What Comes Down to Us

A few weeks ago my friend Jack came over and helped me install a new ceiling fan in one of my daughters' rooms.  Jack is pretty handy with wiring and in order to run the cable down through the ceiling, we had to drill a fairly large hole in the existing junction box.  The largest of the drill bits I keep in my tool box turned out to be too small, so when he asked for something larger, I went and found an old set of my grandfather's drill bits that my father had mailed me a few months before. 

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My grandfather was a machinist among other things in the course of his life.  He passed away when I was three, so I don't really remember him except through a few stories and photographs. 

I once read how the genetic connection between generations rapidly becomes meaningless, especially in a large gene pool with mobility.  Because genetic material does not move across in perfect symmetry it is possible that within a few generations, one or more grandparent's contributions can completely disappear.  It is possible that there would be no physical relation at all between the ancestor and the descendent except by a line on a family tree.  This struck me as sad.  Knowing where you came from is an important part of knowing who you are.  But perhaps it is freeing at the same time – to know that we come from some amorphous stew of genetic material and we eventually return to it as well – that the past is mostly the same for all of us, and that the future cannot hold to many grudges against us as we emerge, differentiate for a time, then re-merge with the mass of human stuff.

Of course genes are not the only thing that comes down to us from our ancestors.  We don't just inherit an oblong face, a moderate stature, and a predisposition to heart disease from them, but also behavioral traits like mannerisms, ways of speaking, how we hold ourselves.  And we inherit deeper psychological constructs as well - things like self-esteem, the ability to cope with stress and change, patience, and perhaps an inclination towards happiness.

It's not quite as easy to look at yellowed photographs from thirty plus years ago to tease out those other kinds of inheritances, but I think we can get hints.  I have two photographs I like to look at when I want to think about my grandfather.  The first is one from probably his senior year of high school.  He and a few of his "chums" (I believe that is a generationally appropriate term) are posed in a fake car in what must have been some sort of hokey gangster photo shoot.  He's a big goofy kid in the back with an open smile and nice jacket and tie.

The second picture is from his time as a machinist.  The picture is taken from the side.  His hair is graying and close-cropped – how he wore it shortly before he died.  He's leaning over a big saw, one hand holding a raised metal arm.  He is smiling in the picture, but his face is down, concentrating on the cut he is about to make – I wonder what someone might have just said to him.  The smile is too real to simply have been the result of "Say 'cheese', Joe."  I imagine it was something a bit more appropriate to an all-male machine shop in the late 60's – or maybe they said that this picture would go into history, and he just didn't believe it.

Somewhere between these two moments frozen in time, he lived most of his life.  He was drafted into the Army in WWII, he came back and married my grandmother, he had a daughter who grew up and got married, he had a grandson.  He was a heck of a bowler.  There were troubles that I am only vaguely aware of, but most of them were over by the time the second picture was taken.  And then he died.

Thirty five years later, a box came in the mail from my father.  In his laconic hand, the message in the box read, "These belonged to your grandfather, I should have passed them down to you sooner.  Be careful – the saw is sharp."  In the box were an old bow saw with black plastic hand grips, a hammer, some metal files, a tape measure, and a steel box of drill bits with a hinged flip lid.

What comes down to us – some of it's good and some of it isn't.  In all the pictures I have, he's smiling.  Maybe a little more wisdom in the later picture – but still a good natured smile.  Was he happy?  I don't know.  I hope so by then. 

I handed Jack two or three different bits until we found the right size.  We punched a hole in the junction box and ran the power through it.