Who am I and where did I come from?

In my last post, Liv brought up an interesting point.

I think stepping outside of the box you grew up in has to be one of the toughest but most rewarding things that a person can do--it takes a bit of courage most of us don't even possess... and a way of thinking that feels unnatural.

I don't know who you were when you first lived in Kentucky, but you've made me curious to know which 'roots' you've hung on to... The person you have chosen to become has to have in some way emerged from the person you were, no? Your lust for adventure and experience... is that from your dad? Your upbringing? Your community? What about your intuition for how to make food taste good? Your sense of humor? My vote for your next post: You suggest that who you are now is a result of rejecting all that you were then... But my gut tells me that if I met you 25 years ago, there would be elements of the same Liz that I see now... What HASN'T changed (other than your wonderful accent)? That's my question.

I do suggest that I rejected everything from my past and have carved out this new and improved D from a fresh block of marble. We all know that ain't exactly so. So I'll attempt some context if only to make Liv happy. But I want you to understand, Liv. You haven't asked an easy, short-blog-post question.

In my family, I am most like my oldest brother. The one in jail. My mother, a trained therapist today, has labeled my brother and I narcissists. The way she hisses it, there is no doubt that I should somehow be ashamed of myself. With all the people I know who are crippled by a lack of self-esteem, I'll take narcissism over self-doubt any day. According to my mother, the difference between my brother and myself today is that I am "just" a narcissist, but my brother has narcissistic personality disorder. I have to disagree. I don't believe my brother has fragile self-esteem. It doesn't matter what label you put on it, it was obvious very early that as as opinionated, vocal children and teenagers, our personalities weren't highly valued.

My brother is actually quite entertaining. He is a master storyteller. He can captivate your attention for hours. I think he would have made a compelling actor. Or comedian. He does great impressions of famous people. I can't tell a story to save my life, but I like to discuss ideas. I like to bounce around alternative explanations. I like to explore concepts, turn them over, see what's buried in the dirt beneath them. But to this day, if either my brother or I try to discuss something among our family we are regularly chastised for "getting on our soapboxes", which was simply a polite way of wishing we'd shut up. It didn't matter (and still doesn't) that I did my homework before I spoke, that I wasn't reciting opinion, but rather basing my discussion on an educated perspective. According to my sister, my sole objective was to be "right". It became obvious to me that I was talking to the wrong people.

So part of who I am and who my brother is arises from the unstoppable overlay of our rather strong personalities--a personality type not inherited from either of our parents.

My father was practical. Reserved. Methodical. Calculating. Thoughtful. He did nothing spontaneously. We didn't go on vacations because we were saving for college educations. We didn't get new shoes until the old ones had holes in them. We didn't get fashionable clothing. His favorite store was K Mart. I don't recall going out to dinner with my family unless we were traveling and mealtime came when we were on the road. I don't recall eating at McDonald's until I was in junior high school. My father's mark on our family was restraint. He thought yellow mustard was an exotic spice. I probably needed restraint more than most. So I credit my father with the lack of interest I take in fashion and the trappings of status. I place no value on designer names. I shop at Goodwill. I buy generic. To me a car is a tool that gets me from point A to point B and a home is place where I hang my hat at night. The one thing my father did value was his home. He valued it even more so than I do.

My mother was a stay-at-home mom. She cooked all our meals, did our laundry, kept the house in reasonable shape. She stayed out of way for the most part. My mother was, and remains, a terrible cook. She makes, no kidding, the same 4 dishes every week. The spices in her cabinet have been there more than 20 years. The vanilla extract has solids on the bottom of the jar. You can't get the lid off the cinnamon. I didn't grow up in a household that valued flavor. So to answer that question, Liv, I learned to cook when I first moved to Chicago and began to sample the world's cuisines. I instantly fell in love. With everything. And I wanted it more than just when my pocketbook would allow an evening out. I cannot credit anyone in my family for my love of culinary adventure.

