DNA

This weekend we celebrated my mom's 80th birthday with a weekend of family frivolity. "We" meant 5 of my mom's 6 surviving kids, 22 of her 24 grandchildren, all 15 of her great-grandchildren (as well as the 2 in utero), plus assorted spouses and partners. My family has always taken the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment very seriously.

Owen was one of the 2 absent grandchildren. It was an excused absence: he's bicycling across the country with a homeless advocacy group. Travel and volunteer work for a worthy cause--Mom wholeheartedly approves of both.

I missed him. Especially since I kept seeing him, various versions of him, bits and pieces of him. There he was at age 2, in the chubby cheeks and legs of my godson. And see, there, his thick and unruly blonde hair, on the head of my nephew's middle boy. And over there, there's his smile on another nephew. And my brother's face, a glimpse of the Owen yet to come.

In big family gatherings, the laws of time and space fall apart. I'm holding a baby, and it's me at 17, holding my very first niece or is it that niece at 17, holding baby Owen, or is it me again, holding my niece's first son? This stocky Tom Sawyer look-alike with freckles and a gap-toothed grin, it's my oldest nephew and yet it's his son. My second oldest brother's been dead for 37 years, but there's his walk, his stance, the way he wrinkled up his nose. All these strands, these fragments, tossed together, rearranged, updated, resurrected.

Except here is Hugh. No strands cling to him, no fragments of uncles or cousins reappear in the shape of his calves or the way he cocks his head. Cut from the biological web by adoption, Hugh stands free in his Hughness.

And yet. Love has its own biology and life in a family seems to produce its own genetic code. In Hugh's wicked sense of fun, his infectious personality and love of the outrageous, my dad comes back to life. Just like the grandpa he never knew, Hugh enjoys lobbing incendiary comments across the table and then sitting back to enjoy the fireworks. Deeper than DNA, somehow, love and life form their own thick web.

And, as it happens, my brown adopted baby fits into my extended family much better than my biological son--or me. Hugh prefers the vast houses, manicured lawns, and backyard swimming pools of suburbia; Hugh longs for an SUV; Hugh has a need for order and absolute rules that my family's political and religious conservatism fulfills. Desperate to hunt and fish and tinker with machines, Hugh suffocates in our book-lined house. But here, in the western suburbs of Chicago, Republicanville, the Land Beyond O'Hare, here Hugh comes into his own.

With his own family.