Chris over at Rude Cactus was just talking about his long-lost sister. It's a great post about family in spirit, rather than family in biology. (You need to be sure to read the Christmas and Easter links.) But it got me to thinking about the news bomb I had dropped on me last Christmas.
We were sitting in the living room at my dad's fiancee's house (another long story). My younger brother was there as was my dad's brother, Uncle Fred. Fred is a really kind man. Life and love have been hard on him, but he's never been unkind to anyone that I ever knew of. Fred has two sons, Devin and Stephen, who were with their own young families that morning.
So we were sitting there unwrapping presents, and Uncle Fred says, "I talked to my son Christopher yesterday." I sat there blinking, running the quick inventory of known cousins in my head. He noticed I looked puzzled and said, "I haven't told you about your cousin Christopher?" I said, "Uh, no." Fred went on to explain that when he and his first wife were married, she was pregnant. Fred was in college, she was barely out of high school, and while they wanted to get married, they knew they couldn't support a baby. They ended up putting the infant boy up for adoption. Apparantly my cousin Christopher is around 33 years old and living somewhere near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
It seems very odd to me that there is a member of my near family out there that I don't know and who doesn't know me. I can't say that I'm particularly close to the cousins I am acquainted with, but still...seems strange, doesn't it?