But other hints of me were present in my childhood. When I was growing up, I saw myself bigger than the dreams my parents laid out for me. I was going to be an Olympic swimmer. A famous author. An actor on television. I was going to be BIG. I don't think that anymore. I do think that teaching gives me an outlet that is useful for my personality. I like talking about ideas. I am something of a performer. I suppose in my classroom, I'm big. I think a lot of people might be uncomfortable admitting that they want to be the center of attention. I'm not really. Why hide the obvious? If I told you I was a humble, reluctant teacher and that I didn't like being the center of attention, no one who knows me would believe me anyway. I believe it is simply good sense to use one's strengths to their best advantage. Teaching allows me to make good use of the strengths of a "narcissist" personality.

The town I grew up in was tired. It was grey. The streets were dirty with soot that fell from the stacks of the coke plant. Never once in the dreams of my childhood did I think of staying in that town and settling down. I wanted to live in the wilderness of Colorado, somewhere so far out they had to air drop in toilet paper. I wanted to live off my wits. I wanted adventure. I wanted to learn to surf. I wanted to ride dune buggies in big sand. I wanted to go to Europe and see the Eiffel Tower. I wanted do things that no one could possibly do in eastern Kentucky. I didn't want to live a small life. I wanted out and the sooner the better.

I'm honestly not sure what my parents thought of my dreams. They listened politely. They didn't discourage me. They didn't encourage me either. They would say generic things like, "You can be anything you want to be" but they never seemed to tell me that I had to plan to do those things. I think they assumed I'd quit dreaming one day and face reality. Maybe they didn't know what to say.

I had great parents. Don't get me wrong. My father made me proud. My mother worked hard to make us good people. But I simply think they didn't know how to deal with someone like me (and maybe my brother, too) who were so different from themselves. I didn't bother to ask to do most things I really, really wanted to do because I knew the answer was no. No, I wouldn't be allowed to get a mini-bike. I wouldn't be allowed to order sea monkeys from the back of the comic book. I wouldn't be encouraged to try out for cheerleader. Just because.

I was actually amazed when I was allowed to join the swim team. And it was my mother who encouraged that. Maybe she knew I needed a way to channel my energy. Maybe she was just too tired to say no. But I became a swimmer and from the fourth grade into high school, swimming was my life. My adventure was planning for how I was going to win Olympic medals. I read books about Donna de Varona. I watched Mark Spitz and dreamed. Oh, how I dreamed.

I credit swimming for teaching me loads that I've brought with me to adulthood. In swimming I learned self-discipline. I learned to entertain myself. I learned the value of hard work. I learned how to win humbly and lose with grace. I learned to push myself. I learned to accept my limits. I credit my parents for schlepping me to meets in towns two hours away on weekends when I'm sure they'd rather be relaxing. For laying out the money on suits and goggles and warmups so I could pursue all this. I credit them for not being too involved. They stayed out of my way. They didn't micromanage. They were just as supportive as I needed them to be and that was honestly very little.

I once asked my mother why they doted so on my sister. I asked her why I never seemed to elicit that sense of concern in them. My mother told me frankly, "You never seemed to need any help." My parents largely left me alone.

To this day, it is difficult for me to look at who I am and say I got this from my dad and that from my mom. As adverse as my parents were to risk taking, I do thank them for guiding me into activities that worked well for me. Were a good fit. Taught me life lessons. I thank them for not belittling my dreams. I think I am a better, more practical, more charitable person because of the role models they were.

The adventurer in my family was my great-grandfather and that I will save for another post.

Diane Sawyer's Portrayal of Appalachia

A few Friday's ago, 20/20 aired Diane Sawyer's A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains. I missed the original airing, but my sister mentioned it during her visit so I went and had a look. I had to watch it in a series of 8 or 10 video's. I encourage you, if you have 50 minutes or so to spare, to give it a go. It's an illuminating portrait of a different America and it's something that fills my heart with an unusual mix of hometown pride and a unique pain.

