I've given myself a time out. I'm being treated for Gout and for Psoriasis. The Gout is now somewhat under control with a standard medication; name of which I'll have to get up from my chair here to get the spelling of....Colchicine, not that you care. The Psoriasis is only the last in a series of diagnoses by a series of doctors for a rash on my back that's about five years old. Haven't you had enough of this?
Yes. Now for the Czech. When I visited the town in Montenegro where my father was born about twenty years ago, I found a cousin, Ivan, with whom I had trouble conversing because I wasn't able to find an available translator and I don't speak what is now called Montenegrin but was then called Serbo-Croatian. But with a small group of people who each knew a few words of English we struggled along, and my cousin, Ivan, who has since passed away, showed me numerous photos of his family.
From what I could discern, it seemed, from a picture of his mother and his description of her, that she was my father's aunt and Godmother, Baba Jana. Another picture was of an Austro-Hungarian Army Officer, and I've come to the conclusion that he was my father's father's father. My great grandfather. I've forgotten his name now. (That's part of the problem of waiting until you're old to get interested in you genealogy.) This officer, everyone agreed, looked just like me.
I don't know for sure, but I think he was born in Czech Bohemia. I believe the Empire's Army sent him to Montenegro, where he married, I'm assuming a Croat, which would have been considered in the family, of the same tribe and race as it were, (Roman Catholic), which allowed him to settle in and become part of the landscape. His son Sima, though, (Simon in Americanese, and my Gramps, who I never met,) married a Montenegren Serb, and was therefore disowned and so had to flee to the U.S., in much the same manner as my mother's maternal grandmother and grandfather, who were Catholic and Protestant and lived in Northern Ireland and came here for the same reason. (This is a story I've told before, so I must think it's interesting.) My Czech part is in the male. My Irish, Scots-Irish part is in the female, with the Catholic being the Grandmother and the Protestant being the male.
I suppose there is a good case for mine being a bastardized as well as balkanized genealogy, all of which could make a lesser man slide toward an identity crisis. I, however, for those of you who are along for the ride, must tell you that I am well beyond that. I've been transformed, (I did EST), I've become transcendant, (I did T.M.), I'm sober, (I did that thing), and I've delved into General Semantics, by which I mean I'm on page 206 reading Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. And on that page, or near it, I've come across some interesting information about infinity, which, and I'll end with this, is formulated symbolically as an eight, on its side, which I thought to myself, perhaps channeling my late brother-in-law Burt Glinn, famous photographer, and compulsive punster, can be written as ate lying down. Badump bump.
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