SOCIAL INVENTIONS: RETROACTIVE BASTARD

This is me, Thomas Knauer, and I’m a bastard. Oddly enough, I wasn’t born that way.

This is where I was born, South Orange, New Jersey, nine years after my parents got married. For the next twenty-six years life went along normally: my parents divorced, they both remarried, I moved to Detroit, had a hallucinogenic stepfather, went to college, etcetera, etcetera…

Then, in 1998 my father retired and he and my stepmother moved to South Carolina and that is when this story really begins, the story of how I became a retroactive bastard.

The thing is that after my parents divorced my father married a catholic. So when they got married she had to leave the church [you know the whole not recognizing divorced so the marriage was really adultery in god’s book, and all].

Anyway… when they retired and moved to South Carolina my step-mom wanted to rejoin the church. So, they went to the parish priest down there and explained the situation, and lo and behold, there was a way around the sticky problem of my father’s first marriage. Conversations were had, meetings were taken and finally the letter was written. This letter was signed sealed and flown away to Italy, well actually to Vatican City. And somewhere in the deep recesses of the Vatican itself some Monsignor or Bishop or whatnot made my parents’ marriage disappear. Poof… into a proverbial puff of smoke, though really I imagine it had something to do with a rubber stamp.

And with that rubber stamp, so too went my legitimacy. I became a bastard, but not just any old bastard. Since my parents’ marriage now never happened – in the eyes of the church, that is – I am a bastard retroactively all the way back to the hospital in South Orange.

I am a retroactive bastard.

I suppose I don’t really mind. I mean I don’t feel any different or anything like that. Perhaps it makes things a little more confusing at XMAS, though now that I think of it… do bastards still go to purgatory? I’m not really up on the rules about that these days. Maybe I should check into that, possibly call my always-already stepbrother and see if he knows.

Oh… I haven’t told you about him, have I? Well, perhaps next time, but right now I need to find something for lunch.