Chapter 11 (My Story)

IT TOOK ME the entire week to write about Dad’s adventure during the Great Chicago Fire. I was handwriting it all, but my computer was open next to me as I looked up details of the fire that burned October 8-10, 1871. I’d doubted some of the things he said, like October in Chicago being hot, but they’d been in the middle of one of the hottest stretches ever seen there and there’d been a drought for the entire year. Fires—mostly smaller—had been sparked all over the Midwest.

I found myself carrying my fountain pen and journal everywhere with me and writing whenever I could. Between writing the story down and plunging into the specs for our project at work, I was putting in pretty long hours. I still managed to have meals with the family, though. That brought another surprise. Zach brought a girl home. I knew who Val was, in a general way. She was in his class and if she wasn’t the valedictorian, she’d certainly be the salutatorian. Zach had mentioned once that she was helping him study for exams, but this girl had been in the garage helping Zach dismantle the Corvair. I thought maybe I should spend an evening with him again.

Val was pleasantly geeky, outgoing, and seemed happy to have been in the garage most of the afternoon. The class schedule for seniors was light, focused solely on their exams. Once the last final had been taken, they were off until graduation in ten days.

“Zach said his grandfather had a car like the one we’re working on,” Val said. “That’s so cool. I hope he likes this one when it’s finished.”

“Where are you headed for college, Val?” Brenda asked.

“Stanford. I’m going to study Symbolic Systems and Engineering. It’s a good program and unique to Stanford. I got a lot of scholarship aid so it won’t be too expensive,” Val said.

“That sounds complex,” I said. “I hope you’ll enjoy your summer before you have to start classes.”

“Oh, I think we’ll enjoy it a lot,” she said, grinning at Zach.

Megan would arrive on Saturday for two weeks, in the middle of which would be Zach’s graduation. We were going to work together on packing up the house when she was available. She was visiting us, but she also would be working remotely when she got in. I couldn’t wait to get an in-depth conversation going with her about Dad’s stories.

We’d talked on the phone, of course. I hit the high points of his story, but didn’t get into the amount of detail he’d revealed. For her part, Meg had said she was going to do a DNA study of our family and see if there were any records that matched us going farther back.

“But how are we going to track down the real Dad prior to 1979?” she asked one evening when we talked. “I got a book.”

“That’s a surprise!” I laughed. Between Megan and me, I was sure we had at least as large a library as Dad had.

“Hush! This book was Finding the Family You Didn’t Know You Had, a Guide to Genealogical Research. I’ll bring it to you when I come to visit. One of the tips was to research a dead relative you do know so you can connect to others through them.”

“Sounds interesting. I thought you were doing all your searches through DNA,” I said.

“Do you have any idea how popular DNA searches have become to people wanting genealogical information? That’s why I want to collect samples from everyone in the family when I visit. Alex, who I work with, got involved in family history stuff and through his DNA match on one of the commercial sites, he discovered he had an older half-sister! It was a real shock to both of them. Neither had any idea their father had been with someone else at one time or another. Thing is, they are both delighted to have a sibling and they are getting along famously.”

“You think we might have a half-sibling from before 1979?” I asked.

“Who knows? I’m interested in our DNA for other research reasons. When was the last time you were sick?” she asked out of the blue.

“Sick? I broke my arm a few years ago.”

“That’s an injury, not an illness.”

“I sort of had the sniffles during COVID when Brenda got so terribly sick, but I don’t remember ever being really sick,” I said. In fact, our kids were never really sick for more than a day. I credited it to being rigorous about all of us having all our vaccines and have a pretty healthy lifestyle.

“Exactly. Nor have I ever been seriously ill. As far as I can remember, neither Mom or Dad have been sick. And neither of your kids. I think it’s something in our DNA and I’ve gotten clearance from the director here to pursue an investigation.”

“That’s incredible. I mean, do you think we are just immune to illness?” I asked. “Wait. When Dad started telling me stories, he said he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.”

“I wouldn’t say we’re immune to disease, but we might have a resistance to viruses. I trust modern medicine and healthy living. But I want records from our grandparents as well as our family. I just don’t know how that’s going to go,” she said. “So, I was reading this book. Remember? I found our grandparents marriage certificate. Get this: they were married in 1934. They’d been married fifteen years when Dad was born!”

“That’s insane. Did they live in different countries? How could they wait that long to have a kid in that era. Do you think they were abstinent?” I asked.

“I think you should start looking up the family background. I’ll send you the file I found and you can start looking things up,” she said.

“Right. I’ve got all kinds of time on my hands. I’ll see you Saturday. Maybe we can both sit down with Dad and ask about our grandparents. I’ll see what I can find before you get here.”

My grandfather had passed away four or five years before I was born and Grandma moved to Florida. She died when I was in my teens, but I remember her saying something about life in Florida being much easier than in Michigan. I figured I’d start by searching for an obituary for my grandfather in Michigan in 1976.

It always seemed like my grandparents must have died young. In 1976, my father was only twenty-seven years old. But the information my sister gave me about my grandparents having been married fifteen years before Dad was born bumped their ages up a ways in my mind. Instead of my initial thought that he must have been in his forties when he died, I know bumped that up to in his sixties. Still young by today’s standard, but not as young as I thought. I wondered what he died of and if that would change the curve regarding our family’s resistance to disease or viruses.