Our 46th president, Joe Biden, does not have curly hair, like I do, and as far as I know, I am not related to him. On the other hand, our 8th president, Martin Van Buren, had very curly hair, and his 3rd great grandfather was my 10th great grandfather, Abraham Pieterszen (van Deursen), who arrived in New Amsterdam in the 1600s. (I am exceptionally grateful to the New York Times for producing this 2011 interactive look at “The Van Dusens Through History.”)

Today is the 3rd day of my 46 posts in 46 days committment in honor of our new, 46th president, Joe Biden. As I was sashaying through the corridors of my brain, opening various doors for inspiration, I strolled over to Twitter, only to see “Today is the 3rd Day” trending: various Biden friends and foes were lamenting what he has not yet accomplished. In three days. It put my composition struggles in perspective. Context is everything.

Today a dear childhood friend tagged me in a Facebook post placed by the Dubln pub, Davy Byrnes, immortalized with a serving of gorgonzola in James Joyce’s literary masterpiece, Ulysses, and visited in 2016 by America’s new president. As Biden bid farewell to his home state of Delaware, and recounted Joyce’s words that when he dies, “Dublin will be written on my heart,” I, too, am connected to my childhood home of Laguna Beach, and my childhood friend, who tagged me in Davy Byrnes’ Facebook post.

A new president of the United States. The 46th. A perfect day for a new committment. A new committment to 46 posts . . . in 46 days.

Enter with me, if you will, one of Houston’s gems: the Clayton Genealogical Library.

Armed only with my mom’ mother’s first and maiden names, and the knowledge that Grandma Ada was born in New Jersey, I set to work. My first stop was one of the dozen computer terminals in Clayton that provide special access to various ancestry databases. Powerful search engines sift through millions of records of birth and death, marriage and military service, pre-1940 U.S. censuses and up-to-the present photos of gravestones.

Eureka! I soon learned that Grandma was born August 22, 1891, in Upper Penn’s Neck, New Jersey.

I turned next to one of the Clayton’s mammoth atlas’s in order to locate Upper Penn’s Neck within New Jersey. Salem County, on the Delaware River. Down the carpeted hallway I walked, past stacks of wonderful volumes of vital records from every state.

Like a child in a candy store, my eyes darted up, down, left and right, scanning the New Jersey counties until I came to the section devoted to volumes of public records for Salem County. Excitedly, I  began pulling down volumes of eighteenth and nineteenth century birth and marriage records.

Dalbow. Grandma’s maiden name. I cannot express the sheer delight in seeing row after row of a name that I had heard only a few times in my life. The deeper I delved into indexes of hundred, and hundred-fifty-year-old records, the more I found of my mother’s past. Even then, I knew I had merely scratched the surface.

Forty-three years after she had died, I felt as if I was for the first time finding my mother. Sitting there, on the floor of the Clayton Genealogical Library, surrounded by musty odes to lives lived so very long ago. I was hooked: The ghosts of the past infused me with a desire to grab as many moments from the present in order to learn more about them, about my mother, and ultimately, about myself.

The search for half of my past had truly, in earnest, begun.

Mom died when I was a teenager.

I can’t remember any of us ever talking about where she was born, where she spent her childhood, or where she daydreamed as a teen. She just appeared. As Mom.

We knew everything about Dad–where he was born, where he went to school, our fascinating roots on both his mother’s and father’s sides. All the way back to the 1600s.

Well, two months ago, I looked, as if for the first time, at my mother’s birth certificate. And there it was: Woman’s Hospital, New York City! Mom was born at a hospital on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, only blocks from where my son, Lorenz, was born seventy-six years later. A whole new world opened to me. There I was, looking closely at my grandmother’s maiden name, and her place of birth—New Jersey. My grandfather, whom I never met, was born in Missouri. Imagine that.

I was thrilled and saddened, shamed at years of learned disinterest and determined to find the family roots that led to this woman, Mom–and to me, and to Lorenz. And learn, I did.

Mom, you had a fascinating history. I’m grateful for the search that led me to you, and I’m excited to share the geneological journey that took me there!

Several years ago a friend and  neighbor gave me a potted plant he no longer wanted. I adopted it as if it had been mine all along.

It’s a spindly, palm-like creature, with sprouts that shoot up to reveal a collection of horizontally-oriented fronds. This dear, quirky plant sheds in installments: for months at a time, the effusion of green atop each stem will be universally verdant. Then, as if on cue, the lowermost fronds of each tuft start to brown, then fall from the stem altogether. At the same time, though far less visibly, the stem itself gains a half-inch or so, and the shoots continue their upward journey.

Ironically, it is in their dying that the lower fronds reveal how truly healthy the whole plant is.

It’s summer already in Houston. School’s been out for a week.

And yet, as I ride my bike early each morning past the several schools that greet me on my way back from the gym, the yellow “School Zone” speed lights blink their feverish morse code. The lights are timed to alert drivers during school hours. Sure enough, the hours are correct, it’s the time of year that is not. The lights are programmed to turn on at a certain hour, and have not been programmed to turn off during the summer months.

How many of our own actions are Pavlovian responses to things we’ve allowed to program us? How many times do we react, instead of thoughtfully responding, because, like the lights that blink whether school is in session or not, it’s what we’ve always done?