The documenary presents vignettes of three or four families, all living in extreme poverty in the hills of eastern Kentucky. I find it amusing the way Sawyer insists on calling them "mountains". I have always said that I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians. Sawyer explores their lives and challenges, but mostly she is trying to make portray these families as the "forgotten people of Appalachia". It's all rather melodramataic. She has selected to follow families involved in the OxyContin epidemic (although they could have as easily discussed the meth problem there, too). And acknowledging the stereotype, she examines the toothless epidemic (blamed on a region-wide addiction to Mountain Dew). Personally, I've never liked the stuff. But the people they follow are true hillbillies. They are uneducated. They are coal miners. They are dirt poor. I grew up in eastern Kentucky. I have seen these images before. The places that Diane Sawyer visits--Inez, Paintsville, Columbia--all within a 30-40 minute drive from my home. I have driven down the country roads in Inez and marveled at the Joe Pye weed growing in ditches along the side of the road, and goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace and wicked twists of Kentucky bluegrass rising up from steep, rocky roadside hills. I ran in the Paintsville 10K race and enjoyed sorghum and wandered the trinket booths at the Paintsville Apple Festival. I have wondered at the disorganization of houses and trailers dotted on "family farms" in Columbia in a maze that obeys no road or discernible plan. I did not grow up dirt poor. I was lucky, but no one who grows up in that region is blinded to the poverty surrounding them.

I remember riding the school bus home in junior high school through some of the poorer sections of my town and seeing kids get off and go into houses with no windows or doors. Tar paper shacks with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. I'm sure they washed in tubs in the back and slept God knows where. We used to laugh about cars on blocks and toilets in the front yard with grass growing up around them. I'm sure these people had the best of intentions, but time or circumstances or lack of knowledge (or maybe the lack of pipes to the house) prevented them from making good on them. The relics on the front lawn were a testament to failure. I hated that part of the bus ride home. I wondered if the kids who lived there were embarassed to get off the bus.

I recall driving through the reservations of Arizona and coming upon poverty like I remember back home. I saw it on the outskirts of Belize City. I saw it in the faces of children picking pockets in Florence, Italy. I want to be clear with you all up front. I did not grow up like that. I grew up in an "urban" area of 27,000 people. We had municipal services, decent schools, relatively stable employment, and opportunities for people of all educational levels. Much like the town I live in now. You know, not doing great but living better than just scratching by. In fact, I think the town where I grew up may be doing a little better than the town I live in now. When kids dropped out of school in my town, it was a big deal and a private shame. It was not the status quo.

When I was in the tenth grade, my father told me to "go to college, get my education, and don't come back." I always found this interesting because my father had moved us to Pittsburgh when I was very little and moved us back because he had found a good job back in Kentucky. My father was the most stable man you ever wanted to meet. He wasn't swayed by popular opinion. I asked him how much of his money would he bet on a wager giving him a 90% chance of winning. He said, "nothing". My father had worked his way through college, while married, working full time, and raising four kids. I was about a year and a half old when my father graduated from college. Sure, it took him ten years, but he made it. That college education put his family in a whole different set of living conditions from some of the kids at my school. To say the least, I did not grow up like those people in Diane Sawyer's documentary. But I believe my father did. His father was an alcoholic. A house painter when he was sober. My mother told a story of how my father had to hunt down his father in some strange man's house and carry him home. She told of how he found my grandfather on the street, passed out and having pissed himself. Oh, he had sobered up by the time I was born. But my father didn't have some idyllic upbringing. And certainly had to grow up a lot faster than any of his children did. Both of my grandfathers wore full dentures for as long as I can remember. How they lost their teeth is a mystery to me. Both of them had that look of the women in the documentary who had lost their teeth. There is something about the chins of people with no teeth. It still makes me shudder.

