WHO AM I, ANYWAY?

On my credenza is a hinged frame with two photographs in it. The one on the left is me in 1935. The one on the right is my father in 1908. If you look only at the faces, you can hardly tell them apart. We are almost as alike as the proverbial peas in a pod.

In my scrapbook is a Certificate awarded at the Mother-Daughter Banquet at George Pepperdine College in 1954 to my mother and me for looking the most alike of any of the other one-hundred fifty mother-daughter pairs in attendance.

So go figure!

If, in fact, my mother and I looked alike then, my cheekbones have certainly slipped downward in the subsequent years. And if my father and I looked alike then, my upper eyelids just forgot when to stop growing; mine look now like they should be on a Shar-Pei. His, at 92, were still as tidy as a reptile’s.

I don’t know how it is that we look like ourselves the whole time we are growing up, yet we still can change in resemblance from one parent to the other at various points in time.

I had one minor foray in high school into the study of genetics. At the time, because the course of study dealt with guinea pigs, and probably because the illustrations were so elementary that I could understand them, I thought genetics were fairly understandable. As nearly as I can recall it, we had several text-book guinea pigs to work with. Of these guinea pigs who were going to mate, some had rough hair, some smooth, some were brown and others were white. I don’t recall if their eyes had anything to do with it but I think not.

What impressed me was that according to the little chart in the book a certain number of baby guinea pigs, of a truth, were going to be smooth whites, another certain number would be rough whites, and the same held true for the brown ones. Or vice versa. Or something like that. Please remember that because it has been nearly 50 years since I saw this little chart, there may be some other factor that came into play but if so, that piece of information has detached itself from my recollection and it is now free-floating in my brain. But I think you get my point.

Obviously there is something a whole lot more complex that comes into play when you talk about human genetics. After all, if you look at the faces of all your guinea pigs, assuming you have any, it will not be the facial characteristics that tell them apart. One pig face is just like another pig face – no high bridge noses, no baggy eyelids, no high cheekbones. It is the rough and the smooth that tell them apart, the brown and the white. But genetics is a lot more complicated than what little I learned in 1952. (Just try to figure out Mendel and his peas!) And I sure don’t know how to relate what I know about guinea pigs to what I see in my mirror.

Nevertheless, there is something deep in our makeup that can change ever so slightly at points in our lives that make us look differently while we yet look the same. I can understand being like my dad in character and like my mom in temperament. What I haven’t figured out is why sometimes I look like one and other times the other. And still look like the same me. Who am I, anyway?