A certain person claims that one of his ancestors of the seventh generation before him was of royal blood. Assuming no duplications, find how many ancestors he has of that generation.

|mm| first period
|ma| 11 going on 12
|my| 1965
|note| supplies had been waiting in top dresser drawer for almost 2 years/summer outing! with family/the dog knew b4 anybody else

|mm| finally fucks woman
|ma| 20 going on 21
|my| 1974
|note| ethically and politically charged situation/hardly anybody knew about this relationship which lasted 5 years/simultaneously seeing other people: sexual revolution!

|mm| moves in with a dyke
|ma| 25 or so
|my| 1978
|note| not a secret but neither is it advertised – particularly when looking for work/regularly appears in lover's family's photos & gives & receives token holiday gifts/routinely assumed by strangers to be lover's sister

|mm| discovers ibuprofen
|ma| ~ 30
|my| ~ 1983
|note| realizes that more than a year of life has been needlessly wasted in menstrual cramping/antagonism toward capitalism, patent office & copyright intensifies

|mm| moves in with another dyke
|ma| 35 or so
|my| 1989
|note| everybody's out these days – except them that aren't/routinely assumed by strangers to be lover's sister – even tho this lover and that lover look nothing alike/regularly addressed by strangers as Sir/assumed by dykes to be a dyke regardless of accompaniment

|mm| hysterectomy & oophorectomy
|ma| 36
|my| 1990
|note| politically suspect procedure warmly embraced by the meat – which now has decent health insurance/small stash of sanitary products kept on hand for guests



home

SHE'S TELLING the story of a camping trip with her friend, Mary, in 1972: she calls it their Jack Kerouac Homage. She even read On the Road in route, and sometimes their itinerary dovetailed exactly with the book's: she'd read a page, look up, and there they'd be.

That was her trip, though: Mary was retracing her would-be boyfriend's trek from the year before.

THE STORY she's telling has a predictably creepy element: a recurring hitchhiker, dressed in black, who leered every time they passed him in the Datsun, who had them freaked so badly that one night, in a little Wyoming hamlet, whose claim to fame was an arch of cobbled-together elk horns erected across its main street, they spent 18 whole bucks on a motel room and shoved the chiffarobe against the door.

DRUGS ARE a feature too, of course, careening down a mountain switchback, fishing through the ashtray in a nicotine fit, smoking butts. The campground in new Mexico where seemingly everybody was high on peyote and retching deliriously. Sitting on the lip of a canyon with strangers, pot laced with Angel Dust: the floor of the canyon morphing to a roadscape in which gas station signs loomed. Wolfing peaches and tossing the pits over the rim, watching a cloud of drifting rain approach, trying to decide if they were too fucked up to drop to the ledge below and crouch beneath an overhang.

WHEN SHE GETS to the part about the peaches, she flashes back to her grandmother's story, of her strip with her sister Mary, and their drive from Ohio to Montana in 1928 so that Mary could marry the love of her life (who wasn't yet a park ranger, but would be). The girls' mother made them take a case of Ball jars packed with fruit: she wanted them to have a touch of home on the road.

WHAT THEY REALLY should have packed was a pair of pliers: that trip took eleven days -- 35 mph for 10 hours a day -- and every day they had a flat tire. Their first, in Illinois, a guy papering a billboard fixed for them, but then they purchased the essential tool, and repaired the rest themselves. Except for the last one, when they were overtaken by a young man and an old man before they even took their jack out of the boot. They'd been watching a herd of antelope graze and hadn't leapt with their usual alacrity to the chore.

THE YOUNG MAN changed their tire while the old man lectured: If you hadn't passed us going so fast, you wouldn't have a flat! And then he said, take a look around, you'll never see a more beautiful valley. Turns out, it was the valley where Mary would soon live.

SHE REMEMBERS her grandmother's story out of time, doesn't pause in her own telling, not even as she wonders what that other generation was reading in their car. She's sure they were reading, even though that fact's been omitted from the story every time she's heard it told. Something by Willa Cather, she figures. O Pioneers!