A long-time friend asked why in my pre-Thanksgiving blog about family traditions, there was no mention of cousins.  Didn't I have any?  I had eight cousins, seven on my father's side.  But my father was the second youngest of seven children, and my mother was nearly 40 when I was born (a very late pregnancy for a first child in 1945), so my cousins were all 15 years or so older than I was and by the time I had childhood memories weren't a part of anything that I remember well.   I was always struck by the idea that my father's siblings and their spouses had the ugliest names imaginable: Clifford and Leila, Wilma and Willard, Roy and Maxine, Lucille and Les, Ava and Ralph, and Melvin and another Wilma.  My parents, Howard and Ruth, seemed to have gotten off easily.  Although all seven of the siblings talked about the joys of growing up in a large family, all but one of them, who had three children, had either one or no children of their own.   My paternal grandparents had a small farm in southern Iowa.  My grandfather, who died before I was born, had either an illness or a farm injury (it was never talked about) that limited his abilities to farm, so the children carried a lot of the load.  I remember occasional visits to my grandmother's house, but she, unlike my mother's mother, always seemed dour, and I didn't look forward to visiting her.  She died when I was young, and looking back, I can see that raising seven children on a small farm wasn't exactly a prescription for levity. 

My favorite aunt and uncle were Roy and Maxine, who lived in a big (or so it seemed to me) white farm house where, when we visited, I slept in a feather bed.  They laughed a lot, cooked big meals, and had a dog named Skipper.  Roy would throw pieces of chewing gum to Skipper, who would give them a chomp or two before swallowing them.  As a child, I thought this was extremely entertaining, especially because I had always wanted a dog, and my parents would never get me one.  Dogs made my father nervous, and my mother professed to be afraid of them.  There was one short-lived and unfortunate experience with a dog.  I don't know where he came from or why my parents broke down, but for about a week, I had a dog which I named, with a distinct lack of orginality, Skippy.  My parents didn't want him in the house, and we didn't have a fenced-in yard, so Skippy spent his few days with us in the breezeway between the house and the garage.  He cried and whined a lot, which didn't endear him to my parents.  And one day when I came home from school, my mother told me that Skippy had suddenly contracted some unknown disease and had died at the vet's.  I wasn't convinced by the story, but Skippy was never talked about again.

Once I lived on my own, I promptly got a dog, which I named Caleb (Hebrew and Arabic for 'dog') and which my parents loved.  Later I had a cocker, Ryder, for 16 years, and he provided good company for my mother once she had moved to Topeka.  My French-Egyptian friend Mona always had five dogs at a time (as well as three coyotes).  Most of them were English cockers, but she also had a rottweiler (a sweet dog which once in a moment of anger ripped my right arm to shreds and then bit me in the ass), a shepherd, and others.  My parents loved Mona and soon got over their resistance to dogs.

On my mother's side, I had one cousin, and she did live in Story City, but she was eight years older than I was, so I wasn't particularly close to her either.  I've written about her before: she became an evangelical Christian who told me that she "wept and prayed" over me every night because I was going to hell.   She also told me she never put a cake in the oven without a prayer that it would be successful.  I refrained from asking why a god would be more concerned about her cake than about starving children or whether, if the cake didn't turn out perfectly, she thought she was being punished.  When I was in my 20s, she asked if we could meet for a talk.  I knew what direction she was going to take, but agreed as long as we'd meet in the bar of a restaurant.  Story City had always had a "beer parlor" or two, but once Interstate 35 was built a mile away, several restaurants with bars opened at the exit.  The conversation quickly turned to religion, and Mary asked whether I didn't think the reason that I didn't love "God" was because I was unmarried and had never loved another human.  I said that I had been with the same man for seven years, so I had indeed loved a person.  She shuddered.  That was what she had thought, but didn't want to believe: her only cousin was gay.  She charitably told me that God hated the sin, but loved the sinner, so she would pray harder for me now that I was doubly damned.  So far, I don't think her 40 years of prayers have had much effect.  I hope they've worked better for her cakes.

When my mother died, Mary created a scene at the funeral because the funeral director put my partner, not her, in the lead car to the cemetery.  We didn't speak for years after that, but then I decided that since I was her only cousin (she did have four children, and her whole family remained evangelical), I should make peace, so I wrote her a letter saying that we should be friendly.  She wrote back that as a Christian, she had of course "forgiven" me, but that she was surprised that an atheist like me would even ask for forgiveness, which hadn't been a word that figured in my letter.  She added a P.S. to her letter asking that a water color that her mother had done and which, Mary said, her mother had "lent" to my mother be returned.  And that was the end of my attempt at reconciliation.

So, yes, I had cousins--eight of them.  I know that two are still alive and that one has died.  About the other five, whom I never really knew, I have no idea.  Roy and Maxine's daughter sends me a Christmas card every year.  Her daughter teaches at a private school in Kansas City, and for 25 years, we always say that we should get together when my cousin comes to KC to visit her daughter, but we never have.  Since I never knew my cousins well (except for Mary, or Mary Margaret as she was called when I did know her), I never really felt the lack.  Not having a dog--that's a different story, but a lack I remedied as soon as I could.