Pirate Heritage

My Pirate Heritage

Beware, not for the faint of heart!

My haplogroup J-M267, carried in the Y-DNA male line of descendants of Matthew Lowe, has always been very intriguing to me. This is the Arab / Jewish line that spread around the world after Spain expelled the Jews in 1492. That's the same year Columbus discovered America. I'm probably a descendant of one of his crew members, although this is unproven. We know there is something different about us, but trying to pin down exactly what it is, is not easy. Sometimes you see it in the eyes of people who share this mutation. My father had the family eyes. (I used to call it Bette Davis eyes!) A haplogroup shares a mutation, but we don't know exactly what that mutation is or how it affects us. We can do math in our head very quickly, which seems abnormal to some people. Most of my life, I have gravitated to people with some Jewish descent. (I'm Scottish Episcopalian, but the brand of Christianity I was raised with seems far different than the Baptist mentality of the South.) On both sides of my family, we have no natural respect for authority. The "riff raff" seem to look for some common ground in fearing some authority in common, whether that be a wrathful Old Testament God or common beliefs about politics, society and established hierarchy. That viewpoint is totally foreign to my way of thinking. I'm a free, independent thinker. Everybody looks to me like they are playing an angle or have an ax to grind. Some people look like outright crooks. My own mother reinforces this way of thinking, if I should ever forget it. I'm a pirate in my very soul. Maybe if I had better models growing up, I would have become more socialized, but I did not. If asked the following questions, here are my answers: (1) Are you honest? Not particularly, but I Iike to keep my nose clean, so to speak. (2) Are you a hacker? Yes, of course I am, but I do it for my employer at their behest. (3) Are you white? Well, I guess I look white, but I feel mixed race. (4) Are you Jewish? No, because Jewish identity is determined from the female line. My connection to Spanish Jews worldwide is through the male line. (5) Are you straight? Heck, no. But on the other hand, I don't sleep around. I stand by my man. So inevitably if people want to judge me based on their own narrow cultural norms, I will not meet their standards. If they are looking for my good side, by their standards, they may not find anything there. LOL. I tell them that ahead of time, to save them the trouble of looking for it. LOL. Yet I appreciate the good in people all the more, probably because it is lacking in me. Despite all these shortcomings, I actually have lots of friends and relatives from all walks of life that I get along with very well. It's just the other 90% that do not like me particularly. But that seems to me as it should be. I would "feel funny" if they did like me.

Yo, ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!