Category: Personal

Those Before Me

Clearly I’m a masochist: I decided to do a November writing project. I was up until 5:00 a.m. last night messing with templates and avatars on all of my various journals and websites, and I spent the most time on this one, so I’d like to actually use it. (I just couldn’t bear that Inigo’s category was getting smaller and smaller in the category cloud with my previous theme, so this theme takes care of that. It’s an old one, Twenty Fifteen, but I don’t need or want a lot of bells and whistles, just a place for words.)

A lot of people on another site where I keep a journal are doing NoJoMo, but as I already do a lot of journaling, I wanted something else to nudge me along and found an old prompt list on History That Never Was, so that’s what I’m using. Hey, I’m a journalist. There needs to be an assignment. I started writing this yesterday, before I got sidetracked in all the design stuff, so I’m backdating it to November 1 and calling it a win.

Today’s word is “ancestors.” Funny that, as my sister and I were just texting about that the other day. I had asked her if she had ever gotten any DNA testing like 23andMe or Ancestry because some of my friends are always joking that despite being of known Italian descent, there must be some Viking blood in me. She hasn’t gotten any testing, so I might go ahead and do so, just for the giggles of it. She did mention that some distant cousins of ours reached out to her from Messina, Italy, so she’s going to go there when she visits Italy. I’m glad of that because we don’t know too much about my father’s side, other than one side of his family came from the mainland (Messina, I guess!) and the other came from Sicily. His grandfather came to the United States fought in the Spanish-American War, but I don’t know anything else about that generation on my father’s side.

As for my mother’s side, most of them are from Italy, some are from Eastern Europe, and they all came over and came over in the early 20th century. Apparently I’m descended from the Sforzas on my mother’s side, through her father, as one of her paternal grandfather’s had that last name. If you can trace your lineage to a male Sforza, that pretty much guarantees you’re a descendant of the famous Renaissance family, as “Sforza” is a made-up last name. The original last name was Attendolo, and when Muzio Attendolo, an Italian condottieri, founded the family dynasty, he turned his nickname, Sforza, into a last name. Here’s a bit from Britannica about it:

The son of Giovanni Attendolo, a prosperous farmer of the Romagna (in north-central Italy), Muzio left home in 1384 to join a mercenary band, eventually becoming squadron leader and then company commander in the service of different condottieri (mercenary captains), including the famous Alberico da Barbiano, who gave him the nickname Sforza (“Force”). In 1398 Muzio entered the employ of the Visconti, the rulers of Milan, but he soon left to fight first for Florence and then Ferrara.

Sforza’s son Francesco went on to rule Milan for 16 years, and the rest is very much history.

I learned all of this after I left a copy of The Duchess of Milan by Michael Ennis on my parents’ coffee table after a holiday visit in the 90s. It’s the story of the women behind the scenes during the power struggle over the Duchy of Milan in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Beatrice d’Este and her cousin Isabella of Aragon. Isabella was married to Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the sixth Duke of Milan. Beatrice was married to Ludovico “Il Moro” Sforza, who had acted as regent when Gian was a child and too young to assume the responsibilities of Duke. As regent, Ludovico basically took over the whole operation, which led to a power struggle when Gian came of age. The book is about the competition between the two women, including who could birth the most sons, and the whole book is very lush and juicy. Plus, there are excerpts from real letters by the women as well as by none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

My mother, a voracious reader who favored whodunits, picked up the book I had left and a few days later she called to tell me that her father’s mother’s father’s last name was Sforza. So basically my great-great grandfather was a descendent of the Sforzas, though I’m not sure which branch of the family.

The best part is that my father was an artist. Da Vinci worked for the Sforzas, so once all of this came to light, it became a running joke between my parents. My mother would say she married beneath her and my father would say “and we artists are still working to keep you happy.” Then when I dug into the Sforza family history a little, I chimed in with “Look, a Sforza’s widow basically told Henry VIII’s people that Henry shouldn’t bother proposing. We women know our worth.” This would be Christina of Denmark, whose first husband was one of Ludovico’s and Beatrice’s sons and a Duke of Milan. According to legend, she said “If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England’s disposal.”

My mother’s mother’s family came from that part of the world that was always changing hands in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I have great uncles who were White Russians and escaped during the Russian Revolution and came to the U.S. with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Neither of my mother’s parents spoke English when they came over, and I wish I knew the story of how they met because at the time my grandfather only spoke Italian and my grandmother only spoke Polish, German, Russian, and Yiddish, though we’re not Jewish.

I suppose I should look into the various DNA tests. Critics go on about their accuracy and security risks (especially with the tests that show you your genetic risks for various diseases), but I don’t care. I think it would be fun to learn where the DNA leads. The results often surprise people, and I love a good surprise.

Keeping Calm, Carrying On

The above is an epitaph on a Roman mausoleum, from a young woman about her older yet kind husband. I saw it on one of the Great Courses about the Roman Empire and had to save it.

I’ve become less frightened of death this last year and a half, even before the heart attack. When Inigo the Nanday Nanner King died, life changed completely and irrevocably. Twenty-one years is a long time to have a soul bird. Grief still hits me out of nowhere at times, but now I take comfort in sensing that whether by trick of dying synapses or a true departure of my life force and energy to another plane or merging with the cosmos, the last thing I will see as the final breath leaves my body will be my little feathered buddy coming down to get me, maybe with his brudduh Jimmy the Green Cheek behind him. A friend of mine once posted a picture of her soul cat with the caption, “I miss you, but every day brings me closer to you.” That’s kind of how I feel about it.

