cousins

My favorite times growing up were with my aunts and cousins. They would take turns watching us four Amy, the oldest, Jeremy, her brother and the only boy, Lorna, and myself. I remember expressing my sense of the age difference between Amy and I by saying I hated her. It must have hurt to hear that, but she laughed it off.

We spent Halloween at my house. The only house I remember visiting was my next door neighbor’s. To reach the door you had to walk through a big blue tent. Teenagers, friends of their kids, hid in sleeping bags and grabbed at your ankles as you walked by. After a couple years of this, the suspense was more than I could bear. When the first person grabbed my ankles I turned around screaming and didn’t get any candy from them that year.

My cousins laughed. They laughed when I wanted to learn how to chew gum. I remember there were leaves on the garage floor, and I would spit the gum out as hard as I could to make a bubble. No luck, I would plop the pink blob in my mouth and try again. No matter how much they tried to explain how to expand the gum with my tongue and work it around my lips to create a bubble, I didn’t understand.

They laughed again when one grasped my hands, another my feet, and they swung me into the hedge at Gido’s house.

They laughed at my fear of deep water and alligators. Every time we visited the old San Francisco Zoo Lorna would threaten to throw me in with the alligators. This explains why I was scared to death the time I fell into the Lafayette Reservoir. It was an annual Summer School field trip to visit the Reservoir. The only thing I remember about those trips is feeding the ducks, which is what were doing when two older girls brushed past and I fell with a loud splash into the water. Some say they saw the girls push me, but I also remember moving out of politeness. Between the two of them I ended up going head first into the water. My first thought was, “Oh no! If my feet touch the ground I will be alligator lunch.” Somehow my 3 foot body managed to pull away from the 4 foot shallow floor without touching, burst from the water and yell for help. Scared me to death when the teachers decided that one had to jump in after me. That meant someone would step on the alligator’s nose. To my relief we all ended up alive and wet. No one could ever understand my wild behavior and words, so no one ever explained alligators don’t hide in the mud of California alligators.

Another time we were going across the Bay Bridge I worked my imagination into a tizzy. The school used a short bus to transport us on field trips. On this occasion I found myself beside the bugger-nosed reject of an upper-grade. Behind me, my friends were talking about sharks. The boy noticed that I was cowering further and further into the wall of the bus and boldly asked what was the matter. By that time I was so frightened about the thought of a shark jumping into the bus window, I was no longer afraid of him told him. He kindly told my friends to stop talking about sharks and offered to sit by the window for me. I admired him after that.

My cousins laughed yet again when I pulled a knob off the Buick and made it buzz. Mom and my aunts were beginning to catch on by that time, that I was not entirely responsible for all my actions. If my cousins were laughing while I stood looking on dumbly they would ask, “What did you guys do?” It was too fun to exploit my naiveté and youth to bother teaching me how to survive the world. How I ever has, is anyone’s guess, or the hand of God.

I doted on my cousins. In a picture you see me imitating Lorna. A picture taken a little later shows that pose was significant to me for a few months after that.