So my mother's newish hobby of genealogy has hit a wall. Seems that too many of our illustrious forbears are not so illustrious after all. They remain anonymous, faceless, and traceless. She's giving up.

What's important about that for me isn't the revelation that my ancestors were no doubt peasant farmers who didn't accomplish much. It's that there is ever any real illusion that the majority of humanity falls into that category. My great-grandfather was mayor of a small MT town. Long before I was born. The only people who remember this are either family members, old timers (who are quickly leaving the table, so to speak) and historians of the obscure and not horribly important. No doubt he was important to those who knew him. Otherwise, not so much.

It's just like that. The dead leave, and all that is left are our memories, no? Ditto ourselves. Nothing left. But what we did to others. Those summer days stored in my memory, along with the good dinners, great sex, happy birthdays, favorite toys, rainy roadtrips, et. al. all go to the grave with me. Because no one else has them stored in quite the same sequence. And human memory is so notoriously quirky, after all.

So those people who are untrackable- the distant ones. They shared the same individuality, and no doubt many of the same feelings. All gone. All lost. And really, that's ok. Because I don't suppose history, despite the scholastic zeal of the deconstructionalists, can be composed of the teeming anonymous masses. There is no distinctly heard voice from all of that. Nothing that can be clearly transcribed. And overwhelmingly, nothing important. Because it's all the same striving. Nothing unique. Been there. And it's not all that depressing, when you think about it. Because it's just not lonely being anonymous- it's actually very normal.