Hey Jakey,

Former president Bill Clinton was on Late Night with David Letterman the other night (oooh...now there's a sandwich!). When he walked out on stage, and there was wild applause, I realized how much I really missed the guy. He wasn't really such a bad president, eh? He was certainly more *interesting* as a person than all of the other presidents of my lifetime put together. And really, who cares if he got a little nookie on the side? He was the ultimate rock star of the political set, and that's what rock stars do. Yay for him. I wish he was running for office again. Even daddy said he would vote for him if he ran against Bush, and daddy's a Republican.

Anyway, it was a rerun from a couple of months ago, so he was there promoting his new autobiography (which I haven't bought yet, but soon. I bought Hilary's the day it came out...). He wrote the whole thing long-hand into 26 big notebooks, and someone else typed it up for him. He said the one thing that he's realized over the course of writing the book was that everyone, no matter who they are, or how old they are, should write out their life story for posterity. For your kids. So that they know who you are and where they came from.

I think it's a grand concept. I wish my parents had done something like that. I mean, I know who they are. They're the people who raised me, but that's the only context in which I "know" them. They hardly ever talk about their childhoods or adolescence. I don't even know how they met. Or what in the world possessed them to get married three days after Christmas. In a very vague way, I understand that both of them had really tough childhoods. My mom's mom died when my mom was nine, and her dad had Alzheimers. My dad was the youngest child, and had nine sisters. There was some really, really traumatic thing that happened between his mom and dad when he was away his first years in the Navy. My dad doesn't even know that I know that it happened. My mom says that he's blocked it out of his memory, but all the sisters still talk about it when they get together.

So they both have these really horrible pasts that they don't talk about. I know that there are certain boundaries between parents and their children, but I think there's a continental divide between my parents and me. Add to that the fact that I'm adopted. And that as a child, we moved from country to country every year or so, and I never got to grow up around any of my relatives. I wound up with no sense of roots or family history whatsoever. In fact, my sense of family is really skewed. My mom and my dad are my family, and all of their relatives are just people I saw every few years when we resided state-side. It drives your daddy crazy that I see his devotion and reverence to his entire extended family as a *weakness*, something undesirable and foreign.

I don't want you to grow up that way. I want you to know who you are, who your parents are, where we came from, where you came from, and I hope that knowledge will give you a better sense of where you're going in this life. You need roots, baby, and a sense of home and family. You have several sets of grandparents who love you very much, and that's a whole helluva lot more than I ever had, so you're off to a great start.

I love you!