I Have An Uncle in Eighth Grade ...

So I'm at my uncle's house. Several of my uncles are around, and it's a pretty standard gathering of uncles. All of them are about the same age. All of them like to tell stories about times when they used to be full of energy and when things were "different" (of course they were).

A young lady, probably around 25 years old, walks up to my dad from the road. About a minute later, my dad summons me.

"This is my cousin."

Wait a minute. I paused for a minute because I wasn't sure exactly how to proceed with my line of questioning. It crossed my mind for a moment that I should just accept the relationship and carry on with the day. But that moment didn't last long.

"You can't just drop that and not give an explanation," I said. "You are clearly not even close to the same age. How can you two be cousins? Or, I get it, you're an African cousin in the way that close friends and neighbors that you grew up with can be cousins, right?"

Wrong. It turns out that my dad's mom and her dad are brother and sister. But how? My quick calculus determined that if my grandmother is conservatively 100 years old, and her brother is roughly in the same age bracket, that would mean that my dad's cousin was born to a father that was between 70 and 80 years old. Unbelievable.

But obviously the story doesn't end there. My 25 year old aunt tells me that her youngest brother is in eighth grade. You do the math. That means my uncle is in the eight grade. And it's not because he can't pass classes. It's because he's 13 years old. I'm almost 20 years older than him. Which could very well mean that at the age of 80-something, this man was still having children. I think I'll be turning to some other hobbies at that age, like tai chi or denture cleaning.

Now for the explanation. My dad's uncle had multiple wives. So my youngest set of uncles and aunts were from his last marriage. So has children who are my dad's age, and a child who is in the eighth grade. And there you have it ... the story of my uncle in the eighth grade.