Wielding Swords and Baseball Bats

A girl's memory

When I was a child, of about 10, one day, together with my playmates, I ran down a hill towards a cornfield below. We were playing a cavalry game of some sort. We screamed out, recreating the yells of soldiers of the past.  We tried our best to scare the enemy away, or, at least, to cower them enough, that our blades would easily make their blood flow.

We did not envision the carnage a real sword could inflict on another human being. In the early 60s, the blood and gore we now experience in the movies, was not a known visual experience to us.

It was, however, to our fathers. Those were the men making the movies back then. They did not feel the need to put onto the screen the exact horrors they had experienced during the war.

That would be WW2.

You might well ask what was a 10 year old girl doing playing a boys game, with the boys?

In today’s world, some nosey teacher just might think I could be a boy in a girl’s body. Today, a girl doesn’t get to be a girl the way she wants to be a girl, without all these self-made gods telling her what she looks to be, to them.

A girl playing war….hmmm, suspicious.

Nosey people need to learn to mind their own business. Because these fools are the usual suspects that have been around for thousands of year. You might know to whom I refer; ignorant fools, who follow the current, fashionable talk, and think it a new truth. They think their atavistic behaviors are enlightening. But it is the same old attitude, that they know better, with a new twist: that the girl can be turned into a boy. And vice versa.

Beware of doctors who can save your life, but choose to hack it up, to rearrange it instead.

Such nonsense. Obviously, there are many ignorant fools who have not studied personality traits. Or read Carl Jung’s work on personality, and the anima/animus. Which means, some girls are not gendered in the things they like to do. Like play war games. Fortunately, we all have this anima and animus. Meaning, it is natural for some girls, to love playing baseball, or love being a bad ass warrior.

Those who cannot see the differences in women are stuck in old, stale ideas, about women. They claim to want equality, and other such gibberish, when it is they who wish the sexes were in straight jackets. Only girls wear dresses, right?

Balderdash.

The historian in me knows the truth; that only in the last 300 years have westerners used the skirt to separate the sexes. In places like China, it’s been only the past 150 years. In the Near East, men still wear robes, which is just another word for gown or dress. Indeed, the noun form of the word means, “a one piece garment worn by women and girls that covers the body…”  The Thesaurus give us as substitute words, “gown, robe, shift, frock.”

Anyone can wear all of the above.

Any thinking person can see that it doesn’t take eternal medical procedures and meds to allow men to wear a dress. It takes an honest change in attitude about what men may wear. As in, get them out of their straight jacket. Maybe then they will stop hating women so much as to want to beat them at everything, including beauty contests, in which they must wear a dress.

That reminds me of the song, “Anything you can do, I can do better…”

The entire mishmash of self-loathing and loathing are getting tiresome.

When I was that girl wielding her pretend sword, I was fortunate to have friends that did not find me weird. My male friends allowed me to play baseball with them, not to be “inclusive,” but because I was a decent fielder, and I could hit line drives wherever I wanted the ball to go. No, I could not hit it out of the park. I didn’t have the upper body strength for that. But I do understand the physics of a home run. What I did have, is one of those glorious accidents of nature; I am a right handed hitter with a left eye that is dominant. Which means I can track the ball coming at me, very well indeed. I am not an easy strikeout.

I was sort of the secret weapon, the opposing pitcher thinking I was an easy strike out. I knew what my job was: Advance the runners. That was what I did.

I once broke a finger playing baseball. That hurt a bit. But I finished the game, and finished the day at school. My step-mother took one look at my finger, and then hauled me off to the doctor.

It was at the doctor’s office that I listened to one of the most fascinating stories I have ever heard. This conversation was a divine moment, because what my step-mother, who, herself, was a trained scientist, and the doctor’s wife, who ran his office, spoke of was the yet-to-be-discovered rules of the passing on of information from one generation, to the next, and beyond.

Yes, I’m referring to the science of genetics, and DNA.

Here’s the story the doctor’s wife told. When the doctor was a boy, he too, had broken a finger whilst playing baseball. That finger had not been dealt with properly, because when my doctor was a boy, it was the middle of the depression. People didn’t have the money, or the insurance, to run off to see the doctor like we did. His finger healed well, but it had not been splinted properly, so it was now crooked. Nothing exciting to see there, until the doctor had his own son. The boy was born with a crooked finger, the very same as the doctor’s healed, crooked, baseball playing finger.

I never forgot that story. Just as I never forgot that day we played soldiers running down the hill to vanquish our pretend enemy. Because something unique happened to me, internally.

Running down the hill had thrilled me in a way I find difficult to describe. It was eerie, as if I was experiencing something I was supposed to recognize, but couldn’t. But the feeling, and its vision quality, stuck with me for decades.

Baseball bats and swords later turned into tennis rackets and fencing foils. Sports are fun, but learning to defend myself, aggressively, was more than fun. That is joyful power.

