And Then

So, Easter at the ILS, all went well, we beat the traffic coming home. All fine.

I had a request for tales of my crazy cousin. I shall comply. I may have told some of the stories before; I won't get to them all in this post. Let me begin by saying that her parents had the best of intentions. When she was born, they already had a four year old superchild, one who taught herself to read at three, was reciting "The Highwayman" at four, and who had already won baby beauty contests. Then their second daughter was born, and they were told that she was "sickly." What does that mean? Anybody's guess. What it came to mean was that the parents, already having one brilliant and very independent child, had the time and energy to devote themselves to making life pleasant and easy for the little one, since she was apparently going to be having a tough life.

I don't know that she ever did, although she was always small for her age, and never developed anything remotely like independence. She was plenty smart, always a good student, was cute, and had friends. At home, her parents trained her to make them her slaves. I first knew her, really, when my mother, my sister and I visited them for a month in California when I was seven. My sister was twelve, my older cousin was 15, and her little sister, whom I've been calling the crazy cousin, was eleven, but she was my size, and we were more or less playmates, even though she was only a year younger than my sister, who saw herself much more in the teenager mold of the older cousin.

In the evening, we two younger kids would watch TV. I got to stay up past my bedtime because her bedtime was later than mine. If she wanted a snack, here is what she did: she raised her skinny little arm up into the air, snapped her fingers -- loud -- and called out "Mom! Choc-bik!" My aunt would come from wherever she was in the house (it wasn't big, a cute little California ranch), acknowledge her daughter's request, and then disappear into the kitchen, to return a moment later with a big glass of chocolate milk, the only thing the kid would drink. How did the mother let this go? The mother had taught the kid to do it this way, that this was the way you asked your mother for chocolate milk when you were eleven. Not looking forward to a trip to the emergency room with a broken arm, I never once tried this on my mother, even at seven, although I did develop a ten-year addiction to chocolate milk as a result of this vacation. (I mixed the Hershey's syrup into my own milk.)

The older cousin graduated from high school at 16, and from UCLA at about 19, including taking a semester off to go abroad. She was 20 when she started graduate school here in New Jersey, at which point she became like an extra sister in my household. The younger cousin finished high school and started college at the normal ages, also with a scholarship to UCLA. The only thing is, she couldn't settle on a major. Ultimately, she did finish college -- I don't know what happened to the scholarship -- after about ten years, with about ten years worth of undergraduate credits. It took her so long because she kept changing her major; she has her bachelor's degree and is a nurse.

She could also go to school for so long because she continued to live at home. Her mother continued to make all her meals, do her laundry, clean her room, etc. She may have had the occasional part-time job, although I don't know how.

When she was in her early twenties, maybe 23, her parents went out one evening, leaving her on her own for dinner for the first