Cabbages & Kings

Apologies to O'Henry and Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus

I like cabbage.

I don’t love cabbage, but I like it. I like cabbage coleslaw. I don’t like the sour vinegar type of slaw. I like the sweet creamy variety, and don’t get me started about the deviants who add tarragon or some other horror into their bastardized versions of slaw. Oh, and by the way, “broccoli slaw” is not slaw. Don’t try to sell me that. But I digress… I like ham hock soup with cabbage. I like corned beef and cabbage. But let me be clear, even as an ethnic German, I am a bit ashamed to admit, I hate sauerkraut.

Sauerkraut is made by, basically, letting cabbage rot. I know, they say it’s fermenting. Fermenting as in sitting around while bacteria starts to feed on the cabbage and break it down into ghastly sour clumps of… well I say it’s just plain rot. The Koreans do the same thing, they take cabbage and put it in a clay pot with peppers and garlic and then bury the pots in the backyard for a year. After they dig it up they call it Kimchi. I like Kimchi. It’s spicy. But German Kraut? No, it’s just unpleasant rot.

In fact, I dislike kraut so much it made me question my heritage. I started to wonder if my parents had lied to me. Was I a foundling? A boy with strange unearthly powers they found in a smoking capsule in the alfalfa field?

So, like any other American who has deep psychological doubts about the way his parents raised him and the various bits of domestic, Dr. Spock inspired trauma I was subjected to by my doting parents, I spit into a vial.

Yes, in search of answers, I spit into a vial. Then I put my spit into a plastic pouch and mailed it to Utah, I think. It might have been Idaho, or even Nevada, but whatever, I put the spit into the plastic, and the plastic into the little cardboard box, and I mailed it in. Ancestry dot com was where my truth would be found.

Apparently, my encapsulated saliva made it where it was supposed to. I knew that because there was no slightly damp box returned to my mailbox over the next few months. Nothing came back. It was a long wait. Not like when I was a kid and I clipped the coupon on the back of the Sugar Pops cereal box and mailed it in, and then 2 short weeks later I got a little four-inch long submarine that I loaded with baking soda and watched it sink and surface in my Saturday night bathwater. Eventually the submarine, that I had christened the U.S.S. Nixon, disappeared into the murky depths of the guest bathroom, when my brother T.J. pulled the flush lever. So many sub-mariners were lost on that dark day.

But now, no news about my bit of drool. Was it lost in Utah? No one knew. And I still hated Sauerkraut. Sometimes at night I couldn’t sleep, wondering if I was Italian. I know, I don’t look Italian. But I love pasta. Maybe I was Russian, a Slav. I did like beets. Or maybe I was Circassian. I didn’t know much about them, but I know Dr. Oz is Circassian, so why not?

Finally, a letter in the box. The DNA experts at Ancestry dot com were going to reveal all. It was kind of like being on Maury Povich, without the semi-rabid slack-jawed audience. “And your ancestors are….!!!!”

I tore at the envelope. There, inside, a short note and a map. And on the map a big circle. The black marker dead center on Germany. No Circassia, no exotic genes from the diaspora. No Inuit blood or Icelandic Viking ancestors. Just one circle. One. No mark over Korea despite my love of Kim Chee. Just one big circle around Germany. I was German with a touch of German and way back… even more German… all the way back to the Germans who had slaughtered the Roman commander, Publius Quinctilius Varus and his XVII, XVIII and XIX Legions to the last man in the Teutoburg Forest , stealing Augustus’ Eagles and driving the Emperor to near madness in his grief.

I was, it seemed, German – and only German - a disappointing result when there were so many other genetic choices on the board. I was forced to accept that I would never be a guest on “Finding Your Roots, and my favorite TV personality, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., would never have me turn a final page to reveal that Eddie Murphy is my distant cousin.

Ancestry dot com is obviously a scam. I will never spit into a vial again as long as I live.

Me German? Impossible.

I hate Sauerkraut.