Cousin ~ Friends

The other evening, I was looking through my phone contact list, trying to figure out who was on the same phone network as I am (I went over our minutes last month, so I'm trying to be more careful...!) so that I could better enjoy my late-night bus ride home after teaching. I called one of my Bontrager-side cousins that I haven't seen for almost two years. She wasn't able to talk right then, but she called back later that night.

We did the usual catching-up conversations, and eventually eased into more "musings" about the relationships of cousins - our cousins in particular. Now that we're all officially adults (the youngest of the first cousins will be 19 on Sunday this week; and there are at least 8 kids in the next generation, ranging in age from about 2 months to... well, 22 years... that's what you get when you have a range of 12 years in our parents' generation!), the nature of our cousin-ly gatherings has changed quite a bit. When we were younger, we were thrilled to run around our grandparents' yard and our aunt and uncle who live next door (in the house where my dad was born!), climbing the pear tree (no longer there?), playing with the barn cats, jumping on the trampoline, playing baseball or woofleball (highly competitive when a certain uncle was around - he was very passionate about the game!), making up games, playing monopoly... Those days evolved into midnight pranks pulled while sleeping out in the tent (girls) or camper (boys), and then that evolved into late-night fiestas of dutch blitz or trivial pursuit and pizza (though some certain cousins had unfair Trivial Pursuit advantages, since they had the game around all the time and worked to memorize said trivia...), rambunctious story-telling and memory-reliving about our parents and grandparents (wouldn't YOU make good, clean fun of your grandma if you found out she'd stuck a rifle in the ground after the foxes, who WERE bothering the chickens, were gone after you'd loaded and readied it? or that she'd brought a "baby" alligator home from Florida and kept it in her room, till it froze to death thanks to the upstairs not being heated?)...

Now we're really adults. All of us have graduated from high school. Many of us have graduated from college or some other higher-education, most of us have steady jobs/occupations that we're generally content with, or at least a plan for getting where we'd like to be in the next 5 years or so. When we get together, the bond of being cousins - even though some of us we only get to have a handful of days together every one or two years - seems to pull us together with positive energy. We discuss our grandparents' health with great concern and our parents' current state of relationships with trepidation and care, knowing how much we love them all and wanting the best for everyone... but deeply glad that the problems they're having are not problems we have to enter into to make a difference. We hope that our parents don't do the same thing to us as Grandma and Grandpa have done to them (and to themselves). We discuss politics, theology and faith (following in the tradition of our parents, who debated tough issues with high energy and a wealth of Biblical ground-knowledge that inspires and energizes me every time I got to observe such a debate!), wrestle with issues of self and identity and responsibility to each other and to our world (the physical and the social world)...

Even though we don't see each other that often, it is so comforting to know that we have this depth of relationships that allows us to have such conversations in love and to listen to each other (at least most of us) when we come across areas where we differ. It is amazing that, despite our vast differences in life experiences, many of us share strikingly similar viewpoints and sensibilities. I feel so blessed to have such an amazing group of cousins (on both sides!) and to know that these people know me and accept me for who I am.