I grew up assuming my family was normal, that what we did was just the stuff that people in general do. But now I am old enough and traveled enough to realize that some of what I once considered “ordinary human behavior” belongs instead to family idiosyncrasy. It turns out that my kin did not always initiate me into standard human behavior, but something else. Some of what we do is just our own devising, the result of how our collective idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, and even br...
