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I like this essay a lot :-)
Family tells a lot about a person. My sister is three years younger than I am. She is normal. She likes normal people music, chick flicks, and reality TV. She’s into makeup and fashion, and has been planning her prom since 8th grade. She doesn’t understand that silence is okay. We call her “the band-aid kid.” When she was little she collected band-aids, and always had an injury requiring one. Now she maintains her own private stash of medical supplies.
My dad is an engineer. He makes computer programs and has patents. He builds model airplanes and flies them into trees. Once as a party game, he suggested we go to the flying field, and whoever found the plane still in the tree would get $5. His favorite saying is, “Math is easy, math is fun, math is good for everyone.” His second favorite saying is, “Work hard, get a good job, make lots of money, buy what you want.” He talks to our cats and says they talk back.
My mother once took a personality test and it said she was a drill sergeant. She immediately recommended this personality test to everybody, because it was extremely accurate. She has sweatshirts that say, “I yell because I care,” and, “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” My mother is practical. She thinks getting married young is dumb. She believes it’s more important to have a career and be able to support yourself. My mother likes to read. Sometimes she steals books from me because she has nothing to read. When I was younger she used to embroider angels. She stopped working on them for a long time because she’s an old person and her eyes are going. Once, she told me to do something, and when I didn’t, she said, “I know I told you to do something but I can’t remember what. Go do it.”
My mother’s family is very Italian. They have big Sunday dinners and talk with their hands. (My sister carries this trait. She can’t chatter if somebody holds her hands still.) My mother’s oldest younger brother has a ponytail and pierced ear, plays guitar, does Louis Armstrong impressions, and makes movies about rubber chickens. When he was fifteen, his garage band needed money, so they wrote to the Shah of Iran saying because he had money he should give them some. The Shah sent $1000 because his kids liked American rock and roll.
My uncle takes after my great-grandfather and namesake, Emilio. For Halloween, Emilio would decorate his car with fake body parts hanging from his trunk. When my uncles spent the night, he would dress up like a ghost to scare them. When taking family pictures, he’d wire the couch to shock people when the shutter snapped.
My one famous relative is my great-great-grand-uncle, Gabriele D’Annunzio. He has roads and villas named after him in Italy. He is famous partly because he supported Mussolini. (We ignore that part of the story.) When we were in Paris a couple years ago, we found an exhibit about him in le Musée D’Orsay. His biggest accomplishment was getting five books on the Index of Banned Books. (Galileo, Copernicus, Balzac, and Hugo only had seven between them.) This makes him worthy of admiration, even if he was a Fascist.
I carry a lot of easily recognizable family traits – my eyes, my hair, even my toes – but I also have family resemblances only found by careful examination – my analytical and practical nature, my love for music, my sense of humor, and my heresies.