This is my sister Betsy’s wedding dress. She dreamed it up herself. She crocheted it herself, working on it for the last year. She imagines butterflies flying from its pockets during the ceremony. She imagines a man loving and compassionate and handsome standing opposite her as she wears it, a man she deserves, a man we all imagine for her, too, but a man who hasn’t yet found her.

Betsy is disabled. She has some deficits, but don’t we all? Do they make us any less complete as human beings? No one is more complete than Betsy. She loves with fullness, comprehends with kindness, feels with depth and grasps the world with a wisdom and joy I only wish I had. But I don’t need it. I have Betsy. We all should have a Betsy in our lives.

She has a few dreams for hers. One is to meet Barry Manilow. Another is to meet the man who will enter her world and stay there, who will take her hand and hold it forever, who will see her with eyes filled gratitude and wonder as she wears her beautiful, brilliant, kaleidoscopic gown of love.

Betsy is an artist. Betsy is a font of unending and ebullient creativity. Betsy is a force of love and light and hope and warmth. Betsy is a gift.

Behold her wedding dress. And while you’re at it, behold her heart.

Last month, I encountered this tree and its profoundly helpful signage near a crosswalk somewhere in our great Northeast. I won’t say where, only because I feel like draping my story in a cloud of mystery. I have no idea what the label means, other than “tree.” I have no idea who put it there and why, and I have no particular interest in finding out, although I’m guessing it has something to do with municipal streetscaping and the need for different civic bodies to communicate with one another, even when the communication requires one such body to state the obvious IN ALL CAPS on a stake in the ground.

Needless to say, I was greatly amused. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, I said, or something along those lines. HA HA HA HA I GUESS THE CITY GARDENERS ARE HAVING THEIR SAY HA HA HA HA HA, then added, just for good measure: HA HA HA HA. And snapped a photo. Which you see here. Ha ha ha ha ha.

But then I started thinking heavily, which I tend to do a little more often than I should. I started thinking about Things That Are Obvious and Things That Are Said, and how often the obvious goes unsaid at the precise points in time when they really ought to be articulated. Like this point. Now. When what’s right and what’s wrong are being confused, when what’s real and what’s fake are being conflated, when up is down and good is bad and love is the not the opposite of hate but a convenience to be bartered and bought among the powerful.

We fancy ourselves creatures of deliberation. We regard ourselves as beings capable of complex reasoning and nuanced motives, but we are not. We are simple. We need labels. Indeed, we crave them. We want to be told who we are, why we are, whom to trust, whom to fear and which among us belongs to the clan.

And so I began to wonder whether everything should be painted in bold letters on conspicuous wooden signs.

The homeless guy panhandling for change: HUMAN. The toddler at the border, separated from her parents and stained with tears: CHILD. The politicians in city hall, in any given statehouse, in the U.S. Capitol and the White House, no matter who they think they’re working for and how they’re lining their pockets: PUBLIC SERVANTS. The trash collectors who lift your heavy-ass, stinky-ass, overloaded garbage into a truck every week: PUBLIC HEROES. The sacred place where we sleep and eat and laugh and hold our loved ones, no matter its location or its footprint or its worth: HOME. The people who live next door to us, no matter their beliefs, no matter their birthplace, no matter their habits or their accent or their orientation or their identity or their ethnicity or their color or creed: NEIGHBORS.

The neighbor who holds and treasures citizenship in this country: AMERICAN. The neighbor who doesn’t but yearns to: ASPIRING AMERICAN. The one who spews hatred in anyone’s direction: UNAMERICAN.

I could go on, but you get the gist. And one more thing: TREE.

With mass shootings the new normal these days — oh, who am I kidding, by now they’re the old normal — I’m starting to run out of things to write, much less say. In November I published a post grappling with the “thoughts and prayers” bromide issued by too many politicians in the wake of such killings, and with the same-old same-old being expressed following the horrors of Sante Fe, I wonder what I or anyone can possibly say that could change anything. But something has to be said. Because something has to change. Because this has got to stop.

