I was just at my parents' house for dinner, where I heard some stories about my grandfather's family. One of his brothers dropped out of Harvard to build a schooner that he intended to sail around the world. He went up to Maine and built it, and while there fell in love with a local girl who ran away with him on the sailing adventure. They loaded the boat up with two grand pianos, which apparently they got very inexpensively and wanted aboard for ballast, not for music. They sailed it down to Florida, where they ran into some weather and broke a mast. While they were fixing the boat she got pregnant, and that kept them from continuing around the world.
Another of my grandfather's brothers was a lawyer, and what I learned about his strained family life led me to think he was an earlier era's version of Anonymous Lawyer. A third brother was a physicist, a fourth was mentally retarded, and the fifth died in a mountaineering accident while still in college.
Comments