Day 261 - Ancestor Story

Ancestor Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Rin was told that she had been named after her great-grandfather, whose name had been Ren. Once she was old enough to understand, she found this strange, as Rin was not a variation of Ren, and the names meant practically opposite things. On top of that, Ren was sometimes used for both boys and girls. Rin often suspected that her father was simply joking with her when she was a child. Fathers had a way of doing that with their daughters when they were young. When she was young, her father teased her incessantly, and while she found it annoying later in adolescence, it was endearing and she loved him for it. It was one of their many joys together. It was one of the many things she would miss.

As a teenager, Rin had varied the spelling of her names and often went back and forth between signing her name Rin and Ren. She wasn’t attached to her name and didn’t feel that either name fit her particularly well. It was a private joke with herself that no one else understood or appreciated. Many frustrated teachers had tried to break her of the habit, but she was obstinate and opinionated and very very difficult. The more someone told her what to do, the more she did the opposite. It wasn’t that she was disrespectful, but she just couldn’t bring herself to be all that concerned with what authority told her to do. She was her own person, through and through. She had been told that in this way, she was very much her great -grandfather’s great-granddaughter.

Rin was not beholden to tradition. She wasn’t religious or spiritual and knew little of her ancestors and didn’t care to learn. She knew next to nothing about her great-grandfather and felt no obligation to honor his memory. She did, however, love her father dearly. Shinto tradition was important to him and so she obliged with little fuss, except for during some of her more rebellious teenage years. As a young adult, she paid more attention to her father’s beliefs and found a genuine appreciation for many of the traditions.

After her father’s death, Rin truly began to explore her own spirituality. She couldn’t quite find religion, but she developed a fondness for meditation and prayer. She enjoyed the routine and found it was a way to feel close and connect with him, even if she didn’t actually know what she believed. He had been a man of prayer and so it always seemed as if he was right there with her. That didn’t fix everything, but it did make her feel better. She still didn’t feel anything for her great-grandfather.