Uncle Jasper

This year for Christmas I asked for a DNA testing kit. I wasn’t actually expecting to receive one (it was one of the higher-priced items on my wish list), but it was one of the gifts I wanted the most. My family’s ancestral makeup has never been well-defined; I know that I’m Irish and English, but there’s never been any sort of roots with which I’ve been able to trace my family back. In fact, the amount of research and digging I’ve done has produced only a few results: I can now confidently follow my lineage as far back as one hundred years ago, when my great-great-grandparents immigrated to Detroit from County Clare, Ireland. My family has since made the risky and grand pilgrimage from Detroit, Michigan to Madison, Wisconsin. I am, for all intents and purposes, unmistakably, woefully, boringly, white. 

I know, every white person secretly has a desire to be something other than whole milk. There’s this desire to combat white guilt with even the tiniest percentage of something we regard as other. We spit in a cup and pray for the results to come back positive for exotic. And I’m no different—my ancestral history has some less-than-stellar moments, and existing with not much else than “Midwestern” to describe myself is, dare I say it, basic at best.

Sure, it may be selfish to hope that I’m something other than a mayo and white bread sandwich, but sometimes I really feel like there has to be more than my makeup than members of two not entirely different races who barely explored much beyond their homelands marrying and coming to America to live among others who look just like themselves.So I bit the bullet and bought one of those nifty tests for myself—it was Black Friday, there was a deal and I decided on a little splurge for myself. 

I remember brimming over with excitement as I confidentially hocked a loogie into the small canister and proudly placed it in the mailbox at the end of my street. As it worked its way through the intricate postal service process, I studied the calendar, eagerly counting down the days until I’d find out more about what makes me, me. I was like a kid waiting for Christmas, which, I kind of was, as my results were likely to be delivered just in time for the holiday. Oh how I anticipated standing at the head of the family table, proudly announcing that I, and therefore others in my family, were actually 35% East Asian, or 46% Colombian, or, if I were really lucky, 69% Ashkenazi Jew. What better Christmas gift is there to give than a lecture to your racist, P.O.S. relatives that they’re not the Aryans they led their lives believing they were? 

Almost as if magic, the results appeared right on time: delivered in my neighbor’s mailbox on Christmas Eve. As I polished off another pre-family gathering glass of red wine, my now-yearly coping ritual was interrupted by my crotchety old neighbor’s incessant doorbell ringing. 

“This is your’s. Damn mailman can’t get anything right. I don’t care if it’s Christmas he should be fired.” She said, jamming the package into my hands before wobbling off back to her apartment. 

“Thanks, Muriel!” I called after her, hoping that she wouldn’t take it as a sign to continue her usual conversation of laments and grievances any further. She didn’t, not even looking back behind her as she left: an early Christmas miracle.  

And there it was, finally in my hands: the holy grail. The key to my existence. A new hope. I gleefully and clumsily tore open the package, knowing that this gift to myself was sure to be the greatest one of all. I haphazardly perused all the pages of the document, hastily skipping over the medical results (knowing just how prevalent heart conditions are in my family didn’t seem like the type of holiday news I wanted to read, especially before gouging myself on smoked meats, doughy cookies and milk-based alcoholic beverages), before landing on the meat and potatoes main course I was starving myself for the past month: my heritage. 

My mouth was agape as I looked over the results:

50% Ireland and Scotland

40% Great Britain

10% England, Wales and Northwestern Europe

Surely there had to be some kind of mistake. Maybe the data analysts weren’t working hard enough, probably under-staffed because of the holidays. Maybe I didn’t include enough saliva, and the spit particles that included the rest—the interesting parts—of my DNA were still floating around my tongue. 

I knew though, deep within my heart, that what I was reading was, of course, correct. I’m just a white person bred by white people who marry into other white people. I dreaded any of the family members who actually ever listened to me questioning me on my results at the dinner table. I placed all the papers back into the envelope and shoved them away in a bureau drawer, and resolved that I would go to work finding a better, more thorough DNA test on sale the day after Christmas. 

