I DON'T RECALL ever meeting my distant cousin Bradley Morrah, whose given name sprang from the same source as my own. About all I knew about him was that he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1966, becoming the first South Carolina Democrat to lose to a Republican in the 20th century.

Family lore holds that my grandmother later said, "Bradley, you're a fine young man, but you should have known better than to run against Strom Thurmond."

I told that story to the senator himself in 1989, the first time I actually met him. (At least, I think it was the first time. I vaguely recall having been introduced as a small child in the late '50s to a man I was told to call "senator," but I can't picture a face.) The senator was as delighted by my story as if 1966 had just happened -- which perhaps to him it had.

"Bless her heart," he said of Grandma. "I'd like to meet her." Alas, I had to tell him that she had passed on a couple of years before, having been actually older than the senator himself -- as hard as that is to imagine now.

By the time I met him that day, the actions and events that had built the Thurmond legend had all taken place a generation or two earlier. In fact, the sheer scale of time involved in contemplating the Thurmond record is unsettling, like trying to comprehend geological periods.

I am a grandfather, yet most of the deeds for which he is either famous or infamous took place before I was born or when I was too young to pay attention.

A decade before my birth, he was already doing things that he was, by conventional wisdom, "too old" to do. He was 41 when he went into France on a glider as part of the D-Day invasion. That is often described in accounts of his life in matter-of-fact terms, but it was a suicidally reckless and brave thing to do, far beyond the routine, safe duty with which many politicians of that generation sought to burnish their resumes. Gliders going into Normandy didn't land; they crashed, and their passengers either miraculously lived to fight or they didn't. Strom was lucky.

From then on, he would defy time and the odds again and again. He married one beautiful young woman barely out of her teens when he was 44, then did so again when he was 66. He would not become a grandfather himself until he was 100.

When he was 51, he became the only person in history elected to the U.S. Senate as a write-in. When he was 55, he set the all-time filibuster record at 24 hours, 18 minutes. At age 61, he became the first S.C. politician of prominence to switch to the Republican Party. That would have been political suicide for anyone else, but my cousin still couldn't beat him two years later.

If only all that energy -- from his Dixiecrat bid for the presidency to the filibuster -- had been directed toward something other than resisting the inevitable, so much could have been different. He was such a force, the might-have-beens are painful to consider.

But all of that was so far behind him when I met him that day in 1989. By then, he had become known for other things -- small things, mostly. Beyond voting a strict conservative line in the Senate, he contented himself with doing favors for constituents. All constituents, black and white -- for despite his early efforts, black folks now voted, so he had rolled with the tide, and survived again.

Survival, indeed, was becoming the largest part of his legend. The only accomplishment that still lay before him was becoming the oldest and longest-serving senator in the nation's history. He was now famous, in short, for being old -- but for having the vigor and appetites of a teenager. If it was an image he cultivated, he did it with persuasive artlessness.

That day when my colleague Lee Bandy took me to meet him, his legendary quirks were on display. It took a few minutes to get him to sit still, as he was doubly distracted -- there was a trio of pages waiting to meet him, and a free feed sponsored by pork producers down the hall. "'Scuze me while ah get these guhls some haht dawgs," he said, apparently not noticing that one of the three was male. "Y'all want some haht dawgs?" he asked us as he herded the pages away. We declined, and eventually he returned and we were able to talk.

I would have other conversations with the nation's senior senator, but somehow that meeting would stick in my mind as epitomizing his essential Stromness -- the hustling about, the enthusiasm for young women and a well-stocked table, the desire to serve even in small ways, and the personal touch.

My last extended encounter with him was a lengthy interview in his office in 1998. He spent much of the time telling me his life story, which necessarily took a while.

A day later, I ran into him for the last time. I attended a ceremony in the East Room at the White House, and there was Strom himself, walking in proudly on the arm of President Clinton. Later, I watched as an aide helped him down the steps under the north portico and into his car. He had become feeble. It turned out that there was a limit after all to how long time could be cheated.

He had survived so much -- the war, his young first wife, my cousin and all those other adversaries and friends, and the 20th century itself. But on this Earth, there is always a limit.

Perhaps, as God is merciful, he's now in a place without such endings -- a place where he can again do headstands to impress the girls, and where the buffet overflows with all the hot dogs that even he can eat.