Well, Whip My Flanks and Call Me 'Sire'!

I've always been envious of people who have deep genealogies. I'd like to think that it's not because I'm jealous of one friend who can allegedly trace a bloodline back to Charlemagne (or some other Frenchy big shot) or another who can claim Marilyn Monroe as a cousin, albeit a distant one. It is more about the simple fact that genes have the power to carry little traits and tics and commonalities across time and space. They skip generations as they see fit, only to pop up again out of nowhere generations down the line. Such linking of past and present always riveted me. To be able to locate oneself with respect to people who left little else tangible of themselves in this world was pretty powerful. Of course, I have a hard time applying this to my own life because my personal pedigree is rather shallow, only three or four generations. I blame the Nazis, but don't I always?

Turns out that all this worrying about where I come was for naught. Why? Because I am apparently a horse, of course, of course. Yup, evandebacle, under his real name, is actually a horse born in 1929. My career and offspring are certainly not the stuff of legend, but my dad, Guy McKinney, won the Hambletonian back in '26. As a matter of fact, the horse named Hambletonian 10 is my great-great-great grandfather (as well as my great-great-great-great grandfather in four different lines and my great-great-great-great-great grandfather in still four others), so there's a little of the inbreeding going on. This means I'm related to virtually every racing horse in the country, great and small. Boy, it feels good to know the real me.