A few more afterthoughts from last weekend’s viewing and funeral:

I chatted with a number of people at the viewing who told me they read my blog regularly. Some of them surprised me, since I really have no idea who reads it, nor how many readers I have. If you are a regular reader, why don’t you leave a comment occasionally so I know who you are?

My mother got a phone call from Florence this week, regretting that all of us cousins on my father’s side have been so busy raising our own families that we have been out of touch way too long. This coincides with the conversation Rita and I had, which I alluded to in my last blog. In the 1990s, Ronnie organized a series of annual family reunion dinners (on my mother’s side), which Jean and I were always too busy to attend which, in retrospect, was a shame. Ronnie stopped holding the reunions when some family members either died or got too old to travel, so that was an opportunity we missed which can never be regained.

Jean and I are determined to make more of an effort to socialize with relatives and friends though. Already we are planning to take my mother to visit Uncle Charley and Aunt Edna this fall, and maybe Richard and Florence will be there as well, since they are both retired now. And my mother’s cousin William in California hopes to come visit the New Jersey family in the spring. Mentioning William reminds me of a bit of Sabella family history which you might find interesting:

My mother’s parents were married in a double wedding uniting a brother and sister pair: my grandfather and his sister Margaret married my grandmother and her brother Willie. A generation later, my mother and her sister Chris married my father and his brother Duilio in another double wedding. There was even an article in the local paper alluding to the fact that they were the first known pair of double weddings in Hudson County. My mother and William shared the same genes and grew up as close as brother-and-sister, which is exactly what Rita and I did a generation later.