Eight Random Facts About Steve

Steve here.

I had dreaded being tagged with this meme and was ducking Dr Hypercube when Patrick came in on my blind side. But it turns out that when I brainstormed it with Libby I had more than "2.6". So:

1) I am the oldest of nine children. The last two (twins) were born after I left home.

2) My paternal grandparents came from a tiny village on Lake Maggiore just south of Switzerland. When I came to Magdalena I found that people from neighboring villages had come here in the Nineteenth Century as herders and miners, and several had founded long- lasting ranch dynasties, even though some had lost the original names (Papa, Bianchi, Strozzi, Gianera. I have contemporaries who still remember the strange patois the old folks spoke, more akin to Provencal than modern Italian. I never met such people in Boston, though there are also some in Raton NM. We now call each other "primo", Spanish (!) for cousin. One woman (Sis Olney) looks like the twin of one of my brothers.

3) I live "downtown on a dirt road" in a town of less than a thousand, 100 miles from the nearest city. Yet somehow I own nine sport jackets, four suits, and a tux. I don't own a single T- shirt and haven't for thirty years, except one I bought because it had a cladogram of raptors ( I photographed it and gave it to a poor drunk).

4) I have been married four times, twice briefly and twice to Libby without a divorce (C of E and local Catholic-- LOOONG story). My best man on my first to Libby was John Carlson of Prairie Ice blog and penguin fame

5) I have never owned a new car or truck.

6) My life has been full of looped coincidences. For instance: several months after I had been seeing Libby I called her to find her in a state of (happy) shock. Her mother had been reading Querencia- The- Book and had come to the part of Betsy’s being born in China and her twenty - year- older sister Jane. She called Libby to say that she and Jane had been the first two Anglo babies born in Anwei province.

And she was holding a photo of them sharing a baby carriage when both were less than a week old.

Patty, Lib’s mother, had left China at the age of eight. We put them in touch for the first time in over seventy years. And I was able to tell her who all the people in her China photos were.

7) I have a book that used to belong to Lawrence of Arabia.

8) There were armed equestrian bronzes of a female warrior in all my grammar school classrooms.



And what about the 2.6? Well, I’ll give you two.

Matt trained his first bird in Panama.

Reid is the only archaeologist I know who also used to work in the aerospace industry.

Back when I can! I couldn’t get blogger at all, and got disconnected twice while typing this!