Random Genes!

I had an Italian grandmother. Granted, she was fair-skinned and avoided the sun like the plague. But she was from Italy (indirectly) dadgummit! Those people live in the sun, no? They turn a lovely golden-brown in the warmer months without even thinking about age spot or wrinkles, is this not correct?

Mislead by these and some other suburban legends, I thought my dark hair was a sure indicator that I, too, would one transform into a golden Sun Goddess. I don't remember anyone in my family ever mentioning the existence of sunscreen in my first 25 years on the planet. 

OK, so my father spent his summer months on our family boat, progressively turning from pink to hot pink to red to beet-colored and eventually to a shade of deep purple. He was tow-headed as a child, with a German father and a mother who was a freckled mixture of some Scotch-Irish variety.  And with hindsight, I don't think I had ever seen any of them with a tan.

So, in my teen years and 20's, I embarked on my quest to become the ultimate Sun Goddess. I frequented the beach, the boat, and the lake. I spend winter months on the (blindingly white) slopes skiing. I fished, I hiked, I camped, I played softball and sand volleyball.

I also turned from pink to hot pink to red to beet colored, miraculously and thankfully avoiding a shade of deep purple due in part to the lovely white blisters that formed all over my body. As an unadvertised benefit of said blisters, once they popped, I had unique and oh-so-trendy polka-dotted skin.

I went to the Doctor, I went to the Emergency Room, my skin swelled, I got fevers and nausea and had more fun with sunburn than a barrel full of scorched monkeys. I did this once, twice, seventeen times... Before my Mom, keeper (and spiller) of family secrets, enlightened me that I was in fact at least half German, probably a quarter Irish, and that my Italian was likely further diluted by the infamously fish-belly-white Brits.

Now I own not one but two wide-brimmed floppy sun hats, and bathe in 85 sunblock year-round. Polka dots, after all, were never really my thing.

Curiously, at the same time all this was going on, both my brother and I were quite dyslexic. Having had a palindrome as a nickname from an early age, I was clearly at an advantage. My brother, Dbvib, however, was not nearly as lucky as I.

I might take this opportunity to point out that those of us afflicted with this curious, ummm, affliction, have a difficult time delineating order in words, letter, numbers, or other symbols. I should point out that while most dyslexics have issues with only letters OR numbers, Dbvib and I were born lucky enough to have issues with both.

Just for a reference point, if one is dyslexic, there is potentially no difference between the letters a, b, d, p and q. It is pretty much impossible to remember which way a j or k goes. And the words HISNEGL and ENGLISH are virtually indistinguishable to us. Likewise, teh, tehm, jsut, and fro are words we all recognize as prolific in the written English language.

If one also suffers from number dyslexia, upper-case e's and 3's are virtually indistinguishable, and ampersands are a vexation beyond ordinary comprehension. 7's are L's and 2's are 5's. This much fun should not be limited to so small a group!

Oddly, I would say my biggest problem was knowing right from left. Directionally challenged to begin with, I then could not decipher where I was going, much less which side of the road to drive on. I began to look for clues in what others did.

People navigating in the car for me, were reduced to telling me to turn "my way" or "your way". Any attempt to point the correct direction was stymied by the fall of darkness.

My biggest struggle of all was the Pledge of Allegiance. I remember in elementary school, always checking the teacher to see which hand to place over my heart. Of course, the direct result of this (teacher facing the class after all) was that my heart jumped over to the right side of my body.

I quickly learned to look to my peers. Until about the 7th grade, this was a crap shoot (known in some circles as a carp shoot!). Even as I taught high school, I incurred daily difficulty with this simplest of acts.

A (left-handed) friend once told me that a solution was simple... My left hand, with thumb and forefinger extended, makes an L. Of course, I then examined both hands to find that BOTH of mine made an L!  This had progressed to a full-blown conspiracy.

Again, I struggled on. Then Mom, as the keeper of all useful (and secret) information in my family, happened to overhear me telling the Left Hand L story to a friend. I believe at the time, I was 40? Long story short, my loving Mother interjected, "Don't you WRITE with your RIGHT?".

Needless to say, the Pledge no longer invokes the full-blown panic attack it did when I was in Kindergarten. I just wonder that, had I been born into a family with a less intriguing gene pool, how much more time I would have had to cure cancer. 

Or similarly, had my parents had somewhat less of a sense of humor, perhaps I could have been spared this pesky dilemma of Right and Left, not to mention a few trips to the Emergency Room and dozens of spotted-skin episodes.

Had I not been born into this quirky and quick-witted family of mine, I would have missed all the fun of my fifth wisdom tooth, thyroid disease, and of course my love of carp shooting.