Relatively speaking

A friend of mine reminded me the other day about the many characters that seem to be part of my family. My favorite was my Uncle Paul, who was brilliant, as in offered the chair of the math department at Harvard brilliant. He turned down the offer to open a TV repair shop in Bayonne, New Jersey. Uncle Paul always had weird little cars, often French, that no one had ever seen before, like a Simca that was Robin's Egg blue. God knows where he found them. Ask Uncle Paul who he thought of as a genius, and the list had one name: Dr. Seuss. I'm not making this up.

Then there's my stepbrother, who at one time was wanted by the police in a couple of states. In New York, for example, he had disagreed with the way the judge who handled his divorce divvied up the property, so one night he broke into his ex-wife's house and redistributed things. She didn't mind that he took some of her stuff, but she was not happy that he took the dog. The story has a happy ending, though: they've since remarried. In Arizona he dissolved a business partnership he had with another guy by taking what he thought was his share of the tools and equipment (it was an auto repair business) and leaving the state in the middle of the night. One day I'll get into why he was wanted in Florida and New Jersey.

And speaking of New Jersey, I'm reminded of the private detective who was watching our house when my stepfather-to-be, who was then dating my mother, was going through a nasty divorce. His soon-to-be ex had him followed by a private investigator, though the guy was easy to spot: I was taking the trash cans to the street one night and I saw him in a car with out of state plates across the street, wearing sunglasses (at 10 p.m.) and pretending to read a newspaper. It might have been more convincing had he not been holding the newspaper upside down.

Noticing he had a gun in a shoulder holster, I called the police, as innocent as a 16 year old could be, to tell them that a man with a gun was parked across the street from our house. It turned out the James Bond wanna-be didn't have a permit for the gun, and so the police confiscated it and told him that his boss could come retrieve it. I never saw him again.

Then there's my other stepbrother, the only original Silicon Valley hacker who didn't become rich, despite having helped Steve Wozniak build the Apple I computer. (He and Woz are still close friends.) And my grandmother, who for awhile sold tickets at the porn movie house across the street from my grandparents' apartment, though she would have been mortified if forced to watch what her theatre was showing.

Sometimes, relatively speaking, I feel disgustingly normal. But it doesn't last.