Maybe she takes after…?

Just when this writer was absolutely certain that she was a bit of a changeling — was becoming quite smug about this, even — she finds that genetics are relentless and humbling. Not to mention a heck of gift. 

(First in a continuing series on the anxiety and ecstasy of influence.)

The older I get, the more I find I am exactly like everybody in my family.

As I’ve been updating my pages, I’ve been thinking that I could take after my Grandpa Paul, who well may have been the original blogger. A trained Classicist, who read Greek for fun and wrote assessment instruments for Educational Testing Service for his career, it seemed to me that he began almost every day of his adult life by rolling a piece of onionskin into his IBM Selectric. Out would roll some bit of commentary on the book he was reading, or an elucidation of some obscure lines of Homer; once in a while he couldn’t resist putting down an off-color joke…

I remember one about some elegant personage named Margot who happened to be seated at dinner with the famously slutty actress Jean Harlow:

As the meal progressed this Margot got increasingly irritated at being called “MarGOT.” Finally, she interrupted the actress to say,

“MarGO, MarGO.”

When Jean looked a bit blank, Margot added, sweetly,

“The T is silent, as in HarLO’.”

Grandpa didn’t publish these bloglets, but he made copies for friends and family members and tucked them into letters to his oldest and dearest friend, Siegmund.

I’m afraid I didn’t appreciate these writings at all — to me they were, except maybe the Jean Harlot joke — crashingly boring. Now I think it’s a shame Grandpa, who passed away five years ago this month, didn’t become acquainted with the WWW. It may not have been me, but his audience is out there.