The face staring back at me is 100-years-old, but it looks a lot like me when I was a teenager.

“That’s your great grandpa when he was a boy,” my mom says. “He was a drunk.”

That was how I was introduced to my family last weekend. My great grandfather, The Drunk.

My mother never talks much about her family. She grew up in Depression-era Arkansas, the only daughter of a railroad man and his wife. Polio struck her when she was a baby, knotting muscle and twisting bone, 20 years too soon for Salk’s vaccine.

She wore bulky braces until she was in high school, often ridiculed by her peers and ignored by a social caste system that wouldn’t tolerate people who were “different.” Like “coloreds.” Like “cripples.”

So mom rarely talks much about her childhood, and I never ask. It’s an unspoken agreement between us.

Then a distant cousin in Missouri – I have cousins in Missouri? – decided to do some research on our family history and put together a book of photos and stories. He tracked down my mom a few months ago and asked a bunch of questions. They corresponded. She told him about our California branch of the family. Actually, since it’s just the two of us, we’re more twig than branch.

We got a quarter of a page in the book.

It’s not a book, really. More like a 30-page term paper a college sophomore might throw together the night before it’s due: punctuation and grammar mistakes, spelling errors (“John Ortez”) and uneven picture quality.

On the “cover” is a scanned photo of an ancient-looking woman and the words, “Dedicated to the memory of Etta Mae Guiren. Even though she is gone, her star burns brightly.”

Etta Mae was one character in the 150-year-old story of my mom’s family, a story filled with losers. The first page highlights my great, great, great grandfather’s war service — as a soldier for the Confederate Army. Then there was my great grandfather’s uncle who went to prison for stealing mail. Then The Drunk.

“I didn’t like him much,” my mom says to me. “Once, when I was in second grade, I got sent home because I had head lice. My grandfather (The Drunk) was there, so I decided to sit on his lap and rub my head all over him.

“And when I was in the fourth grade, he came to visit and got in a fight over some moonshine. He went to jail for that one.”

That’s my family. And that’s just the stuff I can publish.

Even Etta Mae, my mom’s aunt whose “star burns brightly,” had a scandalous past. Though Mom didn’t want to get into details, a picture of Etta Mae emerged of alcohol and illicit lovers, of abandoned children born out of wedlock.

“She wasn’t the nicest person,” Mom concludes. “That’s about all I want to say about her.”

That book would be pretty depressing if it ended at page 10 and Etta Mae. But starting with page 11, the book changes. People are smiling. Their hair is neatly combed. Their clothes fit better. They’re at picnics and ball games and birthday parties.

By page 11, some of the pictures are in color. Here’s a wedding! A newborn baby! A family reunion!

The “Ortez” section is at the bottom of page 12. There’s my second grade picture… me, mugging for the camera with a gap-toothed, mischievous grin. And there’s my mom’s college graduation picture…

Graduation?

“Mom, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this before, but were you the first person in the family to get a college degree?” I ask.

“Yeah, I was,” she says. She says that her father, a man not given to displays of emotion, cried when she received her diploma.

Mom is beaming. Although she graduated from a small Missouri college in 1955, I can tell she remembers it as though it happened last week.

Then I understand. The reason that my family looks so much better after page 10 is simple.

It’s education.

I open the book again.

Here’s a cousin who does research for a agricultural company. He graduated from college in 1962. Here’s a banker, Kansas State, 1965. Look! I have an aunt who was mayor of Salem, Mo.! She graduated from Florida State in1959.

The success stories – and the smiles – are woven throughout the remainder of the book.

And then I finally get the bigger picture.

Our family album isn’t a story of losers, but winners.

It’s about how education has empowered us, how it’s given us confidence and helped us make sense of the world and our place in it. Education lifted shoeless children of the Depression to lives as educators, public servants and nurses. It allowed us to change who we are and who we will be.

But it was my mother, that “poor little polio-stricken outcast,” who set the pace.

She passed the baton on to me, although I stumbled and flailed for almost 23 years after my high school graduation before I understood.

Next week, when I hear the first notes of “Pomp and Circumstance,” I’m adding another bright page in the history of our family. I couldn’t be more proud of my education, my family and, especially, my mother.

Thanks, Mom. For everything.

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