Grampa Perry's Stories

I am Jacob and Gunnar's paternal grandfather. While they torment their mother and father and try to be little boys, I spend my time doing my best to spoil them. Usually I go to their house once a week so that we can have dinner and watch Dr. Who, which is why Jacob sometimes calls me Dr. Who Pa. I always to try to bring them something and Jacob is always asking what I brought as soon as I come through the door, unless he meets me at the car. Every two weeks or so, I take the boys and Kim to lunch. We always have the same thing and enjoy it all. Sometimes, we follow that up with a trip to the Austin Aquarium, although lately, I haven't been up to it.

I am retired and have been for 5 years now. I spend my time reading, playing a computer game called Gummy Drop, and looking for treats for the boys. I have been doing family history since I was a boy—I found the first chart I ever did in my aunt's papers, which I have inherited; it was dated 1957, so it has been a long hobby. At one point I even converted the knowledge and skills into a job running a genetic study at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

I've had a lot of experience writing. That started in interscholastic league competition when I was in junior high and high school and eventually led to a 25-year technical writing career in the electronics industry (I was also trained and worked as an electronic technician in the Navy).

I want to give my stories of the past to the boys and their cousins, but the cousins live a way off and the boys are too little to care yet. So, I thought I would write what I remember and what I've learned so that they can have it later.

Seventy years is a long time. I calculated that it is over 2-1/2 billions seconds, probably as many or more heartbeats and about a third as many breaths, lots of time for many things to occur. And now I have time to think about it all.

I've always been fascinated by numbers and the relationships they represent. For a genealogist, that means knowing that the number of possible ancestors doubles every generation going back and that there are on the average 4 generations every hundred years, it doesn't take long to figure out that if all ancestors were unique, they would soon exceed the entire population that has ever existed on the earth. So, our ancestors were cousins to some degree and everyone on the earth is related to some degree. The concept of race is ridiculous; there is only one: the human race. And the color is red, the color of blood.

We are who we are because of a combination of events that conspired to combine our ancestors. If we have less melanin, then our ancestors came from toward the north pole where conditions allowed people with lighter skins to survive better than ones with darker tones. Likewise, if we have darker tones, then our ancestors came from farther south toward the equator, where that color had a competitive advantage for survival. But man as a species is a wanderer and that wandering has led to all sorts of genetic combinations over time. I've heard it said that it takes about 50 generations for a group to go from white to black or vice versa, which is about 1250 years. So, there is no reason to feel smug or upset about your own skin color. It's an accident of circumstance and occurs because of where your groups ends up on the earth for long periods of time. It is estimated that we all descend from a single woman who lived about 70,000 years ago—that's about 2800 generations, so there has been plenty of time for your ancestors to have been any color. And since she came from Africa, by old Southern law, we are all black, even if our current genetics doesn't show any connection to Africa. Sort of humbling, I think.

But people are people and want to be individuals or belong to individual groups. And the competition goes on even among siblings (like Cain and Abel). And they think of reasons for individual traits to be considered good or bad or preferable or not, and the groups battle each other for land or food or power. Eventually in the name of survival, some groups figure out that cooperation and rules work better than wholesale terror and slaughter, until a new group of brigands rises up to introduce chaos. And even in the so-called civilized societies, some people want power and work to create social levels or castes or whatever and accumulate wealth and property. Frankly, it is what it is. Humans are humans. My ancestors have been among the haves and the have-nots, the power brokers and the sharecroppers (yes, even “white” people can be poor).

So, I hope to tell the boys and their cousins where they got their genes and tell stories that I've heard or seen. It gives a little balance to life, I think.