And then the vision came. As an adult, I had the same feeling as when I ran down the hill towards the cornfield, however, now I was a horse running down the hill, but yet I wasn’t the horse, because I could see the world before me between the ears of a horse.

Yes, it confused me, this eerie feeling with that vision.

Back then, DNA was not a thing, but learning about Eastern religions and the concept of reincarnation, was. It then came upon me that I was once a war horse. I, more or less, settled on that idea until I became acquainted with Carl Jung’s work. At about the same time, the science of genetics, and its sequencing of the DNA, was bursting out of the lab and into our lives. Those scientists were about to turn the world upside down, and, shake it up like a vodka martini.

I’ll have two olives with that, please.

Carl Jung’s ideas about passing on more than the color of the eyes, and a person’s height, was verified. Personalities, and the way of doing things also gets passed on. Like my paternal grandfather, I love to write. Like my father, I am going deaf. Like my mother, I love a good party.

Jung had suggested that memories could be passed down as well. Jung died before the DNA stuff came out. That makes him a prophet. Because the horse running down the hill is a memory of an event, not experienced by me in my body. Yet I recall it as if it had.

On that day, on the farm, running towards those cornfields, inside me, something was triggered. An old memory, that did not belong to me, was running around in my brain.

I became suspicious, after reading the Jung idea, that what I held was an old memory of an event that had happened to an ancestor. That’s when I allowed the vision to take free rein.  The cornfield turns into trees ahead. And, my horse, with me atop, runs down a plank from a ship. The sound of the hooves on the wood is unmistakable.

What ancestor is bugging me about this event? To answer the question, I have to find out who those ancestors are.

It took a couple of years to follow the ancestor thread. I was lucky in that my paternal grandmother had written down her maternal family line, back to 1804. That was a good start. Then, a second cousin studied the Crockett family tree. My maternal grandfather wrote down his parents’ names. This also was foundational information. With that data, I signed onto Ancestry.com, and began the journey back in time to learn who I was made of.

Ancestry’s data bank is huge, since they are owned by Mormons, they can tap into the LDS data. The Mormons do their family research in order to “save the dead” so to speak. Other sources are also available at the local libraries, and also, on the many family tree sites the Internet provides. It is becoming easier to cross reference the family data.

The coup-du-maître is, of course, to have the DNA done. The DNA verifies much of what is listed on the family tree. You can figure what is real and what is out-and-out malarkey.

There are two good sources for who this horseman is. First, the English connection, of an ancestor of 900 years back. His name was Nicholas de Peche, born about 1182.  French sounding name, and perhaps he was one of those Normans that came over with William the Bastard, AKA, the Conqueror. His father was Ralph, Lord of Boyleston, which is in Derbyshire. He married Alice de Syffrevast, whose cousin was the sheriff of Oxfordshire.

Well, now I know that this old family of mine is northern English, based in Derbyshire, and Oxfordshire.

But wait, there is more.

Matilda, the daughter of Nick and Alice, married Walter de Ridware of Staffordshire. So here comes an irony. My very first love was a guy with the last name of Stafford. Was this an old attraction? Were we the decedents of long, lost lovers?

I feel a story brewing there.

Here’s another irony. Before knowing that any of my ancestors  bear the name Nicholas, I named my own son, Nicholas.

Was Nick of Boyleston a fighting man? He could have been. There’s two other Nicks in the paternal line: Nicholas Wentworth and Nicholas Evans. Nicholas Wentworth, my 14th great grandfather, was a knight. Is it his memory that I carry around in my DNA?

Sir Nicholas was the father of the infamous Peter Wentworth, MP, he who dared to ask his queen the big, forbidden question: who would be her successor? Queen Elizabeth had forbidden anyone to ask that particular question. Peter asked it. Twice. He was thrown into the Tower, but not beheaded. He did die there, of complications due to old age. It gets chilly in the Tower during the winter months.

I don’t know if I have any of the memories of dear old 13th great granddad, Peter Wentworth, but I think my apple didn’t fall too far from his tree. I do have his rebellious streak, with a proclivity to fight for free speech. Being a rough and tumble American girl, who likes to play at war, and hit line drives, I bet I ain’t as courteous as he was.   

As for the known fighters in my bloodline, that would be the Crocketts. Revolutionary War, WWI and WW2, you would find my direct ancestors in the action. David Crockett was a 4th great uncle. I relate to him because he did write, and tell stories, and was a fantastic hunter. He did his share of warring, and that’s what killed him.

Whoever that soldier was who gave me his memory, I will never know. It must have impressed him quite a bit for it to become a part of who he was, down to his genetic code. Like my doctor’s crooked finger, once traumatized, it is forever a part of that person. So too, can a huge memory get passed on to some descendant. We cannot choose who will pick it up. Could be a girl at 10 years of age who picks it up, as she pretends to ride a horse that runs down a hill. With her adrenaline pumping, as she nears the cornfields, a corner of an old memory tells her those are the woods wherein lies the enemy. Pull your sword, girl, and be ready!

Life is wondrously strange.