How Are You?

 At first glance, it seems like an innocuous greeting – a little more personal than “good morning,” a little less informal than “hi.”  However, for some people (the author included) it is problematic – frustrating and confusing.

We are members of the tribe of literalists – people who, no matter how often they have learned otherwise, continue to labor under the delusion that other people say what they mean and mean what they say.  This condition apparently has a genetic basis, since even if we grudgingly adapt, our basic reaction never fades.

So what’s the problem?  Well, it’s a question -- or is it?  Pretty clearly, somebody who says “Harya!” while striding briskly past is not soliciting an extensive reply.  That’s on a par with “Howdy,” which is a contraction of “How do you do?” which started out as a bit of social ritual in the form of a totally non-specific question (how do I do WHAT?).

However, “how are you?” is marginally specific enough to be a real question, especially when appropriately inflected.  So, let’s suppose somebody says it, and let’s just skip over the first major point of confusion, which is about whether or not it is intended as a question.

The next decision point is, how do you mean “how?”  How as in physical health, mental well-being, financial stability or ?.  And right now, or in general?  And however it is intended, it carries with it little or no information about the expected response.  Even if I manage to decide on a topical approach, I don’t know whether the speaker wants the 2 second, the 20 second, or the 2 minute answer.  To say nothing of the fact that I haven’t yet decided how much, if anything, I want to tell the questioner.

If I interpret it as an absolute question and reflect on my present condition as part of my life to date, I recognize that I have at least 5 chronic organic conditions (aka incurable maladies), 2-3 structural problems, and some collection of psychological issues.  The only realistic answer is “pretty damn crappy.”

If it is intended to be relative in some way, I have to make a quick grab for a baseline to compare with.  Since I know that the expected answer is something along the lines of “fine, thanks,” or “good, and you?” and I don’t like to lie, I usually try to maintain some sort of façade of civility. I have learned to envision some recent low(er) point that permits me to say “not bad” or (the classic Midwesternism from my youth) “could be worse.”

So now you should be able to understand why I spend a lot of time in the apartment trying to build up enough strength to walk down a hallway where I might encounter several casual acquaintances. My limited circle of close friends is not so much of a problem, since it consists of people who know (and tolerate) me well enough to put up with the truth, or alternatively, with a smart-ass answer designed to deflect the whole subject.

The ”How are You?” is especially a problem at retirement communities, for two reasons.  One is that the population and the population density are such that there are inevitably a lot of people who recognize you well enough to feel some minor social obligation (or who are just compulsively friendly even if they don’t have the faintest idea who you are). The other is that almost everybody has one or more conditions that they are able – or sometimes eager – to talk about.

So that’s the problem.  Do I have any solutions, other than the things implied above?  Nothing completely satisfactory, but consider:

1. Work hard at implementing what I call the military solution, since in that environment there is only one correct answer, regardless of what you may think of the situation: “Yes, sir!”  And don’t forget it.  It’s not a lie, it’s a ritual.
2. The preemptive strike – if you can stay alert and get off a fast “G’day!” even marginally before the other party can start on “how are you,” you are not required to deliver a second greeting in response (by my standards).
3. The preplanned defensive gambit – practice one or more stock answers suitable for various situations. “Pass; next question” is pretty good for discouraging future greetings. I sometimes resort to “Surviving,” which is a little bit less blunt.  One of my fellow tribe members likes “Hanging in there.”  “Still clinging to the wreckage” is my favorite for style, but rather long for a quick response.
4. Be a good role model with respect to privacy issues; (a) cultivate the view that whatever they are asking about is none of their business, and (b) don’t ask anybody how they are unless you really want to know and are very sure that they will be willing to tell you.

So that’s it for now.  Have a wonderful day – which will be the subject of my next diatribe on the subject of social noncommunication.

