July 05, 2003
During the 40s, after the war, everyone was having kids, and I grew up in the midst of an extended family of cousins and pseudo-cousins. Every Sunday, all summer long, caravans of these nuclear families would head out to the Long Island beaches or up to lakes in the Catskills, where blankets would be spread, beach umbrellas set up, and ice chests unpacked with enough food to keep the cousins running and splashing, digging and giggling until the setting sun sent us yawning for home.
That was when we all lived within three blocks of each other. Now many of us don’t even live in the same state. Many of our kids have never met because many of them live even farther away.
But I do have one cousin who lives about a half-hour ride from me and who, each summer, gathers as many of us cousins as he can at his ramshackled old house on a beautiful lake. Of all my cousins, he’s the one with whom I share both personal and political philosophies. We are both renegades and radicals compared to the rest of our family. Oddly enough, though, it’s his daughter who is now in Iraq, in charge of leading supply convoys between Kuwait and Baghdad. It’s his daughter to whom I sent a package of new white underpants and lots of Vitamin C lozenges. My cousin and I commiserate about our kids and how we brought them up to make their own choices and take their own chances.
Today, my mother and I spent the day at my cousin’s summer family get-together, where a new generation of cousins and pseudo-cousins ran and splashed and dug and giggled while the rest of us sat in the shade and ate. But it’s not at all the same as when we were kids. But then, what is?
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Old Comments (1)
dzwonki polifoniczne nokia on 14 Jun 2004
Hmmmmm interesting !!!