Caucasian Son

 CAUCASIAN

SON

 Copyright 2021, Alex Hutchins

All Rights Reserved

 

 

 Introduction

Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard, provided the Hutchins family with a detailed report of their ancestry…  tracing the Hutchins family back as far as there were records and the Pegram family back as far as there were record…  leaving the family and the audience, the impression that the Pegram family could be traced back to Africa whereas the Hutchins family could only be traced back to the days of Charlemagne.

The investigation probably took over 1,000 hours and the presentation, as I recall, lasted about 3-4 hours with 2 hours devoted to the Pegram side of the family and the other 2 hours devoted to the Hutchins side with a break in between.  Several members of the family and friends were invited to hear the presentation by Dr. Gates in Chapel Hill, NC and many left with the impression that it was merely done to boost the ego of our mother who had lost her husband a couple of years earlier.

Personally, I was not that impressed with the presentation as it was too long and too boring and provided the audience with so many details that it was difficult to retain most of what was being shared with us other than what has already been written above. 

I put the two boxes of documents (one for each family name) downstairs for future reference if there was ever a need for future reference and needless to say there has been no such need by me or by any member of my immediate family which represents 4, and includes my daughter and my wife’s son from a previous marriage.

It was not until I retired from working at the age of 67 so that I could collect my full retirement benefits from Social Security that I began to write more seriously and actually started and completed my first novel, which was probably not well written from the standpoint that it did not flow from reader’s perspective but instead flowed from the writer’s perspective who had a lot of unwritten knowledge in his head that would have explained what the novel did not explain.

My second novel was written a little better, I would have hoped, especially since it was not dealing with a science fiction subject and half way through my third novel, I simply stopped for some reason that I am saying is because I became unsure of my ability to write, especially a long novel of 300 plus pages.  That 3rd novel remains unwritten however, I have finished another novel (my 4th), just under 200 pages that it is second attempt at science fiction and I have started a 5th novel that has been trapped in cyberland by a hacker and the computer is currently with the, techs to see if they can restore it, otherwise I will lose 30 pages that will have to be recreated.

NOW, what has this got to do with this particular introduction for this particular novel…  well, I suppose that for some readers there is no justification whereas for other readers it creates a mental picture of the writer, which is me, and what that writer has experienced leading up the  writing of this which, in essence, is about my life, that may or may not be of any interest to the reader(s) but has helped me understand all the crap that I went through during my life, some of which was totally unnecessary. 

I have divided my life into periods of time that I worked at various jobs, but I am not sure if that is going to be a valid approach for what I am trying to achieve…  so, I will need to look other aspects of my life and see if there is a more appropriate breakdown to explore and explain my evolution.  Suffice it to say that I have no idea if a story about my life is worth reading or not but it is a story that I want to write so that I can purposefully reflect upon how I lived my life even though I would not have changed a thing. 

This is probably the single most important issue that has been mentally resolved within my mind because I finally realized that my life was lived exactly as it was intended to be lived.  And, a statement like that does presuppose a creator and presupposes that no matter what choices that I think I made in my life on my own, that those choices were either already seen by the creator or I was guided by the creator to make them the way that they were supposed to be made. 

I base this belief on two concepts:  the first is the fact that we do not have any choice in the matter of when we are going to be born, to whom, or what color our skin will be.  So, who makes that choice?  Second, is the fact that according to Bayes Mathematical Probability Theorem, there is a greater probability that a creator exists than there is the probability that a creator does not exist. 

Imagine this creator living at the edge of the universe (which by the way is still expanding but what is it expanding into?) then time at the edge of the universe passes more slowly that time passes on earth.  Meaning, my life has already come and gone…  therefore, all my decision, actions, and reactions have already taken place and I have ended up exactly where I was supposed to have ended up…  and, since that is true then my life could have been lived no other way. 

So, instead of writing how I may have changed my life and/or changed my decisions, this novel will focus on how I actually did live it, and my perceptions and/or interpretations of why that was done based upon a looking back type of reflection but done in narrative story form.  And, this approach will be rather interesting I am hoping for the both of us.