wheel drive cars, black with a red bucket seats, Quad 4 engine, four speed manual transmission with floor mounted shifter (four-on-the-floor). I convinced my dad to buy the four-barrel carburetor, so much for the miles-per-gallon advantage of four cylinders. I also convinced him to buy seat belts, “for safety,” secretly thinking “like a race car”.

License

In October I got my license on my sixteenth birthday. That took planning only a motivated sixteen year old boy could pull off. I took the written test three months earlier to get a learner’s permit. The high school driver’s ed course wouldn’t be done in time, so I paid for a private course with money from my job at Howard Johnson’s. I rode two buses to class and doubled up on classroom and behind the wheel instruction to be done on time. Then I called the only Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), with a test on the day.

I was ready. My father started teaching me to drive when I could reach the pedals. My mother rode in the back seat of the Chevy, (the Tempest hadn’t come in yet). A State Trooper rode shotgun. I drove around making left and right turns, checking mirrors,  using hand signals and the blinker, doing a three point turn in traffic on a hill. Then came parallel parking on a 30 percent grade into a really tight spot.. I aced it. The trooper was impressed.

“You’ve obviously been practicing that, “he smiled. “OK, you passed. Take us back to the office.. . .. WATCH IT!”

In my elation, I had started to pull out into traffic without looking, almost into another car.

“Alan. Would you rather have your license or your life?”

“my life” I drove back to the DMV dejected.

“Alan, you know how to drive safely, but you can’t let up for a second.”

“yes sir”

“I want you to remember that, always! I am going to give you your license today. . .”

I don’t remember a word that came after that. I don’t remember the drive home, or what my mother and my father said or what I ate for my sixteenth birthday dinner or any of my presents.

I remember when the Pontiac Tempest came into the dealership. My father and I picked it up and he let me drive home.. My father and I loved that car; my mother not-so-much.

The Dance

Coke and I went to a dance the previous spring; my Dad driving us in the Chevy. Instead of a corsage, she preferred a single gardenia blossom, which she wore in her hair. The smell of gardenias still brings back memories.

I was in DeMolay, the Mason’s boys youth group; Coke was in Rainbow girls, the Easter Star girls youth group. February 16, 1963 Rainbow girls held a Sweetheart Dance and I asked Coke to go. I would drive the Pontiac.

I don’t remember the dance or what Coke wore. As we left at around 11:00, it started to snow. I drove her home. We probably kissed in her driveway, but not for long as I had to be off the road by midnight, when my license “turned into a pumpkin” a reference to the Disney Cinderella movie.

And then . . .

The drive home, under five miles, was winter magic. The plows hadn’t been out yet and there was about an inch and a half of new snow on all the roads. Everything was white and streetlights twinkled.  

I drove too fast, maybe thirty-five miles per hour, contrary to what I said later. This was New England. My father taught me how to drive in the snow. When you felt the rear end break loose, steer in the direction of the skid till the car righted itself. I may have even been trying for some fishtail action.

The Pontiac Tempest was a front-wheel drive car. Fishtails are a rear-wheel drive phenomenon. Front-wheel drive cars don’t fishtail, they snowplow skid. The front wheels lock in a turned position and you keep going forward.

In the soft fairy-white glitter light sparkling off individual snowflakes, a big oak tree leaped in front of me. I panicked. I stomped both feet on the brakes. The Tempest accelerated. Even now my memory is in slow motion, the tree reaching branches toward me, white lightning streaks in my peripheral vision. The crash, which must have been loud, is soundless.

I don’t remember getting out of the car. A man standing under a porch light yelled “Are you all right?” I was and he yelled that he’d called the police.

“Police?!”

It took every strand of my spinal cord not to run. The police came. I remember the sergeant saying “You were driving this?” I looked at the car for the first time. My bucket seatback had broken off backwards. The steering wheel was where the seatback used to be, there was an engine-shaped bulge between the two front seats and the four-on-the-floor pushed against the back seat.

“I can’t understand why you didn’t go through the windshield,” mused the cop.

