Cousins

“Danny is as near to a brother as I ever had, same age and growing up, same weight and strength. … In childhood I can remember no picnic, no circus, no competition, no Christmas without Danny beside me as close as my own right arm.”

- from The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

When I was growing up, my group of friends changed constantly. I haven’t been in consistent touch with anyone from my childhood, and I’ve often thought that it is sad that I don’t have any lifelong friends. But lately, I’ve realized that I’m wrong about that. I may not have school or neighborhood friends that have been around consistently since my childhood, but always, always, there have been my cousins.

I refer mostly to my mother’s side of the family. My mom has two sisters and a brother, so there are four of them in all, and there are seven of us cousins. I don’t have many non-school-related memories of when I was young that don’t involve at least a few of them.

First, of course, there was always my sister, Laurie. We’ve had difficulties in our relationship at certain points, but we had our share of fun together, too. Christmas Eve was always a big event. We’d spend several days prior planning out a list of activities we would do during the night on Christmas Eve, as we obviously were not going to sleep. We’d camp out in my sister’s room (she had the bigger room, but I’m not bitter…) designing 10-foot Christmas trees and making up alternative lyrics to Christmas carols. Until about 11pm, when I fell asleep. I have a feeling that Laurie was usually up much later.

One of my mom’s sisters, Judy, lived about a 10-minute drive from us. We spent many an afternoon and weekend at Aunt Judy and Uncle Don’s house with our cousins, Kim and Mike. I often refer to Kim as my first friend. We are almost exactly the same age, and we were friends almost since birth. It was always fun for me to hang out with Kim. She was the epitome of 7- to 13-year-old cool. She had a sit-n-spin, and a trampoline, and a NKOTB sleeping bag. And most of the time, she was willing to share those things with me. Kim has always known what she wanted and almost always made it happen. She’s had her life planned out since age 8. I can remember listening to her tell me what her wedding would be like, how old she would be when she had her first kid, everything down to the last detail.

This was all bewildering to me at the time, but now I regret not taking notes. Kim is now 28 and has everything she said she would: a husband, a child, a house, a doctoral degree, and a career. I don’t know how she does it, but I am proud of my first friend and I aspire to learn to make things happen for myself the way she does.

Mike is Kim’s younger brother. Even though he is a couple of years younger than us, and a boy, he was often forced (or bored enough) to play with us. What I remember most about Mike on those afternoons is that he was always willing to take all the crap roles. We’d pull each other around the driveway in a wagon, pretending that one of us was a king or queen in a carriage, one of us was an attendant walking alongside, and one of us was the horse pulling the carriage. Mike would take his turn as the horse, then we’d stop to change roles, and somehow Mike would end up being the horse again. He always took whatever cards he was dealt and didn’t complain much, so long as we agreed to pretend that his name was Bo. (He had a weird fascination with the name Bo.)

Later on, I always appreciated that Mike stayed interested in things like my school plays. He came with my aunt to see me play the lead when I was a senior. He even told me afterward that he liked it (though he also criticized my dart throwing). Mike is now all grown up and much taller than me, though he remains “little brother Mike” and a head shorter than me in my mind. He still takes a lot of the crap – his wife and I poked a lot of fun at him when I saw him a few days ago – but he’s made his own way. He remains one of the most likeable people I know.

My mother’s brother, John, lived in the next city over. John and my Aunt Tina have one daughter, Jennifer. My childhood memories of her are not as strong, mostly because she was a good bit older than us and not so much interested in being pulled in a wagon or listening to NKOTB. She always seemed a little bit larger than life. I can remember going to one of her swim meets once. I was sitting next to Kim, and Jennifer walked up to us in her swimsuit and swim cap. We just stared at her. “It’s me, guys!” she said, but it didn’t seem possible that we knew someone big and important enough to actually be swimming. I know Jennifer a little better now, and she’s fun to talk to and has two sons that are fun to watch and play with. But back then, Jennifer was someone I thought I would never be old enough to be like.

