Whiskey, my grandmother had 10 kids. That wasn’t so unusual in her time. I remember talking to the woman about her memories of the Spanish-American War – she might as well have been a creature from another planet.

My family’s presence in America predates the United States. My forefathers came over here with a charter from the English king that gave them a huge swath of Virginia. We predate the Mayflower. My ancestor founded the port town of Alexandria, VA, which, during that day, was the largest and busiest port in the colonies. In the context of this old family and all its characters, I always related to Quentin Compson, having been caught up in this grand southern familial legacy that was going to steamroll me and everything.

One day, however, I looked at the huge scroll that is the family tree, and checked out the entries of the family bible, and came to the realization that, in what seemed surely impossible to my whole experience as a youth, we were finished. Taking my grandmother’s 10 children contribution and 300 years on this continent, we’re done. I’ll probably live to the day when I can close the covers on that family bible for good, and punctuate our run in this world. I’ve got two sons, a cousin has 2 more. That’s all that’s left.

It’s demographics, Whiskey. You are right about identifying our inability to make the nuclear family model successful. I imagine that the 66% number of white Americans you mention will continue to fall off the cliff.

I suspect this trend to continue for a while, then folks will rally around the old forms of patriarchy and who knows what will happen after that. But by that time, we’ll all be dead.