You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The DNA test.
“You mean I gotta spit in this tube?,” I say staring at the empty chemistry beaker in my hand.
“Spit in the tube,” the girlfriend responds.
“But it’s kind of gross,” I say poising the plastic test tube to the underside of my lip.
“Everyone does it this way,” she says imploring me to spit, staring at me, strangely excited about this public display of expectoration.
I was always told not to spit in public, so this is an odd moment, especially in front of my girlfriend. But it’s for science, and the quest for knowledge, so I decide to go for it.
I feel my saliva glands swelling with excitement, pumping my DNA into my mouth, slathering my tongue with the juices that make me, well, me.
“Just do it,” she says like a scientific add for NIKE.
I roll the spit around in my cheeks and hope that this is a good sample.
As I poise my lips, ready to spit, I pray this is a good one. I don’t want a truck stop glob or a wad of snot filled phlem to soil the sample. I don’t want a sidewalk bomb I’d spray in Brooklyn. I don’t want a hack I would crank from a top my mower. I want an Olympic style, gold medal filled, solid sample that represents my lineage, that shows who I am, what I am, where I’m from.
I feel my mouth filling with spit. I’m suddenly concerned that I just brushed my teeth.
Suddenly a weird feeling goes through my mind. What if I have residue from Colgate in my mouth? What will my DNA show? Will it be extraterrestrial with a big head? Will it be primordial ooze fish eyes bugging out? Am I a leper? A mutant? A Nobleman or a pauper?
“Come on already,” she says, extending the top of the test tube.
I push the spit to my lips and watch it cascade into the beaker, soiling the pristine, clear glass with a viscous stew of DNA rich spit.
I’m shocked how quickly the tiny test tube fills up.
“Put the top on, seal it, and that’s it” she says.
I screw the top on and look at the tube. It looks like warm spit in a plastic receptacle. But suddenly, in the confines of the beaker, it has a more definitive purpose. The key to my heritage, my ancestry is now somehow represented by this bubbly vial of liquid filth.
“That’s it,” she says. “I’ll mail it out in this pouch tomorrow.”
She puts the test tube in a pre-packaged pouch and seals it.
A month has passed. It’s a Saturday night. I’m 3 beers in and that warm vial of DNA is a cobweb in my mind.
I’m watching Saturday ESPN highlights of the British Open.
Suddenly the girlfriend shouts. “Your results are in!”
I look at her. I am excited. I am scared.
“You want to know what you are?”
DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE?
That’s not something you hear every day?
Do you want to know what you are?
A dozen thoughts go through my head?
Do you want to know what you are?
Is that a derivative of I know you are but what am I?
Or you are what you think you are?
The thought of what I am is interesting.
A million thoughts rush through my mind. I think about that night with a beaker to my lips. I wonder if the toothpaste sabotaged the sample? I wonder if my test tube got switched with Brad Pitt’s or perhaps a cocker spaniel. I wonder if I’m from England like my mom has always said. Oh how Jolly that would be? But I have such wonderful teeth. How can that even be? I wonder if I’m from Ireland? I do enjoy a good sip of whiskey and I can sunburn with the best of them. I wonder if I’m Eastern European like my dad has always said. I wonder if I have any African in me. I think I can dance and I have always had a thing for hippos and the word Serengeti.
“Yes. I want to know what I am,” I reply sheepishly.
She smiles as she opens the email and reads it to me.
I am 99% European, she says.
I am 41% from Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
I am 22% from Ireland.
I am 17% from England.
I am 5% from Western Europe.
I’m apparently a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.
Am I surprised?
Perhaps by the amount of Irish? My mother always told me we were English.
“We are from Great Britain,” she would say proudly, almost with a regal accent.
“What about Ireland mom?”
“Not much Irish,” she would say as if the Irish are a bunch of potato famine lunes.
Well, mom, if this was the Gong Show of DNA results, mom would get gonged.
Sorry mom. Apparently we come from a long line of Western Irish Potato famine refugees.
and 5% of my spit is from Germany and France and the genetic landfill of existence.
And that leaves 15% of whatever? That’s a lot of DNA to go unknown, but that’s what they say. I guess my spit didn’t have enough oomph! Perhaps that 15% is the primordial ooze? Perhaps that is the swamp gas, or the bug eyed blood lines of miscreants?
15% of ancestry leaves a lot of unknown.
Interestingly, the results say I am from Jewish descent in Eastern Europe. But it does not say I am from Catholic or Protestant descent in Ireland and England.
That sounds racist to me.
I have no menorahs or dradels in my house, yet I have a garbage bag stuffed with Christmas lights and 3 Christmas tree stands in my garage.
Go figure!
The Ancestry web site immediately tells me that I have direct links to over a 1,000 other people, most notably 4th and 5th cousins. I immediately find this prospect interesting. These are real people who emanate from the same genetic constellation as me.
Perhaps Einstein had a one night stand in a German brothel. Could I have a little E=MC2 flowing through my blood?
Doubtful!
“Maybe our ancestors dated,” the girlfriend says laughing. She shows me her bloodlines that have strong ties to Ireland.
She’s a potato famine girl too.
It’s not impossible that her clan and my clan either fought or made love in the 1500’s.
That would make us kissing cousins of the 5th or 6th kind.
“Yuk,” one of us says.
Yuk is right.
DNA is messy business. There’s no hiding from it. It starts with spit and ends up in the realization that I have no blood lines connected to Kunta Kinte. I am disappointed. But ancestry is what it is.
Perhaps this year I will get a menorah and learn to eat gefilte fish. Perhaps I will just buy a keg of Killian’s Red and drink till I go blind.
Twice baked potatoes and grog anyone?
Life’s Crazy™