“I dunno. Seat belts, I guess.”

“This car has seat belts?”

“Yeah, I talked my father into buying them.”

“Well you can thank your stars for that. Your Dad’s one of those Ward Cleaver types, right?” The  father in TV show Leave it to Beaver, was the most understanding father I’ve ever seen.

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head, but it turned out he was, even when the insurance company refused to call the car a total loss, which cost a lot of money, he just said, “Put your car on the road.”

I have been religious about wearing seat belts ever since. My father, even though they saved his son’s life, never liked them and had to be reminded to wear them even after the tickets.

Coke and I broke up about four months later as I discovered that other girls might be interested in me. But as the cop said that night:

“You’ll always remember the Sweetheart Dance, when you hugged a tree on the way home.”

At the Therapist

“How has the week gone?”

“I don’t know. . . . not going well. . . I’ve been quite anxious. . . can’t get ahead. . . seems to know and is taking the opportunity to be more of a . . .over and over.”

“Are you ready to move on? What happened with. . .?”

“That went well I guess. I mean, I think it’s better, and it’s more . . . and different but I’d have to . .  and yeah, there is really nothing holding me . . , but I just feel so stuck. I’m not sleeping and I keep having that dream. I wake up sweating and can’t get back to sleep.”

“Tell me about this dream.”

“I don’t really remember it, I’m in a hallway, or a staircase, I don’t remember. I just get so anxious.”

“Would you be willing to try a little hypnosis. It might help you remember.”

“OK?. . . I mean, I guess. . .You think it means something? I keep having it. . . sure, I guess. . .”

“Let’s try. Sit up. Feet flat on the floor. Close your eyes. Breathe deeply. . . just listen to my voice. . . you are feeling a little drowsy. . . eyelids heavy. . . count backwards from 30. . .29. . . 28. . . hear nothing but the sound of my voice. . . imagine you are sleeping. . . . Are you sleeping?

“Yes”

“Good I want you to enter that dream you keep having. . . nothing in it can hurt you. . . it will be just like going to the movies. . . Are you in the dream now? Nod you head. . . Good tell me about it.”

“I’m walking down a long corridor. . . the walls are stone. . . it looks like a castle or something. . . it’s damp. . .I keep walking. . . I think I’m supposed to. . . I’m going around curves in the corridor. . . I can’t see what’s ahead. . . I have to keep moving. . . There’s something behind me.”

“Turn around and look behind you. What do you see?”

“Nothing. . . . just darkness. . . I have to keep moving. . .  faster . . . there’s a staircase, a stone staircase. . . it’s old. . .  it doesn’t look safe. . . there’s no hand rail. . . “

“Go up the staircase.”

“Going up. . .  there’s another hallway. . .  and another stone staircase . . .  running now. . . I stumble on the stairs . . . hurt my hand or maybe my knee. . . there’s a door. . .   there’s light behind it. . . I push on the door, but it won’t move. . . pushing harder. .  I throw my body against the door, but it won’t move. . . my shoulder hurts. . . I’m beating on the door. . I keep pushing . . . it won’t open. . . open! . . .  why won’t it open?. . . Why? OPEN!”

“Stop a minute and breathe. . . this is like the movies. . .  nothing here can hurt you. . . step back a little. . . tell me about this door.”

“it’s brown, wood, I guess, old. . . I push,  why won’t it open. . .“

“Step back a little more back down the stairs. . . can you se the whole door now/”

“Yes.”

“Describe the door.”

“It’s dark brown wood. . . worn. . . round at the top. . . paneled. . .

“Is there anything on the door?’

“I think so. . . yeah. .  .there’s a plaque on the crosspiece . . .old and very faded. . .”

“Can you read the plaque?”

“Well maybe. . .  if I get down on my knees. . . Yeah. . . it’s definitely a word. . . “

“What does it say. . . “

It’s faint. . .  hard to read. . . it says. . .  PULL.”