My Dad's mother, my Gram, was a pinnacle of faith. Despite what anyone thought of her, she is a remarkably strong woman. I think, in many ways, that had she not had the determination she had to be there for her son, that I would not have enjoyed the opportunities that I have had in my life. She told me recently that if she were a young woman today, she probably would have gotten a divorce. But, as she says, things were different back then and you just put up with them--meaning the men who did you wrong. My grandfather drank away the paycheck many a week, I'm sure of it. She told me stories of having to put my father in a seat at the movie house and telling him to stay put, and then running to the grocery store. She recalled all these years later of coming back and finding him crying on the street in front of the cinema. He was about 3 years old. I'm sure the guilt nearly killed her. But her son graduated from college. I hope she doesn't lose any sleep over that even though it breaks my heart.

My parents were from Huntington, West Virginia. My grandmother was from West Virginia, and her husband from southern Ohio. When Appalachia gets in your blood, it's there for good. Most people never leave. You will find "hollers" with five or six houses in a row--all with the same surname on the mailboxes. You don't move away, you just move down the road. Maybe it was my Dad's insistence. I prefer to think that I always had wanderlust, but maybe he just planted a seed and I let it grow. All of us left, just like Dad had wanted. That place I knew so well growing up seems foreign and unnatural to me now. The people seem more backward and frustratingly uneducated. I get so angry. I want them to want more for themselves. I want them to do what I did. They either can't or won't. And so it remains the same.

No matter how long or how removed I am from "home", no one from eastern Kentucky escapes the stereotype. My sister told me the story of going to the doctor in Pennsylvania and having a nurse ask about her home. When told it was Kentucky, the woman shook her head and asked if she had shoes and things like that growing up. She was dead serious. I have had similar comments made to me by people who should know better. I've been asked if my parents are cousins. I've been asked if we burned coal for heat. I've been asked if my family tree forks. There seems to be a preoccupation with incest and people from eastern Kentucky. And Diane Sawyer does not disappoint. She highlights an allegation of incest in her documentary.

But Diane Sawyer did capture the people. I used to be embarrassed of them. Sometimes, I still am. I loved Kentucky, but I hate the way it is. Here I am, a child of Appalachia, pursuing a doctorate in botany. If I make it or I don't make it to graduation, I made it out of that place. I don't know if Appalachia made me stronger, or prouder, or more hard headed, but watching that documentary simply made me sad. Sad for all those who couldn't or wouldn't get out.

I miss my dad

You never know when it's going to strike. You are hanging out, minding your own business when all of a sudden an urgent need to ask dad something comes up. Tonight was one of those nights.

You see, I liked my dad. Although we hate to admit it, my dad was my favorite parent. He was easy-going, intelligent, dependable. He had a sense of humor. A dry wit. He was a practical joker. He used to travel for his job and loved to tell us of how he would get on a plane and make up some fantastic story he'd tell to his seat mates. He was a world famous obstetrician on his way to give a talk at an international conference. He was a poker player in Vegas. Somehow, when he told his stories, you were as regaled as I'm sure his traveling companion was.

My dad was wicked good with kids. I never met a kid who didn't like him. I remember once that he got on the roof with a water hose (he must have been cleaning out the gutters) and before you know it, most of the kids in the neighborhood were in a water war with my dad. Just a tip for you. It takes a lot of kids with garbage can lids to take down a man with a 10' advantage and a water hose.

My father used to take me to high school football games when I was only in grade school. I was a bit of a sports nuts as a child. It was "our" time. My dad didn't even seem to mind when I gave a play-by-play replay of every single play he just saw. I'd yank on his shirt and say "Did you see that? That guy just ran up the middle and four guys tried to take him down and he fell on one knee but kept going." My dad had the patience of Job.

Tonight we got to talking about organic chemistry. My father was a chemist.

I've always been curious. I mean EVERYONE hates organic. How did he get beyond that hate?

I miss my dad. There is so much I had left to talk to him about.

Football and chemistry. And probably politics.

My father passed away on April 5, 1989. He was 53 years old.