Spooky Genes, Part 2

My father, Michele Aquino

1948ish, New York

My son, Henry

2015, Los Angeles

Are you weirded out?

Happy Halloween!

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.