As the landlady and her family and I talked one question kept popping up. Was I related to Fred Oddball? (Note: All names are fictitious). No I replied. I didn’t know anybody named Fred Oddball. I come from a large family. So large. in fact, that when I was a small boy I remember that enough people could attend a family picnic to form two full softball games with enough people left over to provide plenty of cheering spectators but since my immediate family had moved away when I was a small boy I had lost touch with most of my extended family members. There could have been a Fred Oddball in that bunch but I didn’t recall him.

Well, where were you born they persisted. In the Los Angeles area I replied. My last name Oddball wasn’t very common so now they were certain that I must be related to Fred Oddball but I didn’t know a Fred Oddball. I told them that I had an uncle (by marriage) named Fred but his last name wasn’t Oddball. They continued to pepper me with Oddball names some of which were familiar (like my father’s and grandfather’s names) but most were not so I just chalked up the few naming similarities to coincidences.

Working all day and studying in the evening left me with little time to visit with the landlady and her family but every time we met the subject of Fred Oddball came up. Unfortunately I couldn’t help them put the subject to rest. Later in the summer my wife came to visit me for a short time and she was able to spend some time talking with the renting family but we didn’t actually socialize so often my wife was very bored by the end of the day.

As the summer wound down it soon approached the time when I’d have to leave and return to my wife. The landlady’s family was very kind to me and I wanted to spend a little more time with them before I left while telling them how much I appreciated their consideration. So one Saturday morning about two weeks before I had to leave I went downstairs for a little visit. My timing coincided with the arrival of some family members coming for a family reunion. I was graciously introduced to everyone and the Fred Oddball question arose once again.

It turned out that one of the reunion members was doing a genealogical study of the family and he became more persistent than the rest in pursuing the question of Fred Oddball and he started throwing additional names at me. How about Orrin Oddball, Ernest Oddball, Olin Oddball among others he asked. I told him my father’s name was Olin and my grandfather’s name was Ernest but in general most of the names he inquired about were unfamiliar to me.

My answers seemed to stroke a flame of recognition and he pulled out a family chart. Amazingly there on a minor branch was my father, my grandfather and my two older sisters. It turned out that Fred Oddball (and Orrin and a few others) were my grandfather’s brothers (i.e., my great uncles).

Even more amazing I was related to the landlord’s family. They were in fact distant cousins of mine that I didn’t know about. And as if that weren’t enough Fred Oddball, my father and one of my uncles had actually visited Idaho to attend a wedding and had stayed in this very house. How weird was all that?

My new cousin told me more about my family than I ever knew before. We were distantly related and he’d also lost touch with my branch of the family so wasn’t able to gather all the family information for his chart (I was missing for example). I spent the better part of the remainder of the day filling in his chart with all the names, relationships and locations that I could recall of myself, my sisters, my aunts and uncles and my close cousins. He was most grateful.

Well, after it was discovered that I was family I had the run of the house. I was invited down to dinner every night and enjoyed a number of other family perks. All in all a very nice windup to an interesting summer and to think;

It all resulted from calling a wrong number!

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Tags: family, odd

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