Hey Pop -- that is, if you really are my Pop

Grannie and Granddad. What she didn't know didn't hurt her, I can only assume

I am the last of my line. If my 30-ish niece marries (again) and decides to change her name, there will be no more Lidsters in my branch of the family. I suppose at one level that’s kind of sad, but I lose little sleep over it. I don’t know how my brothers feel in that regard. Do they believe we let down the side? I think my father kind of thought that we had. But, that was his problem.

Some people put a whole lot of stock in familial heritage. They put massive efforts into researching their family stock back to the 47th generation; they join heritage groups; they hang out at the local LDS Church genealogy libraries, and they scan the Internet. There are hundreds and hundreds of sites that will help you in tracking down your kin from days of yore. I don’t much see the point, you know, unless you are looking for congenital illnesses that might have impact on later generations. My ex has MS and it was very important to her to find out if she carried the gene -- the jury is still out on whether MS in genetically transmitted, but she did find out, to her dismay, that it was present on both sides of her family -- and did her only child stand in jeopardy of getting it.

Sometimes there can be interesting six degrees of separation things, I suppose, like the revelation that Dick Cheney (shudder) and Barak Obama are actually cousins a few zillion times removed. That should make for an interesting family reunion, much like those held by Thomas Jefferson’s ‘other’ descendants. I guess Barak should only hope that Dick doesn’t offer to take him hunting.

In my case, in that regard, I was in conversation with a Jewish friend of ours. Her maiden name was Goldring. Her predecessors came from Buckinghamshire, England. So did one branch of my family. And it is the only branch of my broader family that actually has a published family tree going back to about the 15th Century. I recalled that my maternal grandfather had told me that there was a Jewish connection in the family, which was why we were distantly related to 19th Century Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Well, I scanned my photocopy of the tree and there it was (don’t remember the date, but sometime in the early 18th Century a ‘Pontifex’ (family name) married a young lady named Goldring. “Cousin,” I cried out and embraced her.

Of course, the whole thing about genealogy was rent asunder in recent years due to studies in DNA. And, those studies have revealed that it would be a very wise child who knows his father, because his father, grandfather, great-grandfather etc. might not have been who he thought he was. The highly titled might just find they have a gamekeeper or costermonger in their heritage. Personally, I think that would be cool. I was always hoping for pirates, highwaymen, royal whores and assorted other blackguards, knaves and jackanapeses in the mix.

So, I thing genealogical research, while it may be fun, is a kind of a mug’s game, and probably no more valid than a belief in that if you are playing Monopoly, you are somehow, by default, involved in the stock market, or assuming that the purchasing of lottery tickets should secure you a little retirement nest egg.

On the other hand, I really liked, and maybe even loved my grandparents, so I kind of hope I am a lineal descendant, despite the fact that Granddad, as a young man, was too rich and too horny to have behaved himself in regards to siring progeny on the other side of the sheet, as it were, so a body never knows who is actually kin. Supposedly I have a Native Canadian aunt out there somewhere (all his children deny this, except for one son, who spilled the beans to me) and I’d like to meet her.

By the way, Granddad was a very respectable older gentleman. At the same time, he taught me an awful lot of invaluable woodland lore (which has stayed with me) when I was a kid.

“So, Granddad, how is it that you know the forest so well? It’s almost like you spent a lot of time there.”

How truthful are our memories?

“We human beings are nothing more than the sum of our memories – combined with hopes and aspirations.”

For the last year and a bit I have been writing a tale of the community in which I grew up. The project was originally intended to be a tongue-in-cheek spoof of the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby and what it meant to me in my childhood and youth. It would be a kind of semi-history and community sociological smartass bit of sarcasm and (hopefully) wit, and nothing more.

But, as many who have turned their energies to the nasty business of writing what they hope might turn into a book have found out, these things have a tendency to assume a life of their own. What was to have been a spoof has become something of a memoir of an earlier time. And memoirs by their nature involve memories, and once I found myself getting down into memory-lane, as it were, things took off from there. One incident would suggest another; a recollection of an early love interest would cast my mind back to the person; a recounting of a day in elementary school would bring back the smells, sounds, and sometimes the anxiety associated with the situation. Anxiety that had been long since forgotten, I thought, but then realized that the same anxieties still permeate my being. I am the sum of my parts.

I’m now nearing the end of the project, and am doing my basic editing. But, there is peril in that, too. I will come to a passage and realize there is more to it than what I have stated, so everything ends up being expanded upon.

And, what of those memories? How many are true. I cite an incident that took place in my senior year of high school in which the students, weary of an ever increasing set of rules and regulations imposed by a heartless and lacking-in-imagination principal came close to fomenting a riot one spring day. As follows is the way in which I recount the event:

“It was at just one of those aforementioned Monday assemblies that the principal’s fan became dung-splattered and the repercussions were huge. It was in the late spring, as I recall. We had been guilty (we were always guilty in the man’s little mind) of some sort of new malfeasance, and therefore we were to lose yet another privilege. The audience greeted his decree with silence. And then somebody – I have no idea who – began to stamp his feet on the gymnasium floor. And then another picked up on it. The stamping grew louder and louder until, or so it seemed, the entire gym was stamping in unison. Nixon, a look of panic crossing his face, raised his hands and demanded our silence; he uttered threats; he told us our conduct was disgraceful and that we would pay for it; he even threatened to call the police if we didn’t cease the behavior. His face blanched as students began rising up from their folding chairs and started to approach the stage. The man retreated, and his place was taken centre-stage by the vice-principal who appealed to us to calm down. We did, sort of, out of a certain respect for the veep. He exhorted us to go back to our homerooms. We shuffled back, taking as long as we wished to reach those destinations.”

Did it really happen like that? In my memory it did. The incident took me directly back to the time and it seemed like I was reliving it. Maybe my memory exaggerates. Maybe it was nowhere near as dramatic as I indicate. I wrestled with thoughts about that for a number of years afterwards. Then one day, probably two decades later I became acquainted with a man who was actually Burnaby’s superintendent of schools at that time. I asked him about it. I told him of my recall, and wondered if it had come to the board’s attention. He responded thusly.

“I remember it well. We were very concerned. We saw a good school being destroyed, and not by the students, but by the very bad choice of the man we had picked to be principal. But, the good thing was, we were looking for an excuse to transfer him. The students at Central gave us that excuse.”

Aha – so I wasn’t suffering from false memory. It was roughly the way I recalled it. OK, then it shall stay as it has been recounted in the book.

And now I’ll carry on with my editing and my memories.