a place at the little table

Two back-to-back turkey dinners with both my family and Michael's has reminded me again of the special relationship of cousins. To a stranger they couldn't look like a more impossible group of friends, cast together by an indiscriminate net. However unalike, they mix in defiance of the rules of the playground. With their parents yards away [laughably] attempting to bicker with each other under the radar, the cousins are treated to a sense of invisibility rare to be found in any other social setting. Free to tackle and wrestle one another, to slink off unquestioned to remote corners, and to spill their family's secrets to one another. Unchecked giddiness; the sweetest childhood plum. Sequestered from the grown-up table, they egg each other on to display the very best of their worst table manners. And as the conversation among adults becomes more adult or less so, anything each young cousin might have ever seen or heard can be poised for debate unnoticed. At our 'first in a very long time' family reunion this summer I re-met many of my cousins and their [in many cases, adult] offspring. It was exhilarating to collect a new generation of cousins, outnumbering the batch I had at my Grandmothers funeral twenty-seven years ago many times over. And by the end of the day my kids were up relatives by about seventy. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a novel called "Slapstick" which prophesied a nation with a decimated infrastructure, a far-flung caste society, and few if any resources for recreating the benevolent society it had once aspired to. Winning on a "Lonesome No More" platform, the new President installed a system of artificial extended family by issuing everyone a new middle name ( Chipmunk, Uranium, Daffodil, etc.). This entitled the bearer to one hundred and ninety thousand cousins across the country. Like many of Mr. Vonnegut's wistful notions, this one is explored to points most ludicrous. But few would label his work 'science-fiction'. We seem to be working closer to this age, not away from it. We revel in this familial blending, searching for those who would make us blow milk out of our noses, sometimes unsuccessfully in religious and political affiliations where similarities are celebrated higher than differences. At work I have taken to calling my [union] co-workers this way; Cousin Randy, Uncle Carmen. Freelancers all, we meet up every two, five, ten years from the last time, each time assembling a few more people we will bear our true natures to. And again we are respected and appreciated for the experience each of us bring to the [little] table. It reminds us of how it is still possible to feel broad and connected, to live outside the playground categories of age, sex, and...whatever- reminded that our connections are all the richer for placing the least importance on how we might read on paper, and the most on the uncensored comradery and commiseration we can share. These might be the sweetest plums of adulthood. Can't we all just be cousins?

adolescent relationship number one

It’s been a while, I know. I seem always to be waiting for the threads of a story to wrap up neatly so I can get on with the business of writing it. That sort of thing has not been happening. I'm between stops. For instance, in October, the waitress in a Greek restaurant we popped into, for whom I didn’t hold a glimmer of recognition, turned out to be my ‘high school sweetheart’. The application of this term to what we actually were to one another is a gross abbreviation considering she had a boyfriend. My insinuation into her life was both quixotic and disruptive. But our story takes place thirtysomething years ago, which is all it really takes to turn it into a tale of romance. In the present, we’ve only managed twenty minutes of conversation divided between two meetings in public and a couple of phone calls- our schedules are at complete odds. We concur on it seeming that what we know about one another happened to different people or in another lifetime yet nothing that has happened in the interim (which neither of us knows yet about the other) has dimmed the immediacy of it. [That's her in the trailer, arguing with me over the construction of PBJs... Oh and again, thrift shopping on the Main Line]. The last time I saw her was in 1979- I had then not seen her in a couple of years- Michael and I, led by a group of friends to the mall where she worked had lunch together in a Woolworth’s 'Grille'. Michael was freshly the new love of my life and quite a jealous boy. As we did a bit of reminiscing I could see him stealthily inching his glass of ice water closer and closer toward her lap until I, as casually, intervened. She says now that she never noticed. I suspect that her twenty six year old son will be reading these words before I have had the pleasure of meeting him (Hi J., I’m Smack Dab...), but even still, this wasn’t to be a kiss and tell piece- except perhaps to say to him that when I was sixteen I had every expectation that I would have been his father (speaking poetically- and a fatherhood not commencing until some long time after the age of sixteen). She, way before I, knew why I wouldn’t. But he should be ever the more thankful that her actual boyfriend back then wouldn’t be either. J.’d have spent his childhood crawling around an unheated loft while his Mom made pancakes on a hot plate for a bunch of unshaven musicians. (The musicians in my unheated loft would have spent their girlfriends' last dollar on a disposable razor to keep their sideburns looking sharp). I suspect that when we finally get to talk she will confide some of her regrets. These two things will not be among them. D. and I used to visit a cemetery near her family’s apartment, in particular a child’s grave whose wee headstone eerily bore just the first name and dates which made him only a couple of months old. It was strangely special to us for no other discernible reason than for being so terse and so wee. Probably a week or two before I met up with D. again I came across a photograph of that headstone and noticed for the first time that I had given my own son that same name. In telling her this story I may have freaked her out further by suggesting that she had named her own son after the main character in a TV show [maybe a little farther than] back then- the show that I postulate is responsible for providing adolescent girls of the time with three of 'GenX’s most popular boy’s names (each beginning with J). These characters were played by David Soul ( the blond), Bobby Sherman ( short, dark-haired, and dimpled), and the big one- many people's curly-haired idea of Hercules. This is really just the very long way around explaining why I haven’t posted in a while. I’m working on a movie set of a 1970s shopping mall, a fair replica of the one where D. and I were ‘rat’s. Somebody’s XM radio has for days on end been boring holes in my brain with bad 1970s music ("Rock and Roll never forgets..." {especially if you are forced to listen to the same song every day for thirty years}); the soundtrack to my own teen angst. And I’m even revisiting acne. I apologize for my reluctance to zero in on anything with clarity- the ‘Etch-A-Sketch’ of my life has been shaken so many times that a blurry ghost of the old lines confuse the new pattern. But even if I never manage to make sense of it, I’ll still continue to pace through it with you. If you don’t already know it; You’re my therapist.