I have 21 cousins: 14 on my mom's side, 7 on my dad's. I have so many cousins and I see some of them at such erratic intervals (intervals measured by holidays and decades), I hesitate to say their name for fear of being wrong. Because all our names are similar, usually one syllable and Biblical, it seems quite easy for me to slip and say Matt when I intend to say Mark, Jeff when I mean Jon.
My cousins represent a universe to me like the characters in The Simpsons. I have a pilot cousin and a professor cousin, a got-pregnant-a-little-young cousin and will-he-ever-get-married? cousin, a manic cousin, a depressive cousin, a sweet one and a mean one, an accountant, a contractor, several pragmatists and one dreamer, a former bratty rich one who's turned into a good guy and a diligent hardworking one who's distanced himself.
When I think of the word "cousins" I think of playing new video games on Christmas afternoons in the suburbs, the smell of dryer sheets, gnocchi, and the clatter of board games. I think of us lining up for photos we've zero interest in, and we all look back toward the camera grudgingly smiling at our moms and dads, we the loved spawn, we the puberters, we the inheritors, we the hope of those who love us imperfectly and deeply. Then the picture is snapped and we disgroup quickly and happily return to busying ourselves with Activity.
All of us cousins are wasted on one another. If we were in a third-world country, we'd depend on each other heavily; we'd count ourselves lucky. We'd drink beers together, share cigarettes, and hatch up business plans. We'd live on the same block and share responsibilities at our little tienda or split shifts at our restaurant. Our profits would be shared, invested, and our legacy would be established through cooperative hard work and uncooperation with Government and Others. We'd house our indigent cousins and happily complain about them. We'd utter statements after mass that, yes, blood is thicker than water, and, yes, family is the most important thing. We'd find great comfort in our sureness of our rightness. We'd also create some serious telenovela-style drama. One cousin would have an affair with another's spouse. Our parents' feuds would become ours. Guns and passion, passive-aggressive exits and operatic arguments. O, it could be glorious!
But alas, this is America, and our parents raised individuals, and their parents raised individuals, and we individuals don't rely on anybody except the corporations and government agencies and a single partner that regulate our lives and provide the services we no longer know how to do ourselves collectively, the ones that give us the illusion of self-sufficiency and independence. This is how we like it, and many across the globe envy us this because they know how obnoxious family can be when you have to deal with them every single damn day, and they know to romance family is the act of man who doesn't truly understand family.
We cousins sense that we represent the last of something. We are individuals now who perhaps tragically embrace our individual freedoms. Our children--if we have them--definitely will not have a universe of cousins around them. They will not have the sense that if times get rough, they'll have loving strangers to go to. They won't know they're not alone in their genetic dysfunction. They'll be unable to see humor and legacy and glory in depression, alcoholism, secrecy, mischievousness, quietude, diligence, humility.
They will have parents and they will have friends, and that will be their family. The notion of an extended family will not be extended to them. They will know not the beauty of Grandma's gnocchi between rounds of video games, the beauty of looking up to a handsome, debonair cousin you desperately want to impress, and the importance of being forced into a picture you don't want to take with people you barely know.
And that's okay. Adjustments will be made. This is not about them; it's about me and my cousins.
I love more and more my cousins because I understand the significance of our denouement. I count myself lucky. I appreciate Cousinhood the way I appreciate a virgin forest: it's not well known, but it's out there, and its simple existence, whether I see it or not, is crucial to my own.
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