****-****-****

For the past couple weeks Yr Fthfl Srvnt has been carrying on a Facebook exchange with a long-lost cousin in NC.
This cousin is one of five “extraordinaries,” although I’m beginning to think only five is not enough.
Her father would be in their kitchen pounding the table with a pot, attempting to bring order into a giant family pow-wow. My cousin and I would be in her living room quietly discussing philosophy amidst the maelstrom of yelling.
“I wanna marry someone like my cousin ****!” I’d say. And amazingly I did. My wife was one of the “extraordinaries,” and now she’s gone, a victim of cancer.
Fond memories, of course. Her younger brother, last of my uncle’s children, and I were lobbing water-balloons into passing cars from the attic of their house in Lansdowne (PA).
We landed one in the back seat of a top-down Buick convertible. It’s angry owner stopped to pound the front-door of my uncle’s house. My uncle sent him packing. That uncle was first-born, also an all-knowing, knower-of-all-things. That Buick owner was no match for my uncle.
Years have passed since that pow-wow, which was in the early ‘60s. I was probably a high-school junior or senior — I began college in late 1962.
As a result of that pow-wow, one of an aunt’s two children was placed in our family. That aunt was committed to an insane-asylum after her husband bled to death in an at-home accident.
Placement was because my mother started crying amidst this pow-wow. That gathering was also where another aunt challenged the knower-of-all-things about his coat-hangers.
“Hey ****,” she asked; “how come all yer coat-hangers face the same way?”
“In case of fire,” he bellowed.
“Yer makin’ it awful easy for burglars,” my aunt snapped.
How can I forget this stuff!
Amidst the bedlam my cousin and I were calmly discussing Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Sartre.
“I wanna marry someone like my cousin ****,” I’d say. And I did, despite my torturous childhood.
I was convinced at an early age no woman would have anything to do with me; that I was rebellious and of-the-Devil. That was my hyper-religious parents and Hilda Q. Walton, my next-door neighbor and Sunday-School superintendent, also hyper-religious.

• My brother is also an all-knowing, knower-of-all-things. A wonderful opportunity to point out his blunders. Assertiveness and volume don’t make him right. We have a good time photographing trains. “Hey Jack; where we goin’?” “Main Street bridge in Gallitzin.” “We are not!” I shout. “Are too; Main Street bridge next to Tunnel Inn.” “WRONG-O, dude. Tunnel Inn is at 720 Jackson Street. Yer headed for Jackson Street bridge.”