HEATHER HOPES: Checks and Balances

By HEATHER CATHLEEN COX
Special to the NEWS
heathercathleencox@gmail.com

Heather Cathleen Cox

In order to apply for a job, a loan, an education—even to belong to a religious institution—we’re given forms with checkboxes, and we’re told to check the box containing the preconceived label with which we “best identify,” with regard to: ethnicity; religious practice; political involvement; educational background; socioeconomic status; familial breeding; physical or mental limitations; and personal affiliations.

To obtain acceptance with said group, we’re expected to make ourselves fit somehow into their prefabricated checkboxes. Sometimes, there’s a box marked “other” or room to “expand” upon our answers. Can you imagine checking the “other” box or writing outside of the lines on such a form?

Recently, I had to do that very thing when a college professor asked me to compile my autogeography—similar to an autobiography but geographical, rather than biographical, in nature. It was not as easy as I’d have expected, depicting who I think I am based solely upon where and how my kinfolk originated, lived and died.

For example, my biological grandfather’s mistress, Maria, descended from Latin ancestors. Maria’s affair with Clyde broke-up a marriage between Clyde and JuaNita (my grandmother). Somewhere amid the adultery, Clyde and Maria married and moved to Hawaii. All I knew of my grandfather before age 9 was that he sent glass jars of Mauna Loa macadamia nuts and cryptic messages scribbled on the backs of religious postcards. “You have all sinned.” Right. Merry Christmas to you too, Grandpa.

When Clyde and Maria moved back to the States, we visited them at an apartment where Maria treated me like I was invisible. Clyde would laugh from a belly full of what I imagined were Carnival treats, and there was always something about him that didn’t set well.

Clyde’s parents were Scottish (father’s side) and Hungarian (mother’s side). My mother’s sister, Zoé, loved her Scottish roots. In fact, she visited Scotland multiple times throughout her life. Before she passed away, Zoé was accepted into the official MacGregor Clan and was actively involved with their lifestyle.

Zoé insisted that bagpipe musicians play at her youngest son’s wedding; I remember my grandmother, JuaNita, and I giggling at the men in dresses. My grandmother even tried to lift their kilts… and may’ve been successful. JuaNita wasn’t Scottish, after all.

Furthermore, Zoé had occasion to eat haggis—if you don’t know what it is, you’re better off—and she often performed original and traditional Scottish songs and poems at festivals across the US. To say my Aunt Zoé was in tune with our Scottish heritage would’ve been an understatement. On the other hand, my mother, Claudia, moreso identified with her Hungarian lineage.

During the Holocaust, my great-grandmother fled Hungary to come to America. She changed her last name to avoid being recognized as a Jew. Even as a small child, I knew my mother was fascinated with her Jewish roots.

Mama taught me that my great-grandmother, Teresa Christina, had been born of some sort of nobility in Hungary, and Teresa Christina had kept special documents tucked away for at least half a century. Teresa Christina’s two sons (Clyde and Bill) were ashamed of their Jewish bloodline, and the night she died, her sons held a bonfire…using the priceless papers.

To her dying day, my mother never stopped wondering what the papers said.

Comparatively, neither my aunt nor mother focused much attention on the fact that their mother was “very” Native American. JuaNita was raised on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, and she had the olive skin and high cheekbones to boot. JuaNita married a Czechoslovakian man named John who taught me to eat sausage so spicy it made your eyes and nose run, and sauerkraut so sour you had to squint while eating it. John was a farmer, and he taught me to drive a big, green John Deere tractor when I was only 8 or 10.

The great philosopher and thinker, Socrates, said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” My friend, this cruel world is full of flibbertigibbets who flap their gums just to hear the sound of their own voices, full of people who accept the status quo because they are otherwise too apathetic to think for themselves, and full of folks who perpetuate ignorance by not challenging it.

What I’m getting at, and thanks for sticking with me until now, is what we’re truly made of, what shapes us—our truest autogeographies, autobiographies, etc.—will never fit into a checkbox on a form. Might I propose that we each consider taking inventory of our present state—geographically, physically, emotionally and spiritually speaking. Let’s check our motives, let’s check our actions and practices. But let’s refuse to be defined by the checkboxes of life.