What dreams may come

In dreams our subconscious sometimes reflects our anxiety. I have the “unprepared dream” a lot. You know the one I mean. I’m taking a test I didn’t study for, I’m in an unknown play where I haven’t learned the lines or I’m presenting on a subject I know nothing about. That’s an imposter syndrome dream, a reflection of my insecurity. . . where I am anxious about doing something for which I think I’m unqualified or unprepared.

I don’t have the test dream much anymore. I guess I graduated and the curtain fell on my acting “career” fifty years ago, so those dreams are less frequent. But I retired six years ago and I’m still having unprepared work dreams. I’ve trained myself to wake, tell myself I’m “good enough” and figure out what, if anything, I might need to prepare.

Sometimes our dreams give us a message. Early in my consulting career, I was managing multiple projects, traveling internationally, and working more than a hundred hours per week. I had a recurring dream that I was trying to get over a hill on a skateboard where the wheels kept falling off.

An old friend told me “Fritz Perls, the German Gestalt psychiatrist, said we are all characters in our dream.”  Andre encouraged me to “play the hill, me, and the skateboard.” It turned out that I was abusing the skateboard (my body?) and I slowed down and asked for help at work and ended up being more productive.

The dream in the shaggy dog story above is like that. How can you step back and realize where you are your own obstacle. That isn’t to say that genuine obstacles don’t exist, but it is still useful to ask:

What is my part of this problem? How am I getting in my own way? Does my persistence inhibit me?

When you feel like you are “beating your head against a brick wall,” step back, or rise up. Can you go around the wall or over the wall, rather than through it.

Maynard and me

Maynard G. Krebs, pictured above, was the sidekick character in The Many Loves of Doby Gillis, the 1959-63 CBS TV series. Dwayne Hickman starred in the title role, and Bob Denver, later of Gilligan’s Island fame, played Dobie’s eccentric friend, Maynard. The character was created for TV and wasn’t in the Max Schulman books the series was based upon. Maynard wore a scruffy goatee, a stretched out gray sweatshirt, dirty low cut white Converse sneakers, and jeans.

Maynard was the show’s Shakespearian fool. Dobie created elaborate schemes trying to get some girl to notice him, and Maynard would say “Why don’t you just ask her out?” Dobie would ignore that advice and laugh track hilarity followed.

In one of the show’s repeated bits, whenever Maynard heard the word “work,”  his eyes would bug out, and he would say in Bob Denver’s squeaky high voice “Work?” and then attempt to make himself scarce. Dobie would talk him down from his anti-work panic and the show would go on.

If you google Maynard G. Kreps, he is referred to as “America’s first hipster.” He wasn’t a hipster; he was a Beatnik. San Francisco Chronical  writer Herb Caen coined this term for the Beat Generation Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, etc. Beatniks rejected consumerist capitalism, loved off-beat poetry, bebop and jazz. Caen added the Russian “nik” to mock their leftist views and characterized the beats as shiftless and lazy.

I loved Maynard. I was twelve and desperately trying to hold onto my boyhood. I hated school homework. I rebelled at household chores. My father despaired that I would ever learn to work. He found me jobs mowing neighbors lawns, and caddying for him and his golf buddies. I was a fan of Maynard, but not a fan of work. I wanted to play.

I did eventually learn to work. The first job I found for myself, soda jerk at Howard Johnsons, taught me who you worked with could make any job seem like play. Then I discovered acting and worked hard in a play. Eventually, I found myself in consulting, working 100 hour weeks and feeling my work had “purpose.”

But I always had a love-hate relationship with work. When I wanted to annoy my boss I‘d say:

“I figured out what I don’t like about my job.”

“Oh, really, what?”

“Workin’!”

Classic Maynard.

Noahpinion: Yes, we still have to work

A friend recently introduced me to Noah Smith’s blog Noahpinion. Noah calls himself an economic blogger, but don’t let the econ-bit put you off; his smart writing might start with economics, but veers into public policy, and philosophy, all in a fun, easy to read style. Noah’s recent post Yes, we still have to work, starts with some news about an experiment with Universal Basic Income (UBI), which found that even at $1000 a month 2% of workers in the study stopped working.  He posits that “a welfare program that causes a significant number of people to stop working entirely is unlikely to pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.”