I never did, though, and the holidays passed in a blur as they always do, a haze of lights, booze and regrets before life was back to business as usual. I didn’t think much more about my ancestral history, — I tried to not think about it at all, as the mirror did a good enough job reminding me of it every single day. Until one day, a year later, when wasting time at my day-job simultaneously scrolling through my usual social media feeds and constantly refreshing my email browser, a peculiar-looking email with an eye-catching subject line appeared:  

We might be related.

I thought for sure it was spam, but it didn’t trigger any red flags in my email’s usual top-notch spam detection settings. I clicked on it, out of pure morbid curiosity, and quickly skimmed through the paragraph-long digital letter:

Hi. My name is Jasper Solomon. Did you recently take a DNA test? I did too, and I opted for the settings to find relatives nearby. I live in Milwaukee and, according to my results and yours, I think we might be related. Would it be completely inappropriate to ask to communicate with you further? We can do it over email if that works for you. If you’d rather not, I completely understand. 

Yours,

Jasper Solomon, M.D.

I stared blankly at the screen. Was this a trick? There were no links or pleas for money, but that name—it didn’t seem distinctly Irish OR English, and he was a doctor, so not the biggest candidate to run a scam. Without really thinking it over, I eagerly responded with my phone number—maybe my DNA results would be more fruitful than I originally thought. 

After a few back and forth calls and text messages, Jasper and I agreed to meet up at a coffee shop in Johnson Creek, a location equally annoying for both of us to get to. I surveyed the area looking for a man that could be a doctor but no one caught my eye. Finally, I landed on a tall, lanky man of about 45 with a black, wiry mustache, a sparse amount of hair creating a perfect semi-circle around the back of his head and olive-toned skin. He wore plaid pants and carried a briefcase. I briefly prayed to God that this Dick Dastardly-clone wasn’t Jasper.

God was not with me on this day. Jasper bolted up out of his seat and beckoned for me to come over. 

“I’m sorry, but I did a bit of researching on Facebook and recognized you right away.” Jasper said nervously as I sat down across from him. I didn’t want to ask how he identified me from my profile, as I had a private account with only a photo of my cat available to outsiders. We got to talking and Jasper quickly told me of his life growing up an army brat, living everywhere from Israel to Tokyo to New York City. He impressed me with tales of working with Doctors Without Borders and setting up charity foundations in Nigeria. He was married, thrice, but could never find a woman with quite the zest for life and need for travel as him, and as such had no children.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been talking your ear off. Please, tell me more about yourself.”

My time in fantasy land was cut short as I was quickly flung back to reality, my reality.

“Well, uh, I work in a call center…”

Good God, when did my life become so boring? Was it always this miserable? It was then that I realized that I had spent so much time seeking out something interesting in my history that I never stopped to consider the fact that I was doing nothing important with my present. I hoped beyond hope that I could finally deny my boring, middle-America, middle-class white existence and, from that, find a new meaning to my life. But what was I really doing to change the world? What was I doing to change myself? Nothing but relying on history to dictate my future—a futile gesture for sure. But now, with this worldly and intellectual man sitting in front of me, I realized it was time to make a change. And maybe, just maybe, he could be my key out of these doldrums. 

“Listen, I don’t have much to really speak about myself. You came all this way, why? What brought you to Milwaukee? What brought you to me?”

Jasper took a sip of tea and cleared his throat before nervously rotating his thumbs one over the other for what felt like thirty seconds before responding:

“I lied when I said my most recent ex-wife left me. She passed, actually. I was so depressed I quit my job at the children’s hospital and just started driving until I ran out of gas. I ended up in Milwaukee with barely any money to my name. I’ve never felt so alone. I lived my life all over the place without ever knowing anyone aside from my parents, who are both gone now too. When I finally settled in here, I figured it was time to meet someone, anyone, who might be able to find my way. That’s when I decided to take a DNA test and that’s how I found you.” 

“Jasper, I’m so sorry. What a tragic story, I’m sorry, how exactly did you say we might be related?” I tilted my head and tried to be patient, but the curiosity was killing me. 

“Well, it turns out my parents—weren’t really my parents, not biologically, anyway. I was given up for adoption by Trudie O’Brien.” Jasper locked eyes with mine as he said her name. 

