2002-01-21 - 8:07 a.m.
| The first grade me*: |
The first grade Day-Hay: |
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| Note the expressions too! |
GENETIC MIRRORS
When I was young, I hated funhouses. I remember going into one and running back out in panic, exactly the way I went in. People said, �The other way� but I paid no attention. I disliked the distorted walls and swinging things but, most of all, I hated the distorted mirrors. They frightened me. How could something be so like me and yet not like me? Little did I know that, for some of us, nature has her own funhouse mirror, deep in our genes.
As I got older, I realized that everyone, even my mother�s family, agreed that I looked almost exactly like my paternal grandmother. By the time I was in college, I could look at a picture she hung on her wall of herself in her early twenties and think of it as a time-traveling mirror. The clothes were different, the hair was different, and yet it looked very familiar. The face was mine and so was the expression. I decided I liked the hairstyle and I adopted it for quite a few years.
But Grandma was not the only mirror. My oldest, Kat, the blue-eyed blonde with the lanky body and long legs was not a mirror. She sounds a bit like me and her mannerisms are comfortably recognizable but that face is not mine and neither is the body. But Day-Hay is a different story. If Grandma was a mirror of my future, Day-Hay is a mirror of
my past.
Long before first grade, I knew that I could never just abandon Day-Hay in a store and get away with it. If I left Kat behind, no one would have automatically identified her with me. If I left Day-Hay, someone would have looked at her, glanced at me, and yelled, �Lady, you forgot your kid.� When Day-Hay was three, my cousin showed her a picture of me at the same age, dressed up as the flower girl in a wedding. �Who is this?� he demanded. Day-Hay looked at it, puzzled. She knew she didn�t own that dress and yet.... �Not me?� she questioned.
I close my eyes and wonder what Kat will look like in approximately thirty years. I have no model except her teenage face. I don�t wonder about Day-Hay. I know what she�ll look like in thirty years. I just have to look into a regular mirror to know that.
And I know even more than that. I know what I�ll look like in approximately 33 years and she�ll look like in approximately 66. We�ll look something like this:
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*Thank you, Dr. Road, for supplying a copy of the class picture from which this photo was taken.
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Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
