Attic Salt for Oct. 18, 2009

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Oct 18, 2009

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How can we grow up with people who share our blood and be anyone but them?

What is in the genes? What is learned? Are we hardwired for honesty? How does the child of a crook or a liar grow to be a person of rectitude?

My mother tried to be tough, but it wasn’t in her. She’d say, “You made that bed, buster. Lie in it.”

Yet, once, when an older boy and I were playing marbles in the backyard, my mother saw another hour would mean the end of a stash of marbles I’d inherited from a cousin — who could shoot marbles.

“Dinner!” she called from the back door — at 4 o’clock.

“You sure eat early,” the big boy said, as I made for the house with what was left of the family marbles.

We grow up hearing relatives say, “You’ve got your mother’s hands” or “The older you get the more you look like your father.”

Are these people simpleminded? We carry our parents’ genes. It would be remarkable if we didn’t look like them.

Then, one afternoon, lying on the couch, our gaze drifts down bare legs to where the legs end in feet to see our father’s toes.

My mother died when I was 14. My father died my freshman year in college. I have outlived each of them by more than 20 years.

I don’t know how they would have looked as old people. They are fixed in memory not as a young man and woman but people suspended between their youth and an old age they didn’t reach.

My mother’s words live in me as though we visit every day. She was the funniest, savviest person I’ve ever known. She equipped me for life in the short time we had together.

But first, she had to convince me that I wasn’t adopted.