So, how was your week?

Last weekend, as temperatures in Ocean City climbed to summerlike conditions and many folks spent their last day on the beach for 2023, Susie and I traveled against traffic on the 9th Street Bridge, heading out of Ocean City. Our destination for the day was Downingtown, Pennsylvania, a place that we’d traveled through many times when our three kids were small on our annual trek to the Lancaster/Strasburg Amish area of PA. Of course, I’m speaking about trips back in the last 80s and early 90s, and the area had changed greatly since those idilic days of our children’s youth, but sightseeing was not the purpose of our visit. This time we were there to reconnect with a cousin of mine from the D’Elia side of our family, that we had not seen since she was a little girl.

Anna-Maria is the middle child of my Dad’s brother Tom and his wife Carolyn. While my Dad fell somewhat in the middle of the many D’Elia children age wise, Tom was the youngest brother, the baby of the family if you will. Not only did my Uncle and his new bride seem young to the cousins, but I was in my late teens and early 20s when Anna-Maria and her two brothers Tommy and Stephen were born. They were definitely kids when Susie and I got married, when our oldest Billy was born, and a year later, when my Dad died. So the last time we saw the three youngest D’Elia cousins was about 40 years ago!

I won’t go into the facts surrounding the reason that for 40+ years we were cut off from our D’Elia Family, but suffice it to say that sometimes the sins of the Fathers (and Mothers) end up taking family away from you as an unplanned consequence. I will, however, get into the facts that tell the story about getting back together with Anna-Maria and her husband Tom.

One of our group of friends here in Ocean City was a woman older than us named Dale Nicholas. Dale was a regular part of our Saturday Dinner Club, that I liked to refer to as our Ocean City Family. She was the first one to call if you were under the weather, and must have had an open account with Hallmark, because every birthday or anniversary, you could count on a card in your mailbox from Dale. A number of years ago, when Dale turned 70, Susie and I had a surprise birthday party for her at our house, and met two of her daughters. Unbeknownst to use, one of those daughters, Johanna, lived in the same school district as Anna-Maria and Tom and their two boys, and she and Anna-Maria were Facebook friends. On one of our Saturday nights out, Johanna commented on a picture that Dale was tagged in on Facebook and Anna-Maria saw the picture. After that she asked Johanna to ask her Mom for our address, and the rest is history!

So after having not seen Anna-Marie since she was a little kid, and having never met her husband Tom, I did have a little anxiety as we traveled the 2 hours or so to their house. What would they be like, would it be easy or hard to talk to them, and what, if anything did we still have in common? Well, I should not have worried, because they are a great couple, and obviously Anna-Maria and I have a lot of shared family to talk about, and we got an update on everyone. We obviously shared Aunts and Uncles and lots of cousins, and caught up with who had died, who lived where, and the general state of the family. We learned about her brother Tommy and Stephen’s lives and their families, and talked a lot about Anna-Maria and Tom’s twin sons Joseph and Nicholas, and compared experiences to Krissi and Kenny, and the differences between Boy/Boy twins and Girl/Boy twins.

Frankly, the time flew, and before we knew it, it was time for us say our good-byes, and to make the trip back home to Ocean City. But I can say with certainty, having a cousin living less than 2 hours away from us definitely means this is the first, but not the last time the 4 of us will get together! As we left, we said that next time we’ve got to get them to visit us in Ocean City and see our beach! The sad part was that our friend Dale died last year, and Anna-Maria never got to thank her for putting us back together. Dale would’ve been pleased with the outcome!