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;-) I truly hope you're writing all this down and saving it. You have either a best selling book, a screenplay, or both.

Free spirits, like your hermit-cousin, Oscar & Marion, Uncle Johnny, and our palo, are very special people. It's a blessing for me to read about them and see how some folks live life on their terms - not those of others.

Until I met Mrs.lodwick at age 32, my plan was to be one of those free spirits who answered to no one, and went my own way like a leaf in the breeze. But committment turned my life in a different, not better and not worse, just different direction, and I've tried to do the best I can with this new course that's been set for me.

Slowly I have been writing down my memories of the family, and their stories...I was just blessed to have been born into this family, and their lives and their antics, have always enthralled and amused me...There are indeed, so many free spirits among them....

Many of these stories actually sound made up, I know...yet, they are all true...life is often more interesting than fiction, at least in my family, so it seems...

Having been raised in such a family, I always just assumed everyone elses family was like mine...growing up, I never considered any of them odd, or quirky, or eccentic...they were just 'family'....

It was not until I got older, that I realized just how colorful my family was...when my dad died, and I was speaking to one of my childhood friends, who grew up considering my mom and dad as his own 'ma and pa', I metioned that I never really fully realized how eccentric my whole family was...this friend said to me, that was the reason all my friends congregated at my house....my parents were so different, so odd, so colorful, and so much fun, as was the rest of our family that they knew...

My son also knows all these stories, and finds them so funny....he will often tell me, when he meets family of his friends, he finds them, in his words, 'boring', simply because they do conform in the main, to what is considered 'normal'....

I really am blessed to have grown up among such grand characters...and blessed that they were all great talkers as well, so that even when I may not know a family member in the flesh, so to speak, I know them by reputation...