Greetings to My Blood Kin

Hi to all the members of the tiny number of my surviving blood kin who talked to me by phone yesterday from Florida, and got the address of this weblog, and may or may not read it in the future. It was great!

Sometimes I almost forget that I have relatives of my own, intimately connected to me by blood, as distinguished from the much more numerous ones of my wife, who are heard from and about and encountered much more often. But the several members of my real family all live far away, on the other side of D.C. and in Florida, a situation intensified by my severe case of travel phobia, and so years of silence between us slip by almost unnoticed.

But also there is the circumstance that so many of the other members of my family, while still very much alive and active in my mind, are conducting all their activities entirely in the distant past, because they now reside really, really far away, like up in Heaven or wherever, off this planet anyway.

It is especially disheartening to be thus reminded of four of those relatives in whose presence I never existed, because they all left this life long before I was born.

Not many people -- in this country at least -- are thus fated never to see even one grandparent, mostly because of various late arrivals in this life, including my own.

Oh, well.....