You probably couldn't tell just by looking at me, but I'm the last in a long line of semi-harmless rogues and semi-charmless outlaws.
My great-great grandfather spent some time in jail for selling phony deeds to government land to Irish immigrants fresh off the boat. An "involuntary guest of the federal government" as the colloquialism went in my family. Rumor has it that was the least of his crimes. He had a legendary reputation as a unrepentant swindler and a world-class avoider of all physical labor.
My great-grandfather was the product of an ephemeral relationship with the "touched" daughter of an Baltimore Lutheran minister. Given the unsuitability of his parents, he was sent off to live with a distant childless aunt in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He soon overcame the distinct disadvantages of the absence of any bad influences by becoming something of a scalawag in his own right. He made a decent living collecting the rewards from "lost" horses and livestock as well as working short stints as a dentist/doctor/undertaker (slightly unlicensed, of course).
He was shot dead as he was climbing out of someone else's bedroom window.
But not before he could leave his seed in the belly of a widowed Denver schoolteacher.
She raised my grandfather on her own. She'd had seven children who were mostly grown by the time he was born. They grew up to be fine upstanding citizens - lawyers, bankers and college professors. But my grandfather missed out on that gene and was cursed with the wayward blood of his father. Though he became very educated, it seemed to just make him a more effective crook. "Embezzlement" is probably too strong of a word, but he definitely leaned toward crime of a more white-collar variety. He was arrested (and acquitted) four times for "accounting errors" at a steel mill, coal & gold mines and a Methodist church where he served as a deacon. As the legend goes, the witnesses just liked him too much to testify against him.
It would have been a pretty safe bet that my father would have broke the chain of lawlessness, but it wasn't meant to be. He grew up straight as an arrow in Eisenhower's America, but soon regressed back into the shadowy crevasse between illegal and unethical. "It's just pot" soon became "I just need something to take the edge off" which in turn descended into search warrants and Ethics Review Boards.
Me? I've managed to stay out of jail and outside the crosshairs of wronged husbands. But not by much. And I couldn't tell you how long the streak will last. I don't presume to know when the pirate blood pumping through my veins will come to a boil.
Gentleman or charlatan.
Faithful or adulterous.
Honest or corrupt.
Pious or immoral.
It's still too soon to know for sure.
