A straight line drawn from Lincoln Nebraska to Gracemont Oklahoma passes very close to Newton Kansas. And Newton, once the gun-fighting capital of the west, just north of Wichita, is where this branch of the Kipp tree began. On a train, as the story is told, where my mom and dad met. I place the period as 1955-56. Why either of them was on a train in Newton, and where they were bound, remains a mystery to me.
Lincoln is home to the state’s flagship university, a charming college town on the grasslands. My dad was born there in 1932, his parents having migrated to Lincoln from the smaller Nebraska outposts of West Point and Craig. The Kipps and Almys were teachers; several of them ending up teaching physics on the plains at Nebraska, Grinnell and Illinois. Dad’s dad taught for years at Texas Tech and Kansas.
Gracemont ( population 309 ) is a suburb of Anadarko ( population 6,500 ) in Caddo County Oklahoma. My mom was born there in 1936, and little is recalled from this early start. Her mom had every indication of an agricultural upbringing, talking about picking cotton and retaining a no-nonsense, wiry strength in all the years I knew her. The family headed for California during the Oklahoma Dustbowl, but were more properly called “Defense Okies” rather than Dustbowl Okies, migrating to Southern California airplane factories during WWII. Mom recalls fondly her early years as a Californian, in La Jolla and Long Beach.
But my parents both arrived in The Depression. Like most people from this generation and the ones before it, they understood difficulty in a personal way. A way with which many Americans today, including this author, have little familiarity. Gradually, Bob and Debbie worked their way up, first in Kansas, then in little hamlets in southwestern Ohio, eventually landing back in the heartland, in Kansas City. Their circumstances changed, the United States enjoyed a general efflorescence, but some peculiarities of their upbringing never left.
There is a strange old proverb, the latter part of it too often left unsaid or unknown:
“What’s bred in the bone will not come out of the flesh.”
Language scholars place the origin of that phrase in 13th century Europe. But it enjoys many variations, including this fine specimen from the prisoner Sir Thomas Mallory’s “Death of Arthur” { The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table } in 1485:
“Sir Launcelot smyled and seyde, Harde hit ys to take oute off the fleysshe that ys bredde in the bone.”
Middle English has much to recommend it.
Our lives are mosaics, with bits and pieces mortared together to form the unique whole. An artist gathers and places these pieces in a careful order and pattern. Not so with the human creator, either evolutionary or divine. Some of the bits are from long ago, buried deep in subconscious memory, others learned as we stumble through life and some passed to us at birth without permission. For better or worse, and most often a mixture of the two, some pieces survive in successive generations while others disappear in the dust. New elements get added in unpredictable ways and places.
It seems that some significant part of our character is inherited – bred in the bone – in the same way as our propensities for medical conditions or our physical traits. Although I suppose it is possible to cast aside some of these bits or mitigate them in some way, better to give them an appreciative examination.
I’ve written about some of my family before, especially the more colorful ones that intermingled with the Mandans on the Upper Missouri River. One of my cousins has taken our family archaeology to a fabulous level, unearthing records from long ago that trace the outlines of the family history. Fascinating – and yet, to me, incomplete. Quirky mosaic pieces are just as valuable and maybe even more interesting, since the sources of many of them are largely invisible. Pictures and scenes like the one below appeal to me in a visceral way, and have my entire life, for reasons I suspect are bred in the bone. My attraction to lonesome landscapes became a loving/teasing focal point for my mother, who would draw and paint pictures of grain elevators for me, even though she herself had no interest in them.
Who can say where these things come from and where they go? The girl from rural Oklahoma, the boy from Nebraska, the dozens of other unusual characters, they all left their mosaic pieces in my personal, idiosyncratic portrait.
Poor David's Almanack 