My recent series on the Troutman cousins has left me with some questions.

Why didn’t we visit them?

I think it comes down to reciprocity.

My mother, I think, was a big believer in reciprocity. So if a family came to visit us, we needed to return the favor. On the other hand, if a family did not visit us, that did not set up a reciprocal commitment.

And Clarence and Elsie, for whatever reason, never came to visit us, and that carried over to their offspring.

Of course, Bryan lived out of state, and Byrd died fairly young, and Stuart didn’t have a family. We could have visited nearby Glenn and his family, but as they never came to see us, I’m guessing that it just never occurred to my parents to go to see them. It’s was probably as simple as that.

Before I started researching the cousins, Byrd’s wife Grace was the only wife whose name I remembered and who I could picture in my mind, so I suspect that we did spend some time with her, possibly before before Byrd died and afterwards, but I don’t specifically remember any occasions.

My sister sent me a note to tell me that she remembered Bryan’s children because she played with them when he came to visit Clarence and Elsie. That must have been after Clarence retired and moved into Womelsdorf, and that would have been when I was old enough not to always go along when my parents went a-calling. So my sister and I have slightly different memories. And I’m presuming that would have been when my parents went to visit my grandparents, who at that point lived next door to Clarence, so Donna might have found playing with three young cousins once removed to be more fun than just sitting around and talking to the old folks.

The biggest surprise for me was discovering that Bryan worked in the computer field for IBM. 

That means I had a cousin on my father’s side and an uncle (Neal) on my mother’s side who worked in the computer industry.

So perhaps it’s not too surprising that I ended up working with computers.

It’s just a shame that both of those gentlemen lived nowhere near me as I was growing up so neither one of them exerted any kind of influence over me.

Imagine if they had been influences on me as I was growing up and had gotten me enthusiastic about computers. How different might my life have been. Instead, like Dorothy, I had to discover it for myself.