My dad, among others, affirmed the big family. And sometimes this meant speaking of the giant conspiracy. This includes the people you despise, you realize. If family’s big enough, you start to think of yourself as a part of the brotherhood of mankind. The founder of my alma mater, which was a small liberal arts Bible college in the Ozarks, once went up to a man and said, “Have a good day brother.”

His colleague, one of the doctors of theology, said, “How do you know he’s your brother?”

The founder said, “If I didn’t hit him in Jesus, I hit him in Adam.”

I get that. I live that way: the brotherhood of all.

Dad — for all his prophetic ire and bitterness over deals gone sour with family and friends, and there were too many who took advantage of him in life — really appealed to that broader family. When your family’s big enough, no bitterness lasts forever. 

In private, I often saw him fretting over how to mend bridges he’d burned or bridges others burned. He cared about reconciliation in a way that many heartless folks do not. It bothered him when someone would no longer talk to him or come to his house. He asked me over and over how to fix it. So yes, even the family member you despise, you’re forever connected to them. It’s your job to pull them along or, if you’re the one being the jerk, to ask forgiveness. Sometimes that can’t happen without confrontation first — it’s not forgiveness if real grievances never air. 

He would often tell me stories about distant cousins that, to this day, I have never met. Even at a young age he said, “Don’t worry, buddy, you still might be as tall as me. Maybe taller. The Oklahoma side of the family…” And then he’d go into a story about giants and a giant conspiracy. It’s my brother who loves the giant conspiracy. He’s the one that would tell you about all the giants buried in the mounds and found in America. The one near Bellhammer they found with a 36” wide thigh bone.

They remain giants in my mind: six-foot-ten, seven-foot-three tall people stand heads taller than me and have a sort of mythological quality to them. Society seems to agree with me because the only statistically meaningful favoritism we show in corporate executive boards is the super tall and against the exceedingly short. 

But Dad would tell me of these giants, of family back in the Isle of Man (this one came mainly through my maternal great grandmother) and of others. Early, early on I became aware that I contained multitudes in addition to my very self. Epigenetically, we know the sins of the father and blessings of the father both visit themselves upon the thousandth and ten thousandth generations. And sometimes they come in the flesh as they did when the gypsies came to town.

It’s another one of those mythological moments in my mind because my Papa Deno Bubba for as long as I knew him insisted on pulling out the family tree scrapbook. He’d showing stories about people, of Uncle Charlie who was a pentecostal preacher, of Uncle Kenny who was in the 101st and 82^nd airborne (how he survived both in a tank buster squad behind enemy lines, I cannot tell you), of the great uncle who murdered a man in cold blood with a shotgun and only got ten years for it. 

He also spoke of Blackfoot and Cherokee ancestors. Why Americans favor the exceptions to the family line, I cannot guess. In any other nation, they would see such deviations as blemishes. In the States, it seems a point of pride. I take them in stride: every person as precious as any other, neither tokens nor dirt to be swept beneath the rug. In my case, we have pictures and names and a rather stubborn relative on both sides who stuck it to the man and refused to register. I’m proud of their choices. But it thereby guaranteed no free college and healthcare for us kids. 

In any case, all of his general native talk aside, Deno Bubba would argue with Aunt Midge about one specific ancestor every time we got together. We called her crazy Aunt Midge, but the further I get from her, the more I realize that if she’s crazy, then I’m clinically insane. 

She was simply an artist in a place that had few. An artist through her life, colorful, and therefore eccentric to people with salt and pepper palates. She painted lighthouses, mostly, for the evocation they gave her of the light of God and the promise of home. I have one I hang in our hall. At our old apartment, it languished in what we called our “attic” in New York — four cubic feet of storage in a nook above our one tiny closet. Now it has a place of pride. 

In any case, Midge had painted most of her walls purple and had a giant victorian four poster with massive curtains and cushions big enough to bounce Mario. Handcarved wood, at least in my memory, which is the memory of a child. Lots and lots of purples and reds as if she may have been some Russian princess caught in Little Egypt exile. Every fabric — the tapestries on the walls, the maximalist decorative rugs — had a sort of gold fringe trim that dangled in little cinched brushes. Tassels? Cascade tassels on the jabot. 

That’s how you say it right and proper.

When asked why she bought these, she’d point to the same ancestor as Deno. Then she said we came from gypsies. 

Now she’s the only one who said this, but she said it often enough to make the rest of us doubt papers and photos and names and the rest. We came from gypsies and Midge’d be damned if anyone told her otherwise. Purple, gold, art, fringe, cymbals. You name it, she had it as much as Marylin had tribal drums and told me the seventh generation is the storyteller’s

Then the gypsie king died. He was a giant, which made it a bit of a giant conspiracy.

When the gypsie king died, they had his funeral in Salem, Illinois — the heart of Little Egypt. That’s what they call Southern Illinois partly because of how that part of the Mississippi mirrors the Nile, partly because of the role Illinois played in feeding the world during the locust plague (think Joseph in the house of Pharoah), and partly because Midge may well have been right. Though gypsies, being Romani, actually come from the Rajasthan region of northern India. Their original name was Sanskrit डोम — doma — which was the caste of traveling musicians and dancers. They moved west first with the Persian Ghaznavid empire, then the Byzantines. It was the Middle Ages that had mistaken them for wandering Egyptians, perhaps growing that belief out of Ezekiel 29: 6, 12–13:

Then all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know
    that I am the Lord
because you were a staff of reed
    to the house of Israel;

I will make the land of Egypt a desolation among desolated countries; and her cities shall be a desolation for forty years among cities that are laid waste. I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, and disperse them among the countries.

Further, thus says the Lord God: At the end of forty years I will gather the Egyptians from the peoples among whom they were scattered;

Whatever the case, Midge at least lived the way many Roma live. 

When the gypsie king died, the population of Salem doubled overnight from people coming in for this man’s funeral. They lined the streets for miles and miles and brought crafts and arts and fire and food and a whole other culture that did not fit into the neat categories of — ahem — Northwest Appalachian Eastern West Gateway Southern Great Lakes Northern South that is the weird intersection of Southern Illinois, Little Egypt. Perhaps that’s another reason they call it Little Egypt: it’s the nation’s bottleneck. 

In any case, the gypsies showed up and I get this feeling that Crazy Aunt Midge said, “See?”

This man was so large they had to put together two coffins to fit him inside. Thousands and thousands of people showed up for this man’s funeral. They still talk about it, the folks who witnessed it. It remains one of the three most significant things that happened in the region. 

Nothing more to clear proof of her giant conspiracy, her wild raving in the wilderness.

Deno’s primal doubt about the blending of fantasy and the life he lived has driven me for years and years. It’s the same of my father who told us honest tales of a giant conspiracy in the Oklahoma Meigs side. Folks, to this day, I’ve never met. 

It’s not escapism in the pejorative sense, though it might have something to do with the positive concepts of escape, The Shawshank Redemption side of escape. Rather it’s what Aristotle said: that a probable impossible is better than an improbable possible, it’s better to dream of what worlds might be rather than to simply write about the outer edges of the bell curve in our world, precisely because the only true progress is moral progress and moral law does not change, both in terms of data and in terms of logic and in terms of the underlying gut-check realities that undergird all that is.

It’s better to think of how we might escape this prison.

For my father to make me doubt whether or not a thing really happened was an incredible gif. It ensured the iterative play, the repetitious joy of monotony, the variations on a theme that enflower both symphonies and childhood. These remain a part of my consciousness forever. It may well be the greatest gift he ever gave me. I’m sure I’ll return to it again, giant conspiracy or miracles.

What good did your dad do?

Tell me in the comments.