A Goodly Heritage

"This structure has two helical chains each coiled around the same axis... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairings we have postulated immediately suggest a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."

—J. D. Watson and Francis Crick, on their discovery of the structure of DNA.

I.

In 1972, my father-in-law, Ron, built a table of cherry wood, gave it a hand-rubbed finish, and presented it to his wife, Susan. Thirty-five years later, its surface is scratched with a hundred fine marks. The varnish has worn off around its edges and the exposed wood glows where his children slouched as they did their homework or leaned to reach the salt or pass the bread. Its finish is dulled in circles where Christmas cookies were set to cool every year for thirty years. The table is beautiful, in spite of—or because of—the worn edges, the dull cookie spots, the scratches. But tonight Susan notices a new, deep scratch, and my husband, Ben, and I watch her fill it in carefully with brown polish. Once she's done, she waxes the table top and buffs it to a shine, then steps back to look. It's two in the morning on New Year's Day. We've all been thinking the same thing since midnight: this is the first year Susan will spend without her husband, the first year her children will spend without their father.

Everywhere in this house, there are reminders of Ron. Scrolls of Japanese calligraphy on the walls, a navy kimono at the top of the stairs. Ron loved all things Japanese and practiced Buddhist meditation. He loved music, and his Möller pipe organ, viols, and shakuhatchi take up a room in the basement. We knew which hymns to pick for his funeral; his favorites were marked with fingerings. There are beautiful objects everywhere in this house—eighteenth-century Japanese textiles, nineteenth-century blue willow plates, a Buddhist heart sutra carved into wood. Treasures aside, the house is modest, built in the 1970s in what was then a new suburb north of Atlanta. What was once a shiny, new starter home is no longer shiny or new. The floor buckles in the hall; the bedroom carpet is the same moss green Ben crawled across as a baby; the deck is rotting away. Ron and Susan had enough money to move to a luxury home in a fancy new development. Instead, they made do with the house and bought art, handmade things from all over the world, and books. Lots of books.

Of all the beautiful objects Ron left to his family, the most treasured are the pieces of furniture he built: table, silver chest, and dictionary stand, the chest of drawers, the nightstand, the master bed. His wife—his widow—is surrounded by the work of his hands: wood chosen with care, cut and shaped, sanded and polished until it glowed.

In the few weeks since he died, it has become a family game to find Ron in his children. "Oh!" we say when Ben or his sister does something especially Ron-like, "I know where you got that gene!" For some reason it's easier to name these similarities now that he is dead—the free-roaming intellect, the love of music and ice cream, the formidable independence, and its corollary, an infuriating stubbornness. I'm amazed to look at a child and see the parent— to know where the smile, the eyes, the laugh, the stubbornness, the music originated.

No one will ever tell me that I look like my father.

II.

We inherit our genes from our parents, as our parents did from theirs, and therefore DNA isn't just the blueprint for your body—your straight or curly hair, your asthma, or intelligence—it's your history too. Your DNA can trace the story of your ancestors, who they were and where they came from and with whom they mated, the patterns of their migrations, all the way back through the generations to the very beginning of humankind.

You might think of DNA as...