"But Mother, what is fair-o?", I remember asking, "Why did your father have to go on river boats to work? I don't understand."

We were sitting on the front porch steps, shelling peas for supper. My mother always put the pods with the peas in her apron lap and then put the empty pods in a piece of newspaper and the peas in our big colander. It was fun to hear them rattle when she dropped them in.

Mother sighed, as she always did when I asked questions about her life. "Faro is a card game, a gambling game", she said, "and my father used to deal that kind of game in saloons in San Antonio and on river boats on the Mississippi."

I could tell by her voice that she didn't want to talk about it any more. So I asked about her mother instead, but that didn't get me any answers either. It seemed my mother's mother died when Mother was two months old, and my grandfather left her with his sister to take care of...and Mother refused to talk about her aunt at all, except to say, "She's dead now".

I had been looking at my baby books again, and there was a page called "Baby's Family Tree", with names of my parents and of grandparents that I'd never seen, at least I didn't think I had. There were two sets written in the book, one maternal and one paternal. I was old enough to know what that means, and I was curious about them. But trying to get my mother to tell me more seemed like a hard job. I dropped two peas out of the pod I was shelling and bent over to pick them up so she couldn't see my face while I went on with my questions.

"I know your mother and father are written down in my book: Charles R. Williams and Jessie Fox Williams are their names, but I don't know anything else about them", I said. "Can't you tell me more?" She just shook her head and picked up another pea pod.

There weren't any pictures of my grandparents in any of our photo albums. In fact, I had decided a long time ago that I really must have been adopted, and maybe I had been kidnapped from a royal family in England when I was a baby and left on my parents' doorstep in El Paso, Texas. I made the mistake of telling my brother this one time and he thought I was crazy.

I didn't have any better luck at finding out about my paternal grandparents either, Charles E. Jones and Mary Ellen Cleary Jones. My mother said she didn't know anything about them.

"The only thing I am sure of", she said, "is that you are exactly half Irish and half Welsh, just as Daddy and I are." Each had one parent who was Irish and one parent who was Welsh, according to Mother. "Jones and Williams are both Welsh names", she added, "so your grandfathers both came from the same country, Wales".

"Really?", I remember being very excited, because this seemed to me to prove my theory about royalty, "did they come to this country on the same boat?"

Now it was Mother's turn to drop some peas, so her answer was not very clear as she bent over to pick them up, and she sounded really impatient, "I don't know whether they came over or their parents did, all I know is that I was born in Enid, Oklahoma and Daddy was born in Joplin, Missouri. Now that's enough questions."

Well, that was easy for her to say. I had at least forty-two other questions I would like to have asked, but it would be no use. So I went back to my kidnap theory. I've never been completely convinced that it wasn't true!