STRANGERS
I don’t know when or how I developed my fairly recently (the last few years, I guess) acquired proclivity for meeting and engaging perfect strangers in conversation. Maybe for most of my 75 years it’s been somewhat dormant, lurking right under my skin, or awaiting just the right time to emerge. I don’t remember, but cousin Mary Lynn Caldwell Morrill says that at extended Caldwell family gatherings, usually at Grandma’s house, my dad and his 11 siblings’ (Mary Lynn is the oldest child of the oldest of the 12, my Uncle Frank) birth and home place, I was running around, bugging everybody, asking endless questions and getting in to mischief while brother, Bill, 4 years older, was the reserved and perfectly behaving elder statesman (brother Harry, 2 years younger, was yet to be classified). The Kiser (my Aunt Verla Kiser had 4 sons and one daughter) boys (Frankie, the youngest, was 8 years my senior) had two, probably more but two that I remember, usual responses to my incessant queries: 1) “You’re too little in the britch(es)”, and 2) “That’s for me to know and you to find out”. (A few days after writing this paragraph, I called 1st cousin, Ben Franklin, who I hadn’t talked with in a while, and told him about this story I’m writing. He said he remembered me as being pretty quiet and reserved in the old days, traits that he only began to notice receding in recent years. Who knows or cares where my inquisitiveness came from? The fact is, it’s arrived in spades!)
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