So let’s take another tack, here. Let’s talk about mental illness, because even some people who support sane gun legislation and oppose the demoniac manipulations of the N.R.A. fall back on this idea that keeping guns out of hands “the mentally ill” will somehow magically solve this singular American hell of our own creation.

And guess what, everybody. It won’t.

Why? For starters, most mentally ill people aren’t violent. Some are: Between 3 and 5 percent of violent crimes are committed by people with mental illness. Flipping that statistic on its head, it means that 95 to 97 percent of such acts are committed by people not defined as mentally ill. Which means, in other words, that most violent people are sane, a point so obvious it rarely gets stated amid all the rampant scapegoating, doublespeak and bass-ackwards emphasis on everything but the guns themselves.

We need gun control not because mentally ill people are prone to violence, but because PEOPLE ARE PRONE TO VIOLENCE. Period.

You want to talk about people with mental illness? Let’s talk about my sister Lucy, the most breathtakingly gentle soul who ever walked the planet. Or my husband Chris, whose only violent act in our 20 years of marriage was that time he knocked a fan to the floor when he woke late to catch a train. Or my father Louis, a pacifist who sparred as a young man but later swore it off, shunning the violence, and thereafter walked out on any film that threw a punch.

I’m more violent than they were. And I’m sane. Supposedly.

Lucy and Chris died by their own hands; my father tried to. In each case, their mental illness manifested itself not in anger at the world or in acts of pathological self-aggrandizement — because, let’s face it, that’s what mass killings are — but the opposite. They weren’t insensitive. They were too sensitive, feeling too much pain with too little hope for assuaging it. Most folks who struggle with psychiatric burdens suffer not from a cold insufficiency of feeling but a glut of the stuff, another obvious point that gets brushed aside in the casual and expedient demonization of the mentally ill.

But I get the logic. I do. As Americans and as human beings, we don’t want to be responsible for these killings. We want some Other to be responsible for the madness. We want Crazy People to be at fault. If, as it comes out, the latest mass murderer exhibited no warning signs, had not been treated for malady X or syndrome Y and wasn’t already diagnosed as mentally ill, the conversation inevitably shifts. The post-slaughter dialogue turns to How He Slipped Through the Cracks,  What Can Be Done To Improve Mental Healthcare and Who Might Have Identified Him as a Crazy Person But Tragically Didn’t.

The idea being: Okay, so maybe the shooter wasn’t labeled mentally ill, except of course he WAS mentally ill, because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many grieving parents and so many impotent politicos tweeting out condolences, right?

Following this logic, the solution is to A) identify all Crazy People everywhere, even the ones who haven’t yet been diagnosed as Crazy; B) make sure none of these Crazy People get access to guns; and C) make sure all Non-Crazy People have full and unfettered access to as many guns as possible. Because guns don’t kill Non-Crazy People. Crazy People do.

What garbage.

First, as I said above, most people with mental illness aren’t bent on killing anyone. Crazy acts are most often committed by Non-Crazy People, which makes the distinction between the two pretty damned worthless, don’t you think?

This also means, and I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, that the line between Crazy and Non-Crazy is much blurrier than you think. It’s a porous border, my friends, and there aren’t any ICE officers waiting to snatch you and send you on home. I say this not as a psychiatrist, which I definitely am not, but as a person who has lived a while and come away with the distinct impression of sanity/insanity as a fluid and relative state much influenced by stressors and circumstances. It isn’t binary; it isn’t off or on, one or the other; instead, it falls on a spectrum. To quote my brother Randy, “Everyone’s a head case. It’s just a matter of degrees.”

And so, given the innate Craziness that rests within us all,  it is in our best interests as individuals and as a nation to make guns REALLY, REALLY HARD TO PURCHASE. I know this is a difficult point for some to swallow, but I don’t care. Watching children cry after their classmates die in a bloodbath is even more difficult to swallow, and I’m tired of it. It has to end. Somehow. Someday. Maybe now. What do you say?

Look at what I stumbled across: a flyer reprinting one of my father’s columns for the long-gone New York World-Telegram.