Back when my mother worked at one of the public utilities, someone drove up in a hearse to drop off his payment. She said the people in her office reacted to it differently depending on their age. The young laughed and said it was wild or funny that the guy drove up in it, and they ran out to see it. The folks nearing retirement looked out the window and critiqued the hearse itself, stating whether they wanted one like it or one a different color or model. The middle-aged people didn’t even want to look at it. I think I skipped the middle-aged “nope” kind of denial and went right to “the little practicalities” stage now that I know for sure that I got the Bad Gene.

In the meantime, I live. That’s what all who went before me would want.

Today’s candy is Now and Later. Makes sense for this entry. And they’re accidentally vegan. The banana ones were my favorite.

Unto Dust

Beautiful night tonight, so I decided to get some miles in and walk home. It’s about 7 miles, or 2.5 hours. My favorite parts are the the paths on either side of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial and the walk over Memorial Bridge. The Crows were just heading to their Arlington roost when I got to the bridge, an endless dark ribbon of thousands of birds gliding over the river. Every once in a while a couple of them would collide seemingly intentionally, like they were messing around and playing aerial bumper cars for the heck of it.

My least favorite part is the stretch of Fairfax Drive between N. Meade Street and N. Pierce Street. It’s Death Valley for the Crows, a dip in the road where they can’t see the cars coming as idiotic, self-important humans gun their engines to make the light at the intersection of where N. Ft. Myer Drive becomes N. Meade and Fairfax Drive. I’ve lost count of the flattened Crows I’ve seen, their bodies crushed into the asphalt. One little fledgling was ground into the double yellow lines, likely on his/her maiden flight.

Every once in a while, like tonight, I’ll find dead Crows by the side of the road or in the grass. If I can bury them, I will, but tonight’s pair were nothing more than feathers and bones. The one in a parking space was so far gone as to be a pile of feathers and a rib cage mixed with leaves and the random detritus humans leave behind to poison the landscape—string, a bottle cap, a baby’s sock, some sort of black plastic. I couldn’t tell where the Crow’s head had been, as the wing feathers were pointed every which way. The one on the grass still had his/her form, but the body and all of the head except the beak were gone. I apologized to both of them for humanity’s carelessness, and bid them rest in peace.

As I walked away, I reminded myself that I should just go up Wilson Blvd., where it’s all restaurants and nightlife and I’ve never seen any dead birds or creatures. But that wouldn’t have prevented my finding a squirrel sprawled out on the sidewalk about three blocks from where I live. I’ve probably seen that squirrel on my many walks to the grocery store. The two corner houses have yards and there are always squirrels scampering about. There are also a lot of squirrels in the park.

I couldn’t leave her there, where people would step over her and skirt around her with expressions of disgust on their faces. Sooner or later someone might have picked her up by the tail and thrown her in a trash can. So I got my gloves out of my naloxone kit, picked her up, and carried her. Her eyes were cloudy and her arms, neck, and legs were stiff, but her belly was still soft and slightly warm. She reminded me of Meeka (or Mica, short for Amica), the squirrel who used to sit in the tree, look in the window, and watch cartoons when I put them on for Inigo. Meeka’s tummy was also still warm when I found her a couple of years ago, after she got hit by a car.

I’m sure people thought I was mad, carrying a dead squirrel down the street, holding her with two hands before me as though I were bringing a birthday cake with lots of lit candles into a dining room. But I don’t care. She deserved better than to be left there on the sidewalk, so I buried her beneath some evergreens.

Tonight’s walk drove home something that eats away at me: We humans will never live in harmony with animals. We trap them, poison them, shoot them, and run them over when they’re in our way. We break their bodies to get eggs. We steal their babies to get milk. We crate them, bind them, pluck them, hang them, decapitate them, force-feed them, and scald them alive to feed our appetites. We call the ones strong enough to suffer a slaughter “Grade A,” and we beat, gas, electrocute, stomp, or simply toss in a pile and leave to die those who are too weak or sick to stand. We isolate them, imprison them, sicken them, cut them, burn them, inject things into them, put things in their eyes, sew devices under their skin, and amputate their limbs in the name of science.

Then we reel back in horror when we see people do any of this to cats and dogs, parrots and bunnies, hamsters and horses.

It’s cognitive dissonance on a good day, hypocrisy on a bad. I’m including myself in that: A lot of the candy I’ve featured this month has milk in it. I’m also a pescatarian, doctor’s orders. I take medications that were tested in animals, and the stent holding an artery in my heart open was tested on animals, including rabbits, pigs, dogs, sheep, rodents, goats, and nonhuman primates. I owe animals my very life.

But it fills me with an endless, bottomless sorrow that any animal comes to harm because of me. Most vegans and vegetarians can tell you about their epiphany, the moment the suffering we cause animals became real to them. Mine was in a grocery store, looking for ingredients to make a soup. I saw a package labeled “whole chicken, cut up” and those words were just so graphic, so gruesome, boom, the light went on. All I could see was the body parts still on the bird. All I could think was, “Wings…just like Inigo’s.” I started crying right there in the store.

I’m not a praying woman, but if I were, I would pray for people to come to see how all animals—and not just the cute or beautiful ones we keep as pets—deserve our compassion. All animals have emotions. All animals can be playful, grumpy, happy, tired, angry, or sad. Most have social bonds as families, herds, flocks, or other groups. They welcome others, battle others, make friends with others, and grieve others of their kind. I’d say all of them are sentient to some degree. And all of them want to live.

No candy tonight. I’m too sad.

Instead, a PSA: When you see a bee in distress, like this one was after landing in my margarita, offer some sugar water. The folks at the restaurant gave me a sugar packet, I mixed it with water, and this little one drank from my fingertip and then from a drop on the table. She perked up, then after a few laps overhead, she flew away to get on with her day—hopefully without a hangover! Every little life is big to the one living it.