Janice Williams Loves Austin

I just had a great dinner with a “new” cousin. Tim M. found me a month or two ago through the “family project” page of my website (which has been woefully untouched since summer). He and I share the same great-great-grandfather Hood, who was a Williamson County, Texas, pioneer. Finally, with the holidays and obligations over, we met up in Georgetown tonight for a great dinner at the Monument Cafe and two hours of scintillating conversation.

I am not going to put Tim’s full name here. He apparently has stalkers and I’d hate for them to Google him. He’s famous in his industry and has been on TV promoting his business and doing some very interesting things and has found out that “friends” come out of the woodwork.

His mother and my grandmother were first cousins. I wish Mamma were alive today so I could tell her all about Tim and ask her about his family. It was fun to get together with him personally. Email is great, but you sometimes can’t tell people’s tone or opinions. In person we were both fully able to confess to the fact that we think our family reunion is boring and maybe there are one or two people that we both know within the family that are pompous.

Tim has met many famous people and had some wild stories about so many of them. Imagine David Allan Coe standing in his boxer shorts at the hotel door that joins your suite to his, asking if you want to come party with him and his “ol’ lady.”

He also had great stories related to the radio personalities that I’ve worked with for years that he has known through his business. We tended to agree on our opinions of most of them, as well.

Tim loves classic country music and you know how I feel about it so we talked music through all of this, too.

One interesting theme of the night seemed to be how things happen for a reason. How events occur that turn our lives in completely different directions. Tim’s ancestors from the other side of his family came to this part of Texas and got off the train in Granger. Their ultimate destination was San Angelo where other members of the family had already settled. But there was a saloon in Granger and one thing led to another and now the family remains near Granger almost 100 years later.

Or the story about Tim being a pilot. To be a pilot, there are required physical check-ups on an every-six-month basis. Tim, hale and hearty, went for his semi-yearly physical. The doctor poked and prodded and asked if he was in pain. No, no pain, he was fine. The doctor sent him for a CT scan. The radiologist asked how long Tim had been sick. Sick? He’s not sick, he told them. The radiologist wouldn’t let him leave the clinic and then the doctor called, informing Tim he had a very large tumor on his kidney. Tim had to drive straight to Seton Hospital to have it removed the next day. If he had not had that physical and that diagnosis, he would have probably died in six months. Wow. Makes you not want to put off that annual exam, right? He said his mother was always worried that flying would get him killed, yet flying saved his life.

Since he was a pilot, I got to tell about my brush with death while flying as a traffic reporter in Dallas. He had all the appropriate reactions and understood how close and how serious that near hit was.

Tonight was pure delight and I had expected it to be, based on the liveliness of his emails. I had a flash of concern this afternoon, though, when I thought back to another cousin I met and spent an afternoon with back in the 1990s. I don’t remember how much communication we had had prior to his visit, but he was odd and deadly dull. I guess he was too distantly related to be fun-loving like everyone within most of my family tree is. He must have had some dull blood mix in somewhere along the way.

Tim also brought me a chart he made outlining how he and I are cousins with Elvis. He and Elvis are sixth cousins twice removed, I think, so I am three times removed. Elvis made the movie “Kissin’ Cousins.” I believe sixth cousins three times removed counts, right?