Here are four of the most often told stories about my maternal grandfather The Enterprising Peasant:

1) As one of 12 children in a poor and agrarian family they were always hungry. Their meals consisted of a big pot of beans or unpalatable food that their mother would brew and give each of them a bowlful of. Since a bowlful was never enough and all the children would be begging for more, their mother would throw a wooden spoon into the pot and turn away so she wouldn't see which one of the children got the extra helping and which 11 cried about starvation.

2) My grandfather put himself through school by getting up at 5am so he could haul firewood, and water for rich peasants and earn enough money for his school books and school materials. He did so well with his studying that he got to train as a doctor, and was a renowned microbiologist in his day.

3) During WWI my grandfather and his brother were conscripted into the army. The starving, poor, Yugoslav army. To prepare them for their march across Albanian mountains, their mother stuffed their pockets with garlic, which was pretty much the only produce she had, and she entreated them to eat garlic daily in order to stay healthy. They did as told, and verily verily they did not die of scurvy and disease unlike most of their unit, and they got sent to France after the war and the French liked garlic too and they gave them a free education, and then they lived Happily Ever Most Of The Time*.

4) My grandfather died very unexpectedly after suffering a catastrophic allergic reaction to penicillin, in controlled medical conditions while undergoing a process of sensitisation to penicillin. This took place a day before my mother's twelfth birthday.

These four stories have formed the founding principles of my mother's belief system concerning

1) being grateful for food
2) the importance and redeeming power of an education
3) that garlic will cure anything *
4) that all antibiotics and medicines (aside from garlic) are poison**, and that disaster can strike without warning at any minute, so it's best to be highly anxious all the time.

*Well exept for the nine years my great-uncle spent in solitary confinement and on Barren Island for criticising Tito's industrialisation program.

** My mother's belief in the power of garlic is unshakable. Whether singly, or in combination with her other two favourite medicines (olive oil and vodka) she uses it to treat pretty much any ailment, including: hair loss, ulcers, high blood pressure, ear infection, throat infection, flu. (The only thing not treatable with garlic is a urinary tract infection, which will be cured with parsley tea).

*** my mother's attitudes to medication can be synthesised into 1) man-made chemistry is poison and 2) if it's a plant that means it's natural, therefore good. (I'm always slightly surprised that she's never bought opium as a natural diet-and-sleep aid)

My son looks nothing like me. (No reason why he should, obviously. I mean, who am I but the woman who gave birth to him and spent the better part of a year carrying him around in my uterus and not eating any interesting cheeses).

Instread, his facial features are divided between Z and my father (hairline, eyebrows, nose, mouth belong to the former; the latter supplied the forehead, eyes and chin).

But I AM there. I hide, I bide my time. I come out from him in his mood swings, his sensitivity, his brand of stubborness and sweetness. We have the same way of clinging to things we like, he and I, the same attachment to food and the same packrat tendencies. And his grin? That is 100% pure me.

It's marvellous strange what crafty wily things genes are. How they hide and divide, stowaway or skip generations. My son is a changeling a Rogue Russian (who were themselves Rogue Germans once upon a time).

I love looking at him, wondering what else he carries. Has he inherited my father's talent for music, his singing voice? His father's passion for discovering what things are made of and how they fit together? My grandmother's charm and steely, unflappable digestive constitution?

And the other things too of course. The dangerous, treacherous ones. Hypertension, heart disease, aneurysms. And the other ones, that are even harder to decipher. The hungers, the anxieties, the memories of loss and shadows of burden. My father's sadness. My grandmother's craving. The memories of being wronged and hating. The corrosive toxic feeling of never being right, or wanted, or good enough. Ticking bombs. Cracks in the ice.

The ancestors live in us. They rule from shadow. Like characters in fairytales, they gather to bestow gifts upon babes. (But there is always an other. The uninvited fairy who is nonetheless a part of the story). The ancestors may find death restful, but they are no good at being inconscpicuous. They still hunger to live, to be remembered, to be heard, to tell their stories.

The ones who died, or fled, or lived. The ones who were dragged from their houses to be shot, the ones who hid in other people's houses, who survived in cellars and cupboards and loosely bricked up walls. The ones who fought in wars, and the ones who waited for them, and the ones who never came back. The ones who were hungry, and cold, and poor. The ones who rose like firebirds. The ones who sang, or painted, or saw beautiful things. The ones who loved,fiercely and sometimes secretly. The ones who adopted children, the ones who were adopted.

