He looks so much like his grandparents. His ears and the shape of his head come straight from his grandfather, and he smiles just like his grandmother. I'm immensely grateful to have escaped my own dad's elephant ears, but my hair was once the strawberry blonde and auburn of my crazy part Galician Spanish grandmother on one side and my many red-headed English-German-who-knows-what cousins on the other. My genealogy-crazy second cousin Peg said that she saw my eyes in family photos in Germany. (I think those cousins were just near-sighted and afflicted with strabismus, mysef. It's a Look!)

I really wish that everyone could see that column. I have no doubts, considering that my father's family has lived in the South since after the War of Independence, that I have many Black relatives. Unfortunately, my father hated my grandfather, so I was cut off from the wellhead of family stories. We probably wouldn't have been told about the "other family" anyway. Sigh.