Howdy, Cousin

I, like many other people, have wrestled with a conundrum. It is this: I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents and so on. Doing the math, given a present population of eight billion people, there must have been, in the days of my great-great-grandparents, 128 billion people. But we know this is not true. Why? Because, we are told, cousins marry cousins. It took me a while to get my head around that one, but it's true.

It turns out that all earthlings are cousins. Every human is a relative of mine, and the furthest removed is a 14th cousin. So it has been calculated by greater mathematicians than I.

Among my more distant cousins are Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin, Idi Amin and Stephen Harper. You can choose your friends but not your relatives.

I hope that during my lifetime, my cousin the Dalai Lama will visit my community. I would love to meet him for the first time and introduce him to my friends and acquaintances. All of whom are also my cousins, by the way.