I was mortified at the thought of meeting my girlfriend’s family for the first time, and a large part of that had to do with my ridiculous fear of Italian-Americans from New York. An absurd fan of Scorsese’s film "Goodfellas" (in my mind the director’s chief masterpiece, overtaking even Taxi Driver in its violent goodness), my Irish mutt brain had cobbled up images of turbulent Catholics who venerate the Pope with one breath and make underhanded deals in a back booth of the family restaurant with the next. Not to mention the fact that my girlfriend had by accident poured endless fears into my brain regarding how these New Yorkers, transplanted into Connecticut, would take a guy who was born and raised in the backwoods of Virginia (and OK, a lot of that time I spent in Chesterfield, but I still have hard and deep connections rooted in Mecklenburg, Virginia).

I am not proud of this gross and wildly inaccurate assessment of my lady’s family, made long before I had a chance to meet them and they had a chance to meet me. People are good or bad or indifferent based off of factors completely outside their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Heck, these cats weren’t even Catholics, but were instead charismatic protestants, and that’s an even scarier religious proposition to this Southern Baptist boy!

Of course, when I met my girl’s mother, father and older sister for the first time, when we caught up with them at their motel, my visions of swimming with the fishes, bound and gagged and told every which way from Tuesday that I was no good for the King’s daughter quickly fizzled out into a thick, misty vapor of nothingness. The dad slapped me on the back and asked me how the fishing was nearby; the mother questioned me all about the curious idiosyncrasies of my heritage (with a child’s enthusiasm at learning something new!); and the elder sister kept on cackling at my nervous shaking about. “You’re so bashful James, and it’s adorable!” This only made me shake all the more.

Being called an Irish mutt by my close friends is one thing, but I am anything but adorable and you'd better be sure to tell everyone you know this fact.

My maternal grandfather, James Harris, is a man I never met. I get my first name from him, and based on this fact I am supposed to feel a kindred connection to him. I suppose in some way I do, but it’s hard to feel but so close to someone you never met. The man was a good Irish Catholic until around the time he married my grandmother, Melvina, at which time he became a Baptist just like the rest of us. He was a truck driver, always on the road and surely drunk off the moonlight.

James Harris died at the age of 45 of heart failure. Another Irish mongrel prince cut off at the seam in his own home. I never got to meet the man, and not a day goes by where I eat a mutton stew and don’t think of this grave loss of my heritage.

What makes a person one thing or another? What factors goes into the racial history of a human being, connects him to the ones who gone on before? What factors will ensure that he will be survived by his heirs in good faith for the future? Is it so wrong to want to be identified by something larger than yourself, by the folk songs and the legends and the moon and the sun that ties into the ancient home place of those who birthed you? My maternal grandfather, and Irish man, died before I could meet him; my paternal grandfather, a man of no ethnic background of consequence by the name of Robert Lawson Moore, died when I was around 11. I get my middle name from him, and much of my stubborn temper as well. But as close as I was to him while he was alive, and as strongly as he felt toward me as his only grandchild, still for the life of me I cannot much remember him at the age of 25. Where’s the sense of ancestral and cultural history in that?

There are writers, people I feel a connection to more than any other group simply because we occupy the same dusty pages, who make beautiful art by going into detail regarding their ethnic, religious, and cultural identity. James Baldwin the Native Son. Flannery O’Conner the Patron Saint of the Grotesque. Sherman Alexie the Nobleman of the Spokane Indians. There are many more I could name, but to do so would be superfluous. The point has been made, and it is this: there are those in my profession who have a much easier time mapping out their overarching narrative, at putting to words the entirety of their history, their people, their souls and their hearts and their desires and everything else that helps to define them. I have a fair bit of talent within me, but I am nowhere near on their level. Perhaps for this reason I cannot hope to appropriately articulate my identity, my background, or anything of worth on the subject.

My girlfriend’s mother asked me all about my Irish, German, British and American-Indian ancestry. I feel a negligent connection to each group, and that’s on a good day. I feel more Irish than anything, though I read too much Vonnegut to ignore the Germans, and I am slowly becoming obsessed with Alexie to the point where I hope to meet the Spokane noble someday and shake his hand. The British would be OK, except that as an American I am all too often reminded of a particular tea party in Boston, and I cannot kill a colonial grudge for the life of me. So when my girlfriend’s mother asked me about my family connections, I simply tell her, “I am connected to the earth, ma’am. I go this way and that, and I don’t put down roots anywhere for too long. Makes life a little more interesting. But that’s my opinion, I could be wrong.”

Part of me keeps kicking myself for that whole rambling monologue. Sounds too much like clichéd dialogue spoken by a pseudo-Indian in a D-List spaghetti western. My father, grandfather and most of the American-Indians I know (and I used to go to church with members of the Mattaponi and Rappahannock Indian tribes) who would be well within their right to kick me to the curb for cribbing in such adulterous fashion. Oh well, it cannot be helped now. May I be forgiven for my massive, if accidental, error in speech.

So what’s it all mean in the grand scheme of things folks? I have written before about being a man without a country in many regards, and I long to be able to cohesively codify the entirety of my existence. At the very least I want to be able to succinctly define myself to my girlfriend’s parents. I am Irish and Native and English and German. I am a man and I am Christian (though neither Charismatic nor Catholic, and I don’t know why but that’s important for some reason). I’ve been known to scribble now and then, and I rave up and down the street in excitement whenever a Scorsese film plays on the TV. And though I have a rich and diverse background sticking up close behind me, I can no more tell you the full extent of that rich and full history than I can tell you the starting lineup of the New York Mets (which lost me a few brownie points with my girlfriend’s father, but I still managed to win him over anyway).

I am so many things, and yet I am none of them at the same time. We are all so much more than the sum total of our parts. Italian Americans are more than Joe Pesci lookalikes, just as the Irish and the American Indians are more than dime store cut-outs of corn-and-potato-fed alcoholics. I bring up the stereotypes to make a point, and the point is this: a man must be allowed to stand on his own two feet, without those who walked before coming back to tell him where to go. The Italians and the Irish and the Africans and the Indians (both native and traditional) and the Asians and the New Zealanders are all the same man attempting to carve out his own block of stone to write the rules down on the tablets. And that man just hopes to God that they don’t break before he climbs down off the mountain, for he has to tell the kids about this when he’s done.

I managed to get through meeting my girlfriend’s family relatively scratch-free, but that’s not what makes me happy. That I learned a thing or two about where my girlfriend came from, and to take a good hard look at where I’ll be going along with her, that’s what cheered me up for the coming weeks. And as for my brief and sinful bout of stereotyping, well…I just hope that the preacher down at the local Baptist church will hear my prayer. Do Baptist preachers and Catholic priests handle their congregants the same way? If my maternal grandfather was here, he’d be able to answer—oh well, I’ll just go to another member of my family and cement a little more background information on my own past.

In the meantime, everybody please love each other. No matter where you are from.