J is for Judgement

short-sleeved dress shirt, wearing a pair of glasses with one opaque lens. "Help you?"
    "I'd like to check your records for a marriage license issued in November of 1935."
    "The name?" he asked.
    "Millhone, Terrence Randall. Do you need her name as well?"
    He made a note. "This will do."
    He pushed a form across the counter, and I filled in the blanks, reassuring the county about my purposes in asking. It was a silly formality in my opinion since births, deaths, marriages, and property recordings are a matter of public record. The filing system in use was called Soundex, a curious process whereby the vowels in the last name are eliminated altogether and consonants are awarded various numerical values. The clerk j helped me convert the name Millhone to its Soundex J equivalent, and then he sent me over to an old- fashioned card catalog where I found my parents listed, along with the date of their marriage, and the book and page numbers of the volume where the license was recorded. I returned to the counter with the information in hand. The clerk made a call to some web-footed creature in the bowels of the building, whose job it was to conjure up the relevant records consigned to cassettes. The clerk sat me down at the microfilm machine, rattling off a rapid series of instructions, half of which I missed. It didn't matter much, as he proceeded to turn the machine on and insert the cassette while he was telling me how to do it. Finally he left me to fast-forward my way through the bulk of the reel to the document in question. Suddenly, there they were-names and incidental personal data neatly entered into a record nearly fifty years old. Terrence Randall Millhone of Santa Teresa, California, and Rita Cynthia Kinsey of Lompoc, California, had married on November 18, 1935. He was thirty-three years old at the time of the wedding and listed his occupation as mail carrier. His father's name was Quillen Millhone. His mother's maiden name was Dace. Rita Kinsey was eighteen at the time of her marriage, occupation unlisted, daughter of Burton Kinsey and Cornelia Straith LaGrand. They were married by a Judge Stone of the Perdido Court of Appeal in a ceremony that took place in Santa Teresa at four in the afternoon. The witness who signed the form was Virginia Kinsey, my aunt Gin. So there they were, those three, standing together in the public register, not knowing that in twenty years husband and wife would be gone. As far as I knew there were no photographs of the wedding, no mementos of any kind. I'd seen only one or two pictures taken of them in later years. Somewhere had a handful of snapshots of my babyhood and early childhood, but there were none of their respective families. I realized what a vacuum I'd been living in. Where other people had anecdotes, photograph albums, correspondence, family gatherings, all the trappings of family tradition, I had little or nothing to report. The notion of my mother's family, the Burton Kinseys, still residing up in Lompoc conjured up curious emotional contradictions. And what of my father's people? I'd never heard any mention of the Millhones at all.
    I felt a sudden shift in my perspective. I could see in a flash what a strange pleasure I'd taken in being related to no one. I'd actually managed to feel superior about my isolation. I was subtle about it, but I could see that I'd turned it into a form of self- congratulation. I wasn't the common product of the middle class. I wasn't a party to any convoluted family drama -- the feuds, unspoken alliances, secret agreements, and petty tyrannies. Of course, I wasn't a party to the good stuff, either, but who cared about that? I was different. I was special. At best, I was self-created; at worst, the hapless artifact of my aunt's peculiar notions about raising little girls. In either event, I regarded myself an outsider, a loner, which suited me to perfection. Now I had to consider the possibility of this unknown family unit... whether I would claim them or they would claim me.
    I rewound the reel of film and took the cassette up to the counter. I left the building and crossed the street, heading toward the three-story parking structure where I'd left my car. On my right was the public library, where I knew I could rustle up the Lompoc phone book if I was interested. But was I? Reluctantly I paused, debating the issue. It's only information, I said to myself. You don't have to make a decision, you just need to know.
    I took a right, going