WHO TAKES CARE OF YOU

Baton Rouge, Louisiana - I just got back from a short road trip up the coast to Florida’s panhandle. My niece lives there, two of them in fact, twins. She in particular echos her grandfather’s oft expressed sentiments, inherited by me as well that blood is thicker than water. You don’t get to choose your blood relatives but you are stuck with them either way. You share an irreversible, genetic footprint. Back in those really, really early days when everyone in your clan was blood related, it meant more than now but in my upbringing, blood is still thicker than water. 

My niece and my immediate family are close now. When my brothers and I were young, when sibling rivalries and our wives moved in their own best interests, those “Thicker than water” loyalties were stretched. For a while, we might as well not have been related. Looking back in time, up stream in DNA, I am her only surviving blood relative now. So we get together when we can, hug and break bread. We laugh at the funny and commiserate our undoings. In primitive, unconscious rituals, our common forbearers get some attention, some respect. It is the seed from which all religion took root.  I still honor that really, really old kind of religion. I know it for what it is and continue in its practice. 

We’ve come a long way in the last 40,000 years. Civilization, technology in particular has leapfrogged exponentially and we have learned to trust and value friends who lack our genetic markers. Lisa learned from her father, my brother, blood is thick. But she learned from her mother, from a different gene pool: Take care of yourself first, then take care of those who take care of you.” She vacillates between the two but it’s still a great leap for mankind. The blood thing is about what emotionally driven tradition wants to forever-ize and the, who takes care of you thing is insightful, tapping the intellect. I like the later. A human lifetime is short, incredibly short in the full scope of our kind. I’m far closer to the end of mine than the beginning so I accept what I can’t change and look for the joy, whatever my circumstance. I’ve been patiently waiting for the Golden Rule to kick in but so far it’s only cheap talk for hypocrites, meeting their temporary need. Even then, it only applies to blood relatives or someone who takes care of you. . . I’m starting to ramble. . . sign of advancing age or maybe just run out of things to say.