Roots &
Ripov/1
by Albert Russo
Watching his contemporaries
go about their daily business so efficiently
while he remained in a state of perpetual doubt,
Ripov thought maybe something had happened during
his childhood which he wasn't aware of ... Until
he realized he'd been plagued with a malady as
refractory as herpes: rootlessness.
A new craze was sweeping
through society and people around him were
digging into their pasts like greedy treasure
hunters. Among the tenants of his own apartment
building was Mr. O, an engineer of Italian
extraction, who traced his ancestry to none other
than Leonardo da Vinci - his mother's side of the
family - deeming it unnecessary to go farther
back. Then there was Miss T, a pretty history
teacher who had taken a sabbatical to write a
thesis on what she termed her 'personal journey
into culture.' After crusading through the
Renaissance and the Middle Ages, trekking to the
Holy Land, she landed in Ancient Egypt amid the
all but enviable guild of fly-catchers appointed
to the service of Pharaoh. There was also Madame
V, the concierge with three upper teeth missing,
whose discovery gave her the shock of her life:
one of her forebears, Marie-Antoinette's night-commode
attendant, had been instrumental in the Queen's
beheading. Madame V immediately wrote to the
French Government to claim a fair readjustment of
her social status and to demand that she at least
be elevated to the rank of chambermaid to Madame
la Présidente de la République, inasmuch as her
great-great-great-great aunt, Madesoille VD, had
so magnificently contributed to the success the
French Revolution.
Madame V received a reply
from the Office of the Presidency, politely
declining her kind offer. She refused to give up
and, totally neglecting her duties as a concierge,
she made it her business to write to every
department in the Administration.
Before such fervor, such
determination, Ripov could only express his
admiration.
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