More Like Them Than We Know

Like so many other realizations in life, one becomes aware of the degree that he or she resembles their older relatives not slowly, but all at once. One day, it seems, we continue in the quaint belief of our own uniqueness. More than anything else, we tell ourselves, we are different: different from our parents, from our brothers and sisters, and certainly different from that amorphous mass of “relatives” that we see a few times a year.

At a certain point, however, perhaps after a long story, a short anecdote, or a crude joke, we become aware of just how much we resemble our brethren. After many years of asserting our own identity, it is more than a little humbling to discover that we, at times, seem nothing more than a hodge-podge collection of the habits and idiosyncrasies of our aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

I, for instance, always thought my brother and myself were the first of our relatives to row. After all, none of my uncles ever rowed and I certainly thought that the somewhat-patrician sport had been beyond the reach of any of my grandparents. I thus took a certain amount of pride in trailblazing, in being unique, in treading new ground for myself and my family. Well, it turns out, I was wrong. Not only did my maternal grandfather row for several decades out of Philadelphia’s famous Boathouse Row, he even coached there for many years.

As I’ve grown up, and been lucky enough to talk more extensively with my parents and other relatives, even more of the things that I thought set me apart turn out to be old hat. My predilection for strenuous exercise and physical activity? Two of my uncles are exercise nuts who have gone so far as to renounce caffeine. My respect and admiration for the Catholic Church and, a little more oddly, a deep-seated hatred of Henry VIII? My uncle Jim, still sharp at 83, recently rattled off a litany of observations no different than my own would be. Even my brother, who in the stages of youthful rebellion intentionally saw himself as completely different from my father, has started to pick up many of his quirks and his sometimes frustrating modus operandi.

The deeper I’ve tread, the more I’ve discovered that virtually everything in me that I use to set myself apart from my classmates and peers is reflected, in one way or another, in the older generations of Suttons and Adomanises.

The holiday season is, inevitably, a time of family get-togethers and gossip. Because of this, family is a subject of discussion more than at any other time of the year; names long-unmentioned suddenly crop up as frequently as the local sports team or the weather. Perhaps some of my “discoveries” are merely the product of an over-active mind, finally given a respite during vacation, and the introspection that typically accompanies the end of one year and the start of the next. Especially at a place like Harvard, however, where many of us have had our uniqueness drilled into us from an early age, I think that a recognition of how deeply we resemble our relatives would do us all a bit of good, and inject a little more humility into a place where it is usually so lacking.



Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.