Along the way Noah examines the same trope that produced the Maynard G. Krebs character, “kids today are lazy.” He rejects this idea with data, but this idea floats around a lot. Are GenZ  and Millennials “lazy?” Do they want the “whole world just handed to them?” I’m tempted to agree until I remember this is exactly what the Greatest Generation said about Baby Boomers and so I am inclined to believe that this is just something the Old say about the Young.

Smith debunks David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs that says certain jobs are useless, noting that work satisfaction is rising. Noah presents valuable jobs lost (like economic bloggers) in an argument credited in a footnote to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Here’s the original:

“These tales of impending doom allowed the Golgafrinchans to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The story was that they would build three Ark ships. Into the A ship would go all the leaders, scientists and other high achievers. The C ship would contain all the people who made things and did things, and the B Ark would hold everyone else, such as hairdressers and telephone sanitisers. They sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.”

(Who says the Internet isn’t amazing? Imagine digging out my copy of HGttG to find this?)

Noah ultimately concludes that UBI is unlikely to be good public policy.

“Human labor is still incredibly valuable, and figuring out how to make human workers more capable is still how most value is created. And for that reason, we should focus policy on rewarding human labor more, and be wary of economic philosophies that claim that most human beings would be better off as glorified pets.”

His post rejects a no-human-work I Robot world and promotes the “a job is dignity” argument that Joe Biden’s father instilled in him. I have been unemployed and don’t remember it as joyful, but I’m still Maynard enough not to buy the absolute sanctity of work.

I do believe in work choice  ̶  not surprising for someone who was self-employed for 23 years. We all work for ourselves. If we choose to sell our labor to “the Man,” we ought to recognize the trade-off.

Some have the luck and luxury of finding purpose in work. Several times during my consulting career, alignment between work and purpose made work seem like play. The “I can’t believe they pay me to do this” euphoria was caused by important work, good people to work with, and achieving results for a grateful client. Those conditions didn’t always exist, but did more often than one might think.

I also got paid more as I rose. I liked that. Pearl Bailey said “Honey, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I can tell you rich is better.”

What part of retired didn’t you understand?

I never made rich.  I did stop asking for a “debt-free existence” every birthday. I got to retire, after waiting till seventy to take Social Security,  and downsizing from a house to a condo. I am grateful. I have friends my age who are still working, unenthusiastically.

I also have friends who can’t imagine why anyone would retire. Some offer me project work and are shocked when I turn it down.

“What part of retired didn’t you understand?”

“What do you do every day?”

“I write. . . a lot.”

Billie says ‘You’re still working; you’re just not getting paid for it.”

She’s right.

“Work?”

“I seek dead people”

My wife is an amateur genealogist. She spends her retirement researching her extended, extended family. She is a detail person, a puzzler, a rigorous researcher, and a writer. She uses all her skills pursuing records of her long dead relatives.

Giving gifts to support her passion is a challenge. I’ve considered books, but it’s like buying Sculpture for Dummies for Michaelangelo. I’ve settled on tee shirts and coffee mugs with dumb genealogy jokes, which, like telling consultant jokes to consultants, must get old.

Genealogy is history taken personally

Billie’s favorite TV show is Dr. Henry Gates’ Finding Your Roots on PBS. I sometimes join her watching celebrities reactions to unknown family stories. Children of immigrants learn their ancestors sacrifices; descendants of slaves, understand their horrific past in a visceral way.  Family stories touch us deeply.

At dinner, Billie sometimes overflows with a story:

“I can’t believe what this woman went through. In a twelve year period, she lost six children and had four who lived. Then her husband died. She married his brother and then two of their children died. Then they moved from Pennsylvania to Iowa. It was the early 1800s. Did they pack a wagon or walk?”

Or she’ll be frustrated with a puzzle she can’t work out:

“There’s no record of a Robert being born. He doesn’t show up in the 1850 census. He is nowhere in marriage records, but here’s his grave, death date 1864.”

