Genes

That's my Aunt Gilda on the left with her baby brother, Michele, my father. I have no idea how old this photo is nor where it was taken, although it looks like late 1950s, an airport in the background and maybe a building in New York City? Anyone? I stumbled upon the photo while bumbling around trying to figure out how to get a photo on Instagram to the blog. It seems like the only thing one can do is provide a link to the photo itself. But I'm glad that I haven't figured it out, because this gem was sitting among hundreds of photos I scrolled through, so I just sat a while and thought about my Aunt Gilda who died much too soon when I was a little girl and how she gave me a copy of The Hobbit when I was seven years old and had made my First Holy Communion and how much I adored that book and have it still, the exact same one with an inscription in her beautiful, flowery script. I thought, too, about my father who looks much the same now as he did then, how one of the only times I saw him cry was the morning his beloved sister Gilda died, how he sat at the kitchen table his head bowed with tears dripping into his bowl of cereal while I stood frozen in the doorway. Then I thought about the grand-daughter of Gilda, my cousin Amanda, and the beautiful little baby girl she gave birth to last week who despite never knowing her will carry Aunt Gilda like an inscription. I thought about genes, about how much I resemble my father and maybe even Aunt Gilda and then there's Henry who is so startlingly ours.