My great great aunt Josephine was, as far as I know, dead before I was born, but I grew up with her legend. She was a not-quite black sheep. I’m not sure there are any black sheep on that side of the family, but if there are it’s probably the guy who went prospecting and sent back (I believe) a lump of fool’s gold with a note that began brother, I know I done wrong and ended with a request for money.1 What wrong he done, I couldn’t tell you. I just know he done it. I also can’t tell you if he got the money. Really the only two things you’d want to know, I guess.
So if Josephine wasn’t a black sheep, what was she? Let’s call her a sheep that had been raised by goats and never really knew how to be a sheep, even though it wasn’t a goat, either. She was raised separately from the rest of her family because her mother, who was, coincidentally, also named Barbara, went temporarily insane after either her birth or the birth of one of her siblings. So Josephine—an…