This is one of those old family papers I periodically lose, then find again, then lose again, then find again. I had actually found it and uploaded it to Facebook several years back, but not in high enough quality to actually read. And it deserves to be read. I am wholly, ludicrously biased, but still: If you care about music, if you care about words, and if you care about words crafted in service to music, you should read it. It’s posted at bottom.

The piece is an ode to the humble but impassioned concertgoer, one who lives and breathes classical music and reveres its practitioners. Yes, “his”; Louis penned this gem 63 years ago, in an age when writing and conversation defaulted to the masculine, so let’s just assume he meant “person” when he wrote “man.” He served as the World-Telegram’s classical music critic for nearly 40 years, from 1928 until 1966, cranking out multiple reviews a night until the paper folded in the wake of the New York City newspaper strike.

He was 59 then. I was 2 1/2. I have no memories of visiting Daddy in the newsroom, accompanying Daddy to concerts or hearing Daddy vent in our Queens apartment at the end of a long day. My sister Lucy did. She once overheard him using “fuckin’” on the phone with a copy editor, and for a week thereafter – at least, in Mama’s version of events – the squirt deployed this powerful new term as a frequent qualifier in everyday conversation. E.g.: “Please pass the fuckin’ milk.” (My parents stifled the urge to spit out their coffee and correct her, and the word faded from her vocabulary.)

No vulgarities made it into this column, of course. My father’s paean to “the little man of music” reads like a prayer. It’s beautiful, simply wrought and poignant in its sincerity, describing a common listener of uncommon musical devotion.  I believe he was writing about himself.

“He is the man who often goes without an amenity or two for a seat at the opera”: that was young Louis, a kid from the tenements in Little Italy, scraping together the funds to feed his addiction. “He is a man of simple but profound spiritual needs without whom there would be no concert halls and no orchestras to fill them”: Daddy often characterized music (or, if he felt like getting specific, Beethoven) as the one true god he worshiped. And I believed him. He loved music as much or more than anyone else I’ve ever known, and he wrote his criticism, his columns and his many books from that place of love.

So here it is: “To an Unknown Music Lover.” Louis Biancolli, New York World-Telegram, 1955. I’ve uploaded the image in all its fulsome jpeggish ginormity, so if you have any trouble reading it, just click on it and then click to magnify it. If you have any trouble with that, please shoot me an email, and I’ll send it to you.

So I found this in the “drafts” folder just now: an empty post titled “weird scar update.” And I have noooooo idea what it means. I’m serious. None. A few years back I came up with a headline for a blog post I never wrote.

I’ve written about my scars before, so, no, it isn’t all that unusual as topics go, not really, not on a blog with the word “shit” in the title, and not for someone as multifariously scarred as I am. It is perfectly normal for me to be telling you about my unsealed wounds both psychological and physical.

But still: “weird scar update.” What the hell was that? What did I mean? Was it a reference to my latest hangnail? A glass shard embedded on the bottom of my right foot? That time someone compared a conversation with me to sitting through the “Ring” cycle?

Again: no idea. I can’t say what I’d planned on writing about at the time. However, as fate and coinky-dinks would have it, I do have some exciting news to report on the skinned-knee front, having taken a rather gymnastic fall on the ice outside church recently. It was one of those whoopty-whoops feet-in-the-air vaults into space that Linus suffered at the hands of Lucy and, in my case, thankfully resolved not with a spinal injury but with a rough landing on all fours. As a memento, I now sport a pair of lingering, sangria-colored splotches just below my left kneecap.

I have no idea whether these scars will ever fade. I’m hoping, at least, that they’ll dial down to a nice shade of burgundy or hibiscus in time for bare-legs season, which I refuse to refer to as “spring” or “summer” given that the damned weather is still behaving like damned winter and I actually wore my damned down parka to work this morning, dammit.

To be honest, I kind of doubt they’ll ever disappear, or even diminish. Scars tend not to. But looking at them tonight, it hit me: those two wee splotches on my skin resemble EYEBALLS, people! Yes! Eyeballs! A little off-center, a little drunken and dorky, but open. Cheerful. Wide-eyed. Trusting. And so, being truly and unapologetically bizarre, aiming to fulfill the cryptic weirdo promise of this heretofore unwritten blog post, I grabbed a marker, drew a smile on my kneecap and added a dot for a nose. 