Now and again, we’d venture across the state to visit the third sister, Janice. Jan and Garry’s older son is Josh. Josh is just a year older than Kim and me, so the three of us would kind of congregate at family gatherings. Because he was older, and he was a boy, and he lived farther away, I think Josh felt left out of the circle sometimes. He was bigger and stronger and faster than us and tended to always win every game. When winning got boring, he would make trouble instead. This often took the form of stealing something from one of us and refusing to give it back, or telling on his brother. When trouble started, you wanted Josh on your side.

The troublemaker side of Josh still lives on. He’s still a big joker, though the jokes are not so mean any more. But the always-the-winner Josh is the one I still see the most often. He casually wins all the 5Ks he enters and starts training for another Ironman race less than a year after finishing the first one. Yet he is completely supportive of those of us (read: me) who are just happy to finish a triathlon or a marathon. I’ve grown to really appreciate that about him.

Last but not least, there is Kyle. Kyle is Josh’s brother, and was always the little one. The kid definitely knew how to use that to his advantage, though. I can remember one time that we were allowed to go down into Josh and Kyle’s basement. We each got to choose a bottle of pop. (A rare treat – Aunt Jan and Uncle Garry had pop in glass bottles!) Kyle downed his immediately, and then started asking for sips from ours. Josh warned me not to give him one, because he’d drink the whole bottle. But Kyle worked his aren’t-I-little-and-cute routine on me, and I handed over the bottle. He downed the whole thing. I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

Kyle was always a ridiculously early riser. If he had not accomplished at least three things by 10am, he would say the day was wasted. He’d be outside and working on something before the rest of us even opened our eyes. He maintains his lead on all of us, even today. He leapfrogged the rest of us, in a way; he had two kids before most of us had any.

These are my cousins. Fixtures of my childhood and my only true lifelong friends. I have so many memories with all of them. When we were young, we had a cottage by the lake somewhere in northern Michigan. At least once per summer, we would all go up there together. We would anxiously watch the thermometer until the exact moment it hit 70 degrees, because that’s when we were allowed to go swimming. We would ride along the dirt roads in a golf cart singing “Do-Wah-Diddy.” We’d beg my dad or my Uncle Don to take us across the lake in the speedboat to the store where we could get push-ups and ring pops. We’d sit in the screened porch playing the board games that were stored in the hall closet with the huge wooden door.

There was one bedroom – the brown room – that had 6 beds in it: a double bunk bed and a single bunk bed. Kim and I would sleep on the top double, Mike and Kyle on the bottom double, Josh on the top single, sometimes Laurie on the bottom single (until she graduated to another room and/or got sick of us). One of the adults would read us a story from The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss. We’d listen as they read off all the names that Mrs. McCave wished she’d given her sons, and we’d all hope that we weren’t the unlucky one to be called Oliver Bolliver Butt.

On the fourth of July, we always had Olympics. We’d do sack races other silly events and proudly wear our cardboard medals. (Josh always got the most golds.) It was so interesting to me to watch a video of the Olympics years later, because the video showed me struggling to keep up, often coming in last. This isn’t surprising really, seeing as I remain completely unathletic to this day and also spent much of my early childhood a bit behind the curve due to being an extreme preemie. But the funny thing is, I don’t remember being last. They must have occasionally let me win.

The cottage was sold years ago, and for that and many other reasons, I don’t see my cousins as often any more. For quite a while, our one yearly fixture was our Thanksgiving football game. We’d run around Jan and Garry’s front yard, sort of tossing the football around, but mostly trash talking each other. What I loved most about the game was that everyone played together. Even me, who can’t throw, catch, or run in a straight line. Josh and Mike would try to invent plays that I could handle, and never get mad when I failed miserably at them.

The game evolved over the years to accommodate significant others that came and went and small children that came along. As more and more of the babies come along, I have a feeling that the football game will fade away. But if it does, I’m also sure that something will come along to replace it.

There weren’t a lot of constant friends in my childhood. But always, always there were my cousins. And always, always there will be my cousins.