Later, when she solves the mystery, she is like a six-year-old girl in a princess dress. “You won’t believe this. . . “

Side benefits for me

Billie did some research for my family reunion. I was amazed. For example, I’d thought both sides of my family immigrated in the late nineteen century. My mother’s and my father’s family actually arrived in the mid-1700s. I was hooked, not Billie-level, but intrigued.

She bought me an Ancestry.com membership and two DNA tests; I learned more. My mother’s grandfather was in the Confederate Army. My father’s grandfather and his brother, mustered into the Union Army of Indiana on the same day. These Blues and Grays were in different battles, but if either hadn’t survived I wouldn’t be here.

My DNA tests show 1% Cherokee DNA and a little snooping on Ancestry found that my great, great grandmother was the daughter of Chief Thomas and a white woman. Chief Thomas survived the “Trail of Tears” and died in Oklahoma.

My father’s family always steadfastly maintained they were English, but they were from west of the Rhine river, at various times German, French or Swiss land. I also have 3% Ashkenazi Jewish DNA, probably from that line, but I am unsure where. . . yet.

My paternal great, great, great, grandfather moved his family twelve miles from Hagerstown, Maryland to Franklin County Pennsylvania. Before then my last name was spelled variously Koller, Köller, Kohler. After the move it was spelled Culler.

Family stories

There is family lore that my father’s family were Huguenots, French Protestants, persecuted in their local area. Perhaps they were followers of John Calvin unwelcome in Catholic Alsace, Northwest Switzerland, or the Rhineland. Or was the persecution in Hagerstown, a German Catholic area, before they moved to the English dominated Pennsylvania? Or both?

Perhaps the most famous story I know of tracking ancestry from family lore is Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976).  Haley, a writer  (The Biography of Malcolm X) and screenwriter (Superfly),  heard stories about his ancestor, young Kunta Kinte captured next to a kuambe belongo (river), brought to Maryland and sold as a slave. Haley used family stories, language and cultural traditions to track his family history long before Ancestry.com and Family Tree DNA. The Roots television miniseries opened Americans eyes to the horrors of slavery and the importance of oral tradition.

“I finally found you, you old African!” he exclaims in the final scene. Haley travelled to Gambia and found a shaman who had memorized members of the tribe. Before written language this is how genealogy, and all history, was recorded. Now we depend on family bibles, government records, family lore and maybe one genealogy “nut.”

Family records

Billie is her family’s generation recorder. She writes histories and distributes them to relatives who express gratitude, but rarely read them. It is an endless, thankless task.

I gave her a tee shirt:

“My work is done. I found everyone in my family tree and all my records are documented,    (said no genealogist ever).”

Occasionally, she vents about the sloppiness of some of her fellow researchers.

“How is it possible to record a person as the mother of another person, when the birth certificate shows she was born after her supposed child?.”

You can guess who manages our home records.

Learning from our history

How has genealogy enlightened me?

I was surprised that my father’s stories collapsed generations. The “four Culler brothers who immigrated to America and moved to Indianna” were four generations from the immigrants.

I asked Billie what she had learned. She replied, “that I am a grand amalgam of many people, who all lived lives while the history we read about – the founding of the country, the Civil War, the Depression – was happening around them. I am, we all are, a combination of all those people.”

“And yet,” I said, “we are each unique. We all get a slice of available DNA so my sister’s reflects my father’s side and I favor my mother’s Scots-Irish.

My family history, includes people who stayed in one place and those who moved families hundreds of miles in buckboards. There are families who prospered, and some who lost everything. There are stories of heartache and resilience. And, as Billie said, I’m connected to all of them.

Billie and I each discovered an ancestor family living in William Penn’s Philadelphia who may have been friends, a previously unknown connection between us. Perhaps if everyone studied genealogy we’d know we are all connected more than we imagine – each a unique leaf in the family tree of humankind.

The trail began in a yellow green wood.

