Even though yesterday was St. Patrick’s day we didn’t do much celebrating. Of Sammy, Boyce, and I, none of us are really sure of our heritage. When I used to ask my mother she would say, “You belong to your father,” so I don’t know what that meant in terms of ancestry. I don’t remember asking my father about it, though I do recall him saying a lot about us being from the ground and that’s where we’re all headed. So in the seventh grade, a couple years after my father had died, my teacher asked me what my background was. I repeated my father’s words: “I’m from the ground, and that’s where we’re all headed.” She thought I was trying to be silly and got mad at me, but the kid who didn’t have to sit through sex ed spoke up for me and said we're big balls of dust or something, and the teacher said, “Oh, Elijah,” and just moved on with her lesson about igloos or whales or whatever we were doing.
Since Boyce and Sammy come from farming families, they don’t know their ancestry either. In my experience the only white people who care about their ancestry are people who grew up without backyards. Also, it seems like people with Irish heritage get excited because they are the closest western Europeans come to being slaves, and it’s always great, if you’ve made something of yourself, to have an ancestor who got beat up on. People act excited when they learn they are related to a king, but in their brains they are really hoping they came from some sickly, impoverished, bullied group of people so they can think, “Wow, ancestor, I am so much better than you. And now I’m going to drink green beer till I erin go bragh the face of a guy who’s related to your dead master.” Rachel told me that one day I was going to get beat up for that opinion, and I should be careful. I told her I’ve been beaten up for much, much less.
Instead of going out to celebrate the holiday we were over at Boyce and Charlotte’s for dinner. Boyce tells us that Lancaster is an Irish name, but for all he knows he had a relative who was a fugitive Hungarian who pushed some crippled Irishman off the boat and just took his name. So Charlotte made a Digiorno pizza, which I’m just going to assume comes from Hungary. Go Magyars!
