It's all relative

I dreamt that I was visiting a cousin in England who was a physicist.  He was young - in  his late 20s - and had written a very popular book about a tachyon in which he credited my father for "intellectual contributions".  My father was/is a mathematician and reading his name on the byline filled me with pride.

My cousin's career and literary acclaim rested on the idea that a particle people had known about for a few decades had, under some circumstances, a shelf life.  It was a very, very, very long shelf life, on the order of millenia.  But it explained why all over the globe, million year old petroleum was accumulating a strange fuzzy goo and slowly going bad. 

I read about his book in the basement while a parade of my distant relatives inched through a line leading to a cash register.  Instead of buying anything, as each family member approached the cashier, they would share a few sentences of the most significant events in their lives for the last 20 years.  This was for my benefit so that I could quickly catch up.

Two of them on my mom's side were 30 something cousins I had never met - a reformed biker-turned plumber with tattooed arm sleaves confessed that he'd recently lost his born-again faith of fifteen years; a large blonde woman explained that ever since her conversion to evangelical Christianity she'd gained and been unable to lose 50 pounds.  Unlike the biker, her faith was intact.