“Don’t get your feet wet!” My mother admonished as I leaped across a trickle-stream not bothering with the log bridge.

Was I six? Seven? I’m pretty sure it was before Cub Scouts and that was eight. The leaves had just started to turn, so before my October birthday- September? Carolyn wasn’t there, but Connie was. My sisters are eleven and six years older than me. Caorlyn, later called Lynne was too grown up to be much of a part of my boyhood, except for the dog she bought me when I turned nine, without asking my parents. Connie regressed to be my first playmate, but that didn’t last when she became a teenager, so definitely not eight yet. Maybe five going on six? Probably six going on seven.

Mount Monadnock was less than an hour’s drive from our home. It is in Jaffrey in southern New Hampshire. We went on a family adventure driving in the old gray Willys. Connie and I counted pastured cows as we looked out half-rolled-down windows on our own side of the backseat. “Oh there’s a cemetery; you lost all your cows.” Connie gloated. “That’s NOT fair!” I pouted sticking out my lower lip, which made her laugh and improved my mood.

All the cemeteries were on my side of the car going, but her side coming home. “Why can’t we go a different way? She half-whined and Mama and Daddy laughed. “Fair’s fair”

I ran into the woods despite being warned to stay with the family. Connie caught me up. “Don’t make Daddy mad, kiddo. Besides, it’s a long walk- you need to take your time.”

“Alan, come over here and look at this. That’s a lady slipper. No, don’t pick it. You need to let it be so it’ll come up again next year. We have some of these in the woods behind the house.” I looked at the hanging gossamer pink lantern next to a dark green broad leaf and was six-year-old unimpressed, but humored the old man. “That’s neat, Daddy.”

I first noticed the warmth of the day as the trail started to rise. Those in our party, who hadn’t been running back and forth and up and down the trail, seemed less bothered by the heat and the incline than me, but I remember Mama saying, “Alan, that’s all the water we have,” as I gulped at the thermos she’d brought in a big straw bag.

“Let him drink, Nan. They’ll be a stream up a ways.”

The trail got steeper. I struggled. I may have started to whine, and whining was definitely not approved behavior in our household. That didn’t stop me, but Connie, ever-the-seismograph for my father’s volcanic impatience jumped in. “Alan Cay, remember Thomas?” Thomas, the Little Engine Who Could, was a favorite story in our house and a lesson used to get me to do many things from finishing my dinner to, now, climbing a mountain.

“I think I can. I think I can,” Connie softly chanted. Soon I picked up the chant. “I think I can. I think I can,” my little legs chugging up the mountain.”

“Thank you, Connie,” said Mama softly.

“I think I can. I think I can, whoo, whoo.”

“I know I can. I know I can,” I sang out as we broke out of the hardwood onto a first outcropping of rock. “Breaking out of the trees” is a hiking exhilaration that has never gotten old and this, my first experience of it, still thrills in my memory.

I was quickly disappointed as we could now see the top of the mountain. “It’s way over there?!”

“Come on, Thomas. I think I can. . . .”

So we started down into the conifers between our position and the peak. Soon there were fir needles cushioning our sneakers and smelling like Christmas. The cool dark green of the forest was broken here and there by vertical golden shafts of sunlight that kept me looking for fairies among the trees.

The downhill-into-the-elfin-glades euphoria didn’t last. Soon the trail wound uphill again. “I think I can. I think I can. . . . How much further?”

“Alan Cay, look here’s a toad, by the water. Look he’s wet and you can see colors on his back.” A cup dipped into the stream. Water never tasted so good before or since.

“I think I can. I think I can. . . . I know I can. I know I can.”

We broke out of the trees a second time, this time from dense fir and spruce onto the granite dome that is the summit of Monadnock, “the mountain that stands alone.”

Mount Monadnock is only 3100 feet tall. As summit views go, it is far from the most spectacular I have seen in my life, but in my brain pictures it remains more vivid than most.

I love the bumper sticker. “Get High on Mountains.”

Hiking is now a family legacy and Thomas has stayed with me all my life.   “I know I can. I know I can.”