“Trudie—that’s my grandmother.” I responded. 

“Yes.”

“So you’re my—”

“Uncle. Uncle Jasper.”

We both stood and I threw my arms around him. This man was so of the world, a person of every race and no race at all. Finally, someone in my family had a story. A story that could be my story, too, if I really wanted it to be. I invited Uncle Jasper to my place for the holidays, after all we were only two weeks away from Christmas and this man had no one around to celebrate the holidays with.

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“But you must, Jasp—Uncle Jasper. Please, celebrate Christmas with me and my family. Trudie is still alive and I’m sure she’d love to see you.” 

Trudie didn’t love seeing Jasper, as it turned out. No one did. Mainly because no one, except for me, ever did see Jasper after that day. 

Jasper moved in with me for the two weeks following our meeting. At first he was just staying the night after our first coffee date ran long.I offered to give him a tour of Madison, and a few beers at a local watering hole left him unable to drive so I let him crash at my place. That one night turned into a week, as his car that was left back at the coffee shop was impounded and he was unable to pay the fee to retrieve it. I couldn’t possibly kick him out so I let him stay a few nights more, taking delight in our nightcaps and story sessions. Any time I’d try to bring family home to meet him he’d say he wasn’t ready, he wasn’t in the right headspace, or he couldn’t possibly even think about meeting his birth mother and biological siblings without any sort of proper preparation. I understood, but sitting on this secret was starting to eat away at me from the inside.

And so it continued for another week. 

It was then, the night of Christmas Eve, when Jasper dropped a bombshell on me: he had been lying to me; that’s why he wasn’t ready to face our family just yet. He was not my uncle at all. 

He was my father. 

I had always suspected that my own deadbeat dad wasn’t my real dad. He got my mom pregnant in high school and stuck around, getting arrested for minor offenses over the years before my mom finally grew a pair and stopped taking him back. “Tommy That Rat Bastard,” as my mom so eloquently referred to him, was barely a figure in my life, offering not much more to me than fine, ginger hair and freckles that multiplied like flies in the summertime. I spent much of my life wishing that my mother would one day marry rich and leave Tommy in the dust, or that it would turn out I was adopted all along, but it never came to be. Tommy did get left in the dust, eventually, but it was from cardiac arrest, and not my mother’s better senses.  

I wanted to cry and puke at the same time when Jasper revealed this. Of course he was my father, how could I not have known? Sure, we didn’t look anything alike but there was that connection between us unlike any other I’ve ever had with another human being. Jasper was so smart, so worldly, so different from every other person in my family. I had to get it from somewhere. And my mom was no angel in high school, so it wasn’t beyond reach for her to have suitors other than Tommy. It all clicked: this was where my story was about to begin. 

Unfortunately, that’s where it ended. Jasper admitted that he was in over his head and not ready to reveal himself to my mother. I tried and tried but on Christmas Eve, right as my family arrived in my small apartment to celebrate, Jasper was nowhere to be found but a note was left behind, right in the drawer placed above the envelope with the DNA results: 

I’m sorry, I tried but it wasn’t the right time. Tell your mother I’ve always loved her, and maybe someday we’ll all be together again.

My mother found me sobbing in the kitchen as she was rummaging around looking for the corkscrew. I finally let it all out: the DNA test, the disappointment, the email, the houseguest, my father, my REAL father. 

“I’ve never met a man named Jasper Solomon in my life and that idiot Tommy Moore was the only person I slept with in high school and, therefore, your father. You nitwit.”  

My mother walked away shaking her head, resuming our inevitable fight-starting, food-gouging, over-indulging festivities as usual. She was wrong, I know deep in my heart that she was wrong, she was lying or she was mistaken. Maybe Jasper Solomon wasn’t his real name, maybe it was a decoy he was using to protect his identity. But I know that man is my father and I know I’ll find the answers to all my burning questions someday: what was Jasper’s ethnicity? Why did he run away? Why did he meet me now and why did he leave so suddenly? Why did he steal upwards of $500 from me while he was here? 

Sure, it might be that same wishful thinking that led me here in the first place. But I know one thing is for certain: I finally have a story.