I’ve written before about all the spam I get, including that one time recently that I got weird gun spam. I pretty much knew it was spam because of the word salad contained therein, which included the phrase, “Pushing ahead through you have any different sorts of information concerning your proposing, moving past nobody characters, proceed and visit with us.” And it was pretending to be connected to PayPal, which made it a good bet that if you called the number or wrote back, someone would ask for bank information.
But I also get a lot of emails that I’m pretty sure aren’t spam but misfires meant for another B Nagler. After a while, I realized that most of the legit-looking ones (no weird grammar or typos like a very smart parrot wrote them under extreme duress, nothing related to sending or receiving money) were addressed to “Beatrice Nagler.” Although I do also get her spam, as well as her political emails. Turns out, according to Facebook, she is actually three different people, and according to LinkedIn, seven — two of them German (which I guess could explain the German spam, but not the French or the the Hebrew, which are the main languages of the spam I seem to get).
I’ve figured out that I mainly get political emails for the Beatrice Nagler in Michigan — wanting me to send money to Elissa Slotkin for Congress or Steven Olikara for Senate (he’s in Wisconsin, so I guess she spreads the love around), or do call banking on Michigan Prop 3 for the ACLU. Yes, I do find it comforting that my Michigan spam sister is a politically-active Democrat as well. According to LinkedIn, she is a writer, illustrator and dancer, who worked as a librarian for 16 years at the University of Michigan, and now teaches both improvisational dance and creative writing. She doesn’t have much of a Facebook page, and her LinkedIn doesn’t include the dates she was at college, but she’s been writing fiction and poetry for 35 years, so she must be about my age. She’s an artist trying to make ends meet between her creative work and her day jobs, with some success (her poetry has been published in journals), and still plugging away at five novels and several short stories-in-progress. Which is where it gets it a bit weird. We all want to think we’re exceptional, that I’m the B. Nagler with the talent that people will recognize, and yet in her alternate, Midwestern timeline, she’s the starving artist B. Nagler who eventually makes it big. Who’s to say? I can only hope that we are both right. I mean, with parallel universes, technically it’s not an either/or proposition, is it?
The emails that are differently fraught are the ones I get from what looks like real people looking for one of these other B. Naglers for important reasons — because then I have to figure out if I should respond. I got one from a probate lawyer looking for Blanche Nagler because she was the distant cousin of someone who had just died with no other next of kin. The lack of typos led me to think it was legit and write back, at which point I found out that the lawyer had tracked down some other people to help her — which was good, since I had no leads on Blanche. Then just this past year, I responded to an email from a historian writing a book about a leading figure in the prisoner’s rights movement, looking for a Nagler couple. I did some digging and found out that the guy who wrote me was in fact a historian whose work “focuses on 20th-century social movements, the Black radical tradition, and the carceral state,” and that the activist he was studying was basically a political prisoner, who’d been jailed on trumped up charges by Hoover’s FBI’s racist COINTELPRO program, became a jailhouse lawyer, and won many cases on behalf of other prisoners before he was granted clemency — in part due to the many defense committees set up in New York State to advocate for him. The Beatrice Nagler he was looking for and her husband were on one of them. Yes, more politically-active, left-wing Naglers! This research made me an official fangirl of all of these people, so even though I had no information to offer him, I did write the historian back to say, I don’t know these Naglers but good luck because gee you’re cool! As I was plumbing the depths of my inbox for this piece, however, I found that, as that crazy person who saves all of her emails, I actually did have the email addresses for them. Turned out that Beatrice had once tried to forward an email to herself from her daughter — a very impressive Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean with three degrees — which she unintentionally sent it to me. And then, several years later, her husband sent an email with one word — test — apparently trying to check if my email was his wife’s (if you, like me, have help your 80-something parents with their tech issues, you can think of many reasons why this might have happened). Of course, now I had to write the historian again to say, “Hey, look what I found!”, and he wrote back to say, “It’s thoughtful of you to remember this and follow up!”, which I interpreted as the nice guy way of saying, “Boy, you sure are an enthusiastic person I never expected to hear from again!”
And now I’m sure you’re thinking, “Boy, I sure am glad I’m not a B. Nagler or in any way related to one, because this crazy bitch would be prying into my life.” But all I can say is…probably not? Because these particular people are only fascinating to me because they somehow arrived in my inbox, served up to me like alternate universe Naglers. Similarly to how the B. Nagler in Michigan was kind of a blurred reflection of me (or am I of her?), this older Nagler couple have a lot of similarities with my parents: they are politically-active lefties around my parents’ age, the husband went to CCNY like my dad did, and his wife Beatrice got a doctorate in education and was a superintendent of schools, while my mother was a teacher and worked at the NJ Department of Education. On top of that, their daughter the professor went to Cornell like my brother (he didn’t know her — yes of course I asked), who is also a professor. The only thing missing in this scenario is me. If only I had chosen this different path, one of impressive academic leveling up. Sure, I have two degrees, but they are basically useless, and definitely don’t qualify me to be in this family of three Dr. Naglers.
Still, even if I wasn’t the most impressive Nagler daughter out there, I was happy with the synergy of all the Naglers I’d found — until I found the one from Indiana. And this brings me back to the piece of email I received a couple of weeks ago that got me started down this whole rabbit hole that has now taken up so much of my time, and yours.
Apparently we are back to guns, only this time I’m pretty sure this email is a real thing, because all of the links just seem to go to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (no, of course I didn’t click on them, just rolled over them, do you not get how good at this I am by now?). When I googled this Nagler’s first name combined with Indiana, I got a lot of different listings — obits for one from Minnesota, who died in 2017; Democratic political contributions from one from Michigan, who it appears is still kicking at 93. But then, I found the arrest for armed robbery, which led me to the guy with tattoos, which took me down the dark road leading to the Indiana Naglers. This is where I found Beatrice Nagler #3. She posts things like this:
And also this:
Which would be a weird juxtaposition, except that this is America, and this Beatrice’s wall is one big mess of God, prayer, and blessings memes, including this one, which is saying…what exactly? About…9/11?:
Between the God and the guns, the Indiana one is clearly the universe of opposite Naglers. I guess it makes sense that they, too, would have to exist, given the country we live in. But I can’t say that makes it any less strange, after all the other Nagler parallel universes had so many actual parallels. As a curious person, I’m always fascinated by the “what if”s of life; the roads that, given some weird quirk of fate, we maybe could have taken. But I have a hard time seeing how the Indiana Naglers could represent any sort of “what if” for me.
And maybe that’s for the best. There are only so many alternate versions of yourself that you would want or have time to explore. Given how much I’ve already spent googling all the different permutations of Beatrice Naglers and their families, trying to answer such questions as, “Is the Charles Nagler who recently died in Indiana the brother of the one in New York State, thereby tying those two branches together?!” (Spoiler alert: no), I can’t even justify the ones we’ve covered so far. Particularly when I have a screenplay I’m supposed to be revising.
Which I’ll be right back on as soon as I find out exactly what’s in an Indiana Department of Natural Resources After-Hunt Survey…
This was the strangest and most fascinating blog you have every written. Also how coincidental that there is another family of Naglers with similar backgrounds to ours! Too much!!!
Shades of the movie Brazil. FWIW - my secret sharer is the deputy commissioner of aging and long term care for New York State. He is smarter, more accomplished and better looking than I am. Oddly enough, he works with a woman with whom I went to law school.