In the last year I've come to realize how blessed I've been to be a part of my family. Sure, my family has it's quirks, probably more than most, but it's also made up of Good People™, and sometimes that's worth its weight in gold.

My brother and step-sister now live in the Dallas area, too. This past year, we've started meeting for breakfast on Saturday or Sunday mornings once or twice a month. Ten years ago, I never would have thought this could happen.

Sure, my brother and I were pretty typical brothers when we were growing up. We fought, I thought he was a pest, he hated following me in school, that kind of thing. We were never close as youngsters, and when I went off to college, we pretty much lost all contact. Some of that was me, just not making any sort of effort to interact with him, but most of it was due to my extended family on my father's side telling him lies about what a horrible person I'd become and how he shouldn't be like me (I'd had a pretty nasty falling out with my father's side of the family, which was one of the factors that led up to my changing my name). Only a few years ago, after my brother had a similar falling out with the paternal side did he realize that he had been fed a line. We finally had a heart-to-heart about it where he apologized for thinking poorly of me and I reassured him that he was given bad information and wasn't responsible. That was about the time that he changed his name, too, ironically just a few weeks before I did, and neither one of us knew the other was doing it. Then once he moved into this area, we started hanging out a little more often and really getting to know each other again as adults. As an adult, he's a Great Person™. But I guess he'll always be my pesky younger brother.

I never really got to know my step-sister. She was 4 and I was 16 when her dad married my mother, and I left town a couple of years later. In fact, the first time I saw her after I left for college was on a return trip "home" with my wife, about 10 years or so after I left home, when she came to the door of the house, I answered the door, and thought she was one of my brother's friends. I didn't even recognize her! I still have yet to live that one down. In fact, it came up *again* at one of our breakfast meetings a few weeks ago. Thought she eventually moved in with my folks and we would see her when we went to visit them, I still really didn't interact much with her. But now that she's graduated from college, lived back east for a year (she lived across the bay from Manhattan on 9/11), and moved to Dallas ,my wife and I are getting to know her again, and she's turned out to be Good People™ too. In fact, she and my wife have become pretty good friends, which is always a relief.

And now our family is about to grow again. My pesky younger brother, who hates to hear that we thought he was going to be an "old maid" forever, is getting married in a couple of weeks. We've gotten to know his future wife and step-daughter at these family breakfasts over the last year, and I'm happy to announce that they're Good People™, too. One of these two brothers who swore on a stack of Bibles and other printed material that we would never have children is about to become a step-father, and the rest of us think he's going to be pretty good at it. That means I'll be an uncle again in a few weeks (my other step-sister also has a child, but she doesn't live anywhere near us, so we never get to see them). So I need to start reading the "How to be an Uncle" manual and see what all kind of things I can get away with in my new familial role.

So congrats to Jason, Erin, and Molly, and welcome to the family. I hope you'll find that you're gonna fit right in with the rest of us Good People™.