Four Generations of Spitting

Four generations of spitting images, that is.

I’ve been with my adorable grandchildren this week and yesterday watched my four-year-old grandson build a “house” out of cardboard, chairs, a wheelbarrow, plastic child’s car, two pieces of plastic and a lot of imagination.

He described what he was doing the whole time, explaining the need to keep raccoons out of his basement, “because they only come out at night, Grammy.”

It felt very familiar, nodding and trying to match his earnest descriptions with respect.

He moved his hands in elaborate patterns as the good 1/8 Sicilian he is and I suddenly felt transported back to another yard, another place, another intense little boy explaining how something worked.

Indeed, not just the adorable grandson’s father, but his grandfather–who spun stories of engineering marvels the first time I met him at 16–and even to his great-grandfather who always thought deeply and creatively about any problem that came his way.

Was the adorable grandson just another chip off the old block? All three generations of Ule men would like that description because it sounds mechanical–using a tool to do something constructive.

Or was he really a “spitting image?”

The grandfather in this line up likes to talk about “spitting image” as a contraction from “spirit and image.”

In this way, a person so described demonstrated both a similar spiritual state, or character, to the person he’s being described as looking like.

I like this concept because my grandson reminds me so much of his own father–an enthusiastic little boy who wanted to be right/

He always wanted to do well, and explain everything in a manner understandable to even someone as innocent of engineering schemes as, well, me.

(After knowing four generations, I can testify, it’s a family trait).

Over on the Phrase Finder website, they have a different idea for the term, wondering if it might really be

 ‘splitting image‘, i.e. deriving from the two matching parts of a split plank of wood.  . . .  The theory has its adherents and dates back to at least 1939, when Dorothy Hartley included it in her book Made in England: “Evenness and symmetry are got by pairing the two split halves of the same tree, or branch. (Hence the country saying: he’s the ‘splitting image’ – an exact likeness.)”

I don’t really think so.

Splitting or spitting the image?

For most people, the words “spitting image,” probably derive from the notion two people couldn’t be more alike than if one had spit the other out of his mouth–thus people who look very much alike, if not act the same.

These four Ule men in my life are different in many ways, but that engineering mind– got to figure out and work the problem, which may be the result of being first born males in all their families– appears in all of them.

Their eyes twinkle, too, and they all can take a joke.

But give them an engineering problem, and they’re on it.

It made me think of Genesis where God conferred with the other two in the Trinity and said, “Let us make man in our image.” In God’s image, He created us–to be like him.

The more time I spend with the Lord, the more I try to behave like Him. The more time I spend with God, the more I should reflect His spirit and image, too.

It’s a family trait.

Or at least I hope so.

Just as I have had the joy of knowing four generations of Ule engineering men, so, too, I’ve had the exquisite joy of seeing God’s light and character reflected in my husband, son and grandson.

And they don’t even have to spit.