Family
Today I had my semi-annual phone chat with my cousin Lin. He is 83 years old and lives in Newberry, South Carolina. To be precise, he's my first-cousin-once-removed, the adopted son of my dad's Aunt Hazel (my grandmother's sister). His own dad, who died when Lin was a boy, was actually the brother of his adoptive father—so the person Lin called "Dad" was really his uncle. (Yeah, I have to sort that out anew every single time, too.) I have met Lin in person only once, on a family vacation that swerved through Newberry so my dad could visit with his Aunt Hazel —the mother of Lin's wife, Mabel. I was 11 or 12 at the time. This was in the early '70s, and it is the only memory I have of Aunt Hazel (who died in 2001 at age 102), or of Lin and Mable , or of their son, Ross (who died in 2010 at age 45). My three siblings and I remember Ross for a single conversation during that visit. He was maybe 7 then (he was three days older than my sister Karen) . ...