Dwelling on this artful portrait, which I did for approximately eighteen seconds before scrubbing it off, I pondered its resemblance to the Mona Lisa and other Renaissance masterworks. No, wait. That is a lie. I did no such thing, though surely the contrasts in light resemble chiaroscuro, do they not? Again I lie. They do not.

In conclusion, I would like to come up with some beautiful and insightful profundity with which to cap this ridiculous post, but I don’t think I have it in me. Maybe something about smiling through the pain of existence? Choosing hope over despair and faith in the aftermath of trauma? The importance of putting a happy face on the shit that flies our way, sending our asses to the sky and our knees to the sidewalk? The need to get up after a fall and keep at it, keep moving, keep swinging one scarred leg after another into the unseeable future? The transformative power of a Sharpie in reshaping our conceptions of ourselves?

And there you have it. Weird scar update. The end.

So I got back my DNA kit results, and guess what, everybody! I’m a mutt!

I mean, I always knew I was a mutt. I always knew the paternal half of my DNA was southern Italian, the maternal half EnglishScottishGermanFrench (and as my mother always added, “Thank God for the French”). Except I’m not really. Not entirely. Nothing so tidy as half anything.

I am, as it turns out, exactly 76 percent of what I thought I was,  the unsurprising bits breaking down into 36 percent Southern Italian, 29 percent Western European, 7 percent Scottish-Welsh-Irish and 4 percent British. But my variegated ethnic muddle also includes another 24 percent of unanticipated factors: 6 percent Middle Eastern, 6 percent Iberian peninsula, 5 percent European Jewish, 4 percent South Asian and traces from the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and North Africa.

To which I say: HOW COOL IS THIS? Almost a quarter of me is previously unadvertised genetic material!

In truth, family lore already suggested some Jewish blood on the Biancolli side, so that didn’t surprise me — although I wonder about the DNA markers for “European Jewish.” What does that mean, exactly? Ashkenazic? And I’m fascinated by the Middle Eastern and South Asian components, which amount to a whole 10 percent of my genetic makeup. Not too shocking, given Southern Italy’s location at a giant crossroads and humanity’s tendency to schlep goods and people back and forth across bodies of water, pausing to make babies along the way.

I’ve only just started scratching the surface of these results. But already, noodling around the “DNA Matches” on Ancestry.com, I found relatives in Argentina. Argentina! Confirming yet more family lore on the Biancolli side! I hesitate to dive too deeply into specifics, which A) aren’t quite verified and B) are so convoluted I might lose consciousness trying to explain them, but C) involve great-grandparents who emigrated from Italy to Uruguay in the 19th century and D) also involve a great-grandfather who later bolted for Argentina.

Even minus the tangled South American subplot,  I’m faced with a genealogical narrative of stunning mystery, complexity and depth. How on earth am I going to unpack it all? My Middle Eastern heritage — what does that mean? My South Asian chunk — am I part Indian? Pakistani? And the Iberian business — could that be on my mother’s side? If so, to borrow one of her favorite turns of phrase, the news would have tickled her pink. In her heart of hearts she was Mediterranean.  She longed to hail from a land of sun. Not for nothing did she marry my father.

But for all the glorious genetic complications in these Ancestry.com results, the takeaway is a simple one. We’re connected. We’re related to parts of the world and pieces of history that we might not comprehend, but the connectedness alone is revelatory. Look at me. Not half Italian, as I’d always believed, but a little more than a third. The rest, it seems, is a beautifully confused gumbo of ingredients I may never understand.

So whatever you think you are, you probably aren’t. Not quite. You’re more. More of a rainbow. More representative of homo sapiens sapiens and its unconquerable itinerant spirit. More of a wanderer, an immigrant, a child of multiracial forebears. More connected with every other person on this planet. More a member of the refugee human race and less a member of any so-called race we use to classify, to separate, to oppress.

More beautiful. More mixed. More true. More mutt.