Violating the Law…Part 3

Here is another very unlikely event which happened to me.

After basic training at Camp Haan, Calif., I was sent with a cadre of soldiers to open a new camp nearby at Arlington, in the middle of the orange groves. I have mentioned that I was raised as an orphan in a children’s home in Denver and, other than my younger brother and two half sisters, I knew of no other relatives. My father, was out of touch with us while I was growing up, and we first heard from him about the time I graduated high school and left the home.

One evening I went to a USO recreation center for military personnel. While there, I heard someone mention my name, Grodsky. I assumed that it was some other guy from my outfit. But when I looked around, I could see no one that I recognized. There were two soldiers conversing nearby, and when they were finished, I asked if either of them was named Grodsky. One of them indicated that his name was Dave Grodsky. As this is not a common name, we began to exchange information. He was stationed at a nearby camp, and he told me that his home and family were in Roxbury, Mass. I told him my father’s name, Max, and described my upbringing, indicating that I knew of no other relatives. He wrote to his father, and the upshot of this was that his father was my father’s brother, and Dave was my cousin. My father was from Lithuania or some other part of Russia, and after he came to America, lost touch completely with his family. It turned out that he had another brother in Chicago. So after all the years that had passed, my father was once again in touch with other members of his family, and I had acquired at least one cousin and a couple of uncles. I kept in touch with Dave during the war, and even after. When I was working in Washington D.C., I had an opportunity to meet him and his wife.

To tell the truth, I am not strongly inclined to maintain family connections, other than my own family. I did have an opportunity, when I was stationed for a while in Illinois, to meet my uncle who lived there. However, I never did maintain these links. But, it has always struck me that this freakish contact was another instance of an event that, somehow, would be extremely low on the scale of normal probability.