As I took my first load of laundry from the dryer, I began contemplatin’ orphaned socks. Bein’ the frugal person that I am, I have long had a basket-orphanage for the forlorn foundlings rescued from my dryer, providing them a safe refuge until such time that I might be instrumental in reuniting them with their lost twin. I had always surmised that the lost siblings were naughty pranksters, merely hiding from me in order to exasperate me. Never had I realized that the evil Count Maytag might be lurking in my laundry room.
My basket-orphanage has grown quite large, with orphans not only from the country of Ban-Lon and Nylon, but also from Cottonia and the newer nation of Microfiber. These stranded waifs are a melancholy group, since one is the loneliest number.As I sorted the clothes taken from my first load, I found additional strays which I gently carried to the orphanage. I am glad to report that sets of twins have now been united.
This made me think of stories that I have read about twins who were reunited after long periods of time. Often when they reunite, they are found to have similar traits which they recognize in each other when they meet. [This even seems to be true for animals.] For instance,
The first pair Bouchard met, James Arthur Springer and James Edward Lewis, had just been reunited at age 39 after being given up by their mother and separately adopted as 1-month-olds. Springer and Lewis, both Ohioans, found they had each married and divorced a woman named Linda and remarried a Betty. They shared interests in mechanical drawing and carpentry; their favorite school subject had been math, their least favorite, spelling. They smoked and drank the same amount and got headaches at the same time of day.Similarly,Equally astounding was another set of twins, Oskar Stohr and Jack Yufe. At first, they appeared to be a textbook case of the primacy of culture in forming individuals -- just the opposite of the Lewis-Springer pair. Separated from his twin six months after their birth in Trinidad, Oskar was brought up Catholic in Germany and joined the Hitler Youth. Jack stayed behind in the Caribbean, was raised a Jew and lived for a time in Israel. Yet despite the stark contrast of their lives, when the twins were reunited in their fifth decade they had similar speech and thought patterns, similar gaits, a taste for spicy foods and common peculiarities such as flushing the toilet before they used it.
. . a woman named Gilia Angell recalls wandering into the St. Patrick's Cathedral gift shop in New York and buying a postcard of an airbrushed Jesus, which she mailed to her twin sister in Olympia, Wash. A few days later, she says, a letter postmarked the same day arrived from Olympia. Enclosed was a refrigerator magnet "with the same filmy airbrushed picture of Jesus!" Then there are those twin pranks, adding to our general sense of wonderment over their doubleness -- duped boyfriends and confused motor vehicles officials, cheating on SAT tests . . .Of course, that leads me to wonderin' jes' how much of my personality comes from my ancestors.
Geneticist humor: A little joke is posted on the bulletin board of the clinical genetics department at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. It's a diagram of the X chromosome, with the names and descriptions of imaginary genes scribbled at intervals along it: "visa" -- the gene for shopping addiction; "klutz" -- the inability-to-manipulate-mechanical-objects gene; "blab" -- the gene for prolonged telephone conversation; "eek" -- the fear-of-bugs gene. There's even a gene for emotional instability -- "shrill" -- and one for learned helplessness: "honey . . ."It would be nice to believe, that all of my faults are not my fault, but I suspect that's not quite the truth. Posted by Susan R at January 8, 2005 01:11 PM