Cousin, Cousin

My cousin, Eunice, passed away this fall.  She was the oldest living descendant of Samuel Harvey Morrell, my grandfather.  So now I am the patriarch of the clan, if primogeniture has any bearing.

Once about every third whip stitch a meme pops up on fb reminding us that our cousins were our first friends.  And that may well be true for many people, but not all human experiences are shared by everyone.  There are, for example, those whose parents had no siblings and thus they have no cousins. Or, in my case, I have forty-eight first cousins, some of whom I never met and never will, for some of them are gone now.*

The circumstances of various lives determine friendship and acquaintanceship.  In my case, the parents moved from the community of my nativity when I was but six months old.  Moved a good long way away, too.  Most of my father's siblings either stayed in that locale or moved themselves a good way away to somewhere we weren't.

My mother's people all packed up and moved to California when I was about five years old, and there went that opportunity to develop a "best friend" relationship with any of my maternal cousins.  Over the years I met all those cousins and even developed friendships with some of them.  To this day there are three of them who are facebook friends and another three or four who are "Christmas card" cousins.  But all of them reside on one coast or the other.

During my early years there were three of my dad's siblings with whom we exchanged visits and I came to know their children.  Uncle Wayne and his family even lived in the same town we did during my teen years.  Uncle Ben's son is a fb friend and his sister and I correspond on occasion.

Otherwise the familial relationships were characterized by a cousin whom I met via the expediency of stopping in his town while on a trip several years ago.  When I was met at the door by his wife it was clear that she had little interest in who I was or what I wanted, but she did call her husband to the door.  We made arrangements to meet in a restaurant for supper after BBBH and I checked into a motel.  We met, neither of our wives joined us.

During the course of the visit he remarked, "We Lacys aren't very sociable."

Pretty well summed it up, at least so far as family interactions are concerned.

*Thirty five on Dad's side, 13 on Mama's side.