I did it! I have finally achieved greatness!

Just a note. The start of this edition’s Happy Trails is coming a little more than a year late but that’s okay because the numbers just don’t add up in my life anyway.

For most people, it takes a lifetime to achieve greatness. Take my father, for instance. He didn’t achieve greatness until he was 76. My grandfather didn’t achieve it until he was 84. But I achieved it at only 36. In record time, in my opinion.

I won’t brag about it because it was easy. So easy, I didn’t have to do a thing. It just happened. One day, I wasn’t great. The next I was. It happened the same way for my father. You could almost say “greatness without effort” runs in my family. Because in my family (and in yours, too), someone else makes you great. For me and my dad it was my niece who made us great when she had a daughter, making me a great uncle and my father a great grandfather. There you go: Greatness in one, fell swoop. And it was my niece who did all the work! Anyone who tells you achieving greatness is hard is an overachiever.

By having a daughter and making me great, my niece did me a huge favor because she made me great before my wife made me a father.

Yes, you read that right. I’m going to be a father. At the time of writing this my wife is exactly (to the day) 19 weeks along, and when my son is born in November, I’ll have been great for about one year and eight months, which is a relief because the pressure of achieving greatness in his lifetime is over. If my son ever accuses me of not being a great father, I can argue, “I am. My niece, your cousin, who’s old enough to be your aunt, has the paperwork to prove it.”

At this point, you might be thinking, Well, what’s the oddity in all this?

Let’s start here, with the numbers, keeping in mind, I was never any good at math.

How could a 36 year old be a great uncle?

Easy, when you become an uncle for the second time at 10, it’s pretty much downhill from there.

With that info, you might be thinking, Boy, they have them young his family.

Not really.

Seventeen, 14, and 10-and-a-half years separates me from my siblings. To date, I’m an uncle seven times over, with my youngest niece being 18 and my oldest niece being 29 (about 29, her birthday’s in August).

So when my son is born, he’s going to have a number of first cousins all old enough to be his parents, and second cousin who’s older than he is by about two years, which shouldn’t be all that strange in my family because I have eight third cousins all older than I am and three first cousins older than I am, two of which by 14 and 12 years.

Let’s stack one more oddity on top of this. My grandfather was born in 1903. He’s been dead for many years now, but when I was growing up, my grandfather was about the age of most of my friends great grandfathers.

At this point, you might be wondering, how did all this happen in his family. The answer is easy: I was an accident.

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