 

FAMILY MATTERS/FAMILIES MATTER

I never thought of myself as a survivor, but when I looked around the family landscape I noticed that almost everybody else was dead, so I guess I must be.  Nor did I consider myself a family historian, but I ended up with some boxes and envelopes of family information and nobody to give them to, so it turned out that I was.  Then when my great-grandson Ezra was born, it dropped in on me that I myself was an historical artifact. So when grand-daughter Remy expressed some interest in family history, it was with great relief (mine, not hers) that I recognized there was somebody on whom I could off-load this intergenerational responsibility.

As sure as the dark follows the dawn, I promptly realized that the contents of the boxes and envelopes required considerable curation and description to be reasonably intelligible even to an interested party. Old Artifact, to the Front! However, memory impaired Old Artifacts require a fair amount of technical and organizational support.

So, when Remy and her Auntie Stacey came to visit, I tapped into my abundant inventory of low cunning and allowed myself to be persuaded to send a tube of spit to 23&Me to get my DNA assessed.  And signed up for their family tree program.  And since for me, nothing is done until it is overdone, I repeated the process with the Ancestry site.  Both sites require a paid subscription, but wotthehell, I figured, when the future looks bleak you might as well spend your money on the past, where you can count on a little stability.  Or so I thought.

Which brings us to the end of the introduction (I will surely issue sporadic future reports on my adventures in historical research), and the beginning of my steadily growing disillusionment with the concept of the stability of the past.  The era of computers and AI has hugely facilitated the practice of genealogy, with vast numbers of critical records digitized and readily available.  No more stumbling through tick-infested cemeteries or shivering in dark and moldy county archive rooms -- just type in your search criteria, et voila! (apologies for the lack of accent marks; Blogspot has a rather depauperate inventory of fonts).  Or so you think.

An  initial foray into the ancestral world of MAYBE ---  What you get when you type in your search is access to a variety of data sources. Each of these, in keeping with the Blog Theme, turns out when opened up to contain an alternative manifestation of Schroedinger's (imagine an umlaut) Cat, alive (useful) or dead (garbage), but all with an infinite variety of colors, shapes and sizes (and even species). It's Quantum History, where uncertainty reigns and the data change if you look at them.

Example: My paternal grandmother -- Jakobina or Jacobina or Jakobine or Jacobine Christine or Christina or Kristina or Kristine Dahl (or Dall or Doll) Buddemeier (just about anything). Nickname Bena or Bina or Beana.  Grandma's family immigrated from Denmark when she was a child, and she married Grandpa, the son of German immigrants.

Resolving her name was comparatively easy, since I had access to her tombstone, and when I tracked down her baptismal certificate it was in legible handwriting.  The bookends to her life, spanning 70 years, 2 continents, and 2 languages, agreed on Jakobine Christine Dahl.

Whence came all the others?  Well, a lot from people misrecording or misspelling a spoken name.  In Danish and German, Christine is pronounced Kristeeneh, which sounds more like Kristeena than like the English pronunciation Kristeen.  Same with Marie/Maria -- and to those you can add Mary, because immigrants often deliberately anglicized their old-country names, and up into the early 20th Century in rural Illinois you didn't need to go to court, you just did it.  Another source -- miscopying or mistransliterating written records.  If the writer (either original or copyist) had "narrow" handwriting, it's hard to tell the difference between most of the vowels.  Jakobine's mother, Marie, appears as Miria in a lot of the public family trees that contain her -- probably from copying each other after somebody found the passenger manifest that really can be read that way.

So searching, since few records contain just one piece of data, is complicated by the fact that when you put gold in you may get garbage out, but if you don't investigate the garbage, it's easy to miss nuggets.

I'll end with that observation, and the comment that the existence of other searchable family trees makes it possible to scramble across the backs of people who have put lot of effort into the process.  But, observe the classic adage -- trust, but verify.  I have the advantage of knowing enough German to identify translations and transliterations, and recognize things about which to be suspicious.  Most of my fellow amateur genealogists are unlikely to have that advantage in assessing promising pathways or possible errors.

More to follow -- I'll try to warn you which ones to skip at the beginning of the posts.