Each generation carries the others. Remembers their stories. Passes them on. We are one whole. The lost children, and the living ones. Saying: you are ours, and you will never be lost. Also: remember us and sometimes when making salad, add dill and sugar to taste.

Mine has always been a restless family. We are obsessed with other pastures and what lies beyond horizons. The sort of people who take Here be dragons as an invitation and go Well let's go have a look then. We belong to no place, but we are bonded to one another, with sacrifice and tears and blood. But mostly love.

The ancestors inhabit the light and air. Bodiless, they cartwheel in space. They leave no traces in mirrors, no prints on the carpet, no dent in the bed. They are a fabric of every room - like wallpaper.

Your bones are our bones. Your son is our son too. Our dreams are the foundations upon which your dreams were built.

We are here. We are here. We are always here.

I will be forever indebted to Lynne for leading me to this fabulous site: http://www.laststophell.com

For added pleasure have your speakers on when you check out the site to get the full benefit of the background music they have, I assume by way of alerting you to the profound peril of the soul.

there was indeed so much good reading material that I was utterly spoiled for choice. I am even more appreciative of the beauty of this site since being assured that people who built it are actually serious.

Satan loves homosexuals.. And will usually set them up with good careers in something Satan is in control of i.e.. Entertainment.. any form of the Media.. Satan wants them to grow.. The more homosexuals there are the more souls Satan gets to join in a Furnace of Fire.. GOD hates Homosexuality!..

There are too many gems to list, but the above I thought was particularly brilliant. Reading it I could have been forced to conclude that Satan feels ambivalent about Tarot readers since my own career is not particularly illustious but for the link on the main site admonishing Tarot Cards and Other Garbage . I was particularly heartbroken however to discover that the link didn't work, alack, alas.

What I find the most outstanding is that in one of the most prominent quotes on the site, God is cited as saying: My people are destroyed through lack of knowledge

It's quality. :D

On a completely different note, thank you to dubaiyan for leading me to http://www.katiemelua.com and pointing out that she is from Georgia (the ex-USSR one). :)

*bounce* My people! My people!

Georgians tend to be universally excited when they meet one another, especially outside of Georgia, which is at first weird and then completely contagious and certainly a nice change from the usual Yug procedures when the ex-patriates circle each other warily until it can be ascertained whether they loathe the other person/the other person loathes them/anyone has killed anyone's friend's or family/anyone wants to kill each other.

It can make for some tense social encounters. One time it turned out that two of my Yug acquaintances in London had fought against each other in Bosnia, but remarkably they were both pretty cool about it, only making breezy comments along the lines of: *Oh, so YOU'RE that division*. It probably helped that they were stoned at the time. As good a reason for legalising weed as most of the others I heard.

My family are notoriously bad at informing each other of important things, (births, deaths, marriages), notoriously bad at telling each other the truth.

We often learn of things by chance, or as an afterthought long after they happened.

Like today. A phonecall from relatives in another contry.
"Magda is dead."
"WHen did she die?"
"A month ago."

Useless to say, why didn't you call earlier? Not that we were close, or that we could go to the funarel, but still. I don't really remember her well except as a woman with badly dyed hair, and the sort of unfortunate nose which is a typically Jewish legacy. Hopeless with directions speaking a badly accented Serb. Speking as though each of her sentences divulged a great and profound truth and generally starting them with:
"I tell myself, Magda, you must..."

She visited us a few times when I was in Yugoslavia. She seemed impossibly funny and quaint to me with her appalling pronounciation, linguistic mistakes and thinning hair a garish red. She took my cousins and me to a children's clothing shop. I remember they were more timid, better behaved, but I took her hand and dragged her over to pleated plaid skirts and twirled around saying:
"Look, I would be very pretty in that one."

And the news that she died a month ago delievered casually between complaints about Palestians and the weather.

It is often so with my family.
Masters of Euphemism.

"I need to have a small routine procedure. I'm going to Belgrade for a few weeks." my mother's description of her fairly advanced cervical cancer and radical emergency hysterctomy.

"Your father needs to be in hospital for a little bit." my mother's for his having a burst aneurysm, needing to undergo neurosurgery.

"Daddy has gone on a trip", my own, for his death.

And news of ill health, of misfortune, nearly always reaching me after a delay.

Like the light of the stars reaching earthly telescopes with records of what happened millions, billions of years ago. So that each staring into space, into births and deaths and lives of stars, all that which is new and just learned is always in fact only a glimpse of the past, a journey back into history.