The American Question

I went to see a psychologist. (It's been a good while.)  I no longer remember if I was forced, ordered to do it, or if I agreed for the sake of peace among nations.  Knowing that I had discovered genealogy of my family reaching all the way back to the 18th century,  and how he knew it, again I don't recall, I certainly would not have volunteered to tell him myself, he asked me a question.  I remember it (the question), which once more shows you how selective our memories can be.  I also remember that his office was located on the first floor of one of the two residential houses surviving on the so-called Pill Hill, where several giant hospital and clinic structures had been built, along with the usual ugly multistory concrete parking skeletons, while the second floor was occupied by the house's aged owner, and I also remember that at the Western foot of this hill, where I parked my car in the free parking zone of a marginal neighbourhood  (contrasting that, on the Eastern side was the auto row of multiple car dealerships),  was a small grocery store owned by some Middle Easterners, and that next door to it opened a honey shop owned, I think, by the same people, its name a pun of some sort,  "Bee Well", or something similar, and I knew that I owed it to myself to walk in there and ask this other question, even though I had already anticipated the answer, but hope springs eternal, doesn't it, "Do you sell Tupelo honey?" "What? No!"

The psychologist's question referring to my discovery of the family tree was "How does it feel?"   I don't turn on the  TV any more, but when I did, one thing that always assaulted the senses when watching the news broadcasts, and this is by no means an original observation, others have made it a long time ago, was the picture of the pretty faces and pompadour hairdos of TV reporters sticking microphones under the chins of people, often victims of natural disasters standing in front of the ruins of their houses, tastefully framed in the background by the cameraman, and asking them, "How does it feel?"

"How does it feel?" goes the first line of the refrain of Bob Dylan's most famous recording.  In least in Dylan,  it is a rhetorical question.

I was surprised by this question and I laughed. "How does it feel?  How should it feel?  It doesn't feel at all.", I answered.  The psychologist, a decent, intelligent man, decided to help me. "Well, did it make you feel happy, proud?"

I found this genealogy on the Internet, and not through any of the family root services, but on a webpage of a university professor in an unrelated discipline, whose hobby was compiling family trees of families from a certain region.  My ancestors' family on my father's side happened to be one of them.

"When I found it, I was a little surprised," I said, "because none of it was known to me through my parents.  But the contents itself of this chart don't make me feel anything.   Those ancestors could have come from Macao, South Africa or Patagonia, and knowing it wouldn't make me feel anything and wouldn't make any difference to me one way or another. It just wouldn't.   But the disclosure shocked my sister, who despite having some physical proofs among family papers verifying this finding, denied it, which denial and anger (hers) contributed  to a split between us."

Their graves are long paved over,  their descendants, if not lost to war and disease, are spread throughout the world, and I don't know any of  them, nor do they know me; I thought I found a cousin once and contacted him by e-mail, but he did not reply.  I found the location of my grandfather's grave through a cemetery map posted on Internet, I never knew him and I will probably never visit it, it is probably overgrown with weeds (I would feel a shock if I saw it was being maintained!), and where are the graves of his wives (he was a widower who remarried)?   There is no person alive who remembers him, and while there are records of the scientific papers he wrote, and other documents in some forgotten archives somewhere, scanned copies of old newspapers where his name appears, one among thousands of others,  I am the last person alive to remember his name and his existence,  Après moi, le déluge?