weatherby as lincoln: a grandmother's hallucination?

let me start off by saying that people who type in all lower case (besides pronouns) are of higher intelligence than those who do not, with the sole exception of me.

my grandmother once told me that our family is related to Abraham Lincoln, through the Branch family on her mother's side, and so on and so forth, from him to me, just like that. i've wanted to believe her since i was a young child, and repeated this fact over and over again whenever the name was brought up; mostly i got strange looks and passive nods. i kept vocalizing the idea thinking, well, i'm tall enough, and (later) i could probably do a great Lincoln on halloween. and why shouldn't anyone believe me?

***

i first began to realize the ridiculousness of my claim when my grandmother passed away. when they cleared out her belongings and effects from her room, they found in a clothes hamper underneath a few dirty shirts a terrifying stash of empty pill bottles marked with her name and the name of a powerful mood enhancer known to cause hallucinations in some users. no one knows how or why she had the prescription for so long, but some things began to come clear to me.

***

on my 17th birthday she kept me on the phone for 30 minutes telling me that i should be a doctor, insisting that the only people in my family worth spitting on were doctors and that i should probably study science in college instead of English. i am terrible in all sciences, always have been, and kept telling her that i've wanted to study English since i started reading. she acknowledged the sound of my voice, but did not hear what i said... that same year my cousin was busted in his trailer with a meth lab and 2 kilos of weed (and a wife and child) and she called the FBI in to investigate saying "He was set up!" thankfully for him they never came... and on a regular basis she called a line at the white house to let the president know about the poor job he was doing; i'm assuming she was never patched through to the oval office.

***

i can't really appreciate my grandmother. i don't feel ashamed for thinking it, but it doesn't rest so easily on my conscience that i'm not a bit ashamed for saying it. she was a strange woman, a self-purported adventurer and traveler, but also an outspoken racist with no real awareness of the hurt her offhand n-words could cause. she was by accent a deep south racist, though she hailed from Ohio and had a short list of entertainers and intellectuals she classified as "the good ones." once on a trip to Washington, D.C. she made my grandfather smear mud on their Mississippi license plates so no one would be able to see the markings of the deep south on their vehicle and smash their windows. i see now that she was embarrassed more than anything; for most of her married life she lived on a street called Plantation Blvd. that was long before i was born. by the time i was old enough to realize what she was, the staunch racism surrounding her mixed with the sticky Mississippi summers and chased with a bottle of pills must have boiled her brains pretty good.

***

i don't know why anyone does anything, or how people's beliefs and convictions are shaped and held on to, or what makes one idea better than another. and today, after photoshopping my face onto a pic of old Abe, thinking about my crazy grandmother again, and writing this blog, i realize that i will never truly know those things about myself either. i'm okay with that. as far as being related to the Gettysburg addresser, who cares if it's not true? i am tall enough, and if it will make mimi's troubled soul rest any easier i'll keep believing no matter how dumb it makes me.

also, my face fit eerily well on Abe's, and that's pretty damn cool.