"I watched a movie this weekend that led me to a better understanding of your people," Bard said. "I watched West Side Story."

He cracks me up.

"Yes, that's us--in fact, I actually spent most of my weekend jumping on cars and singing."

"You see," he said, "I know you so much better now that I have embraced your culture."

What Bard was referring to was that, recently, while going through a pile of old Coyle family photos, my brother and I came across one of someone named Carlos Cortez Coyle. "Holy shit," my brother exclaimed, "we've got a Cuban in the woodpile!"

We laughed together, but since then, we've tried to research this name, the very one that we now understand will serve as the catalyst for the dissolution of our family mythology, a mythology that was built upon our father's nearly pure Irish heritage. Ha!

It turns out that this Carlos Cortez Coyle is from the same tiny Kentucky community as my paternal grandfather, the grandfather we'd often heard was one of the first Coyles born in the US of A. Carlos Cortez Coyle, however, was waddling around in Bear Wallow almost fifty years before my grandfather was born. Moreover, he is a reasonably well-known American primitive artist who was described as "untrained" and "weird" but "quite good" by Robert Boyce, the head of the art department at Berea College, the very same Berea College that houses the largest collection of his art AND the very same Berea College where my grandfather went to school.

Yeah, we can't dismiss this as a coincidence: Same last name, same tiny Kentucky community, same college, and this pesky little business about his picture showing up mixed in with the others of our barefooted, gap-toothed, not-so-distant cousins in Kentucky.

So Bard reminds me in ways that could be hardly described as subtle: "Did you hear me, Ann? I can spell that for you--it is 'N' as in....'nacho'....'E' as in...'enchilada'..." He stops his spelling of someone's name to laugh. "You see, I want to say words to you with which you'll connect more readily than those in my language."

I laugh heartily along with him but he was warned me: "You think this is funny now, but I am going to remember this for a long, long time...even when you're claiming to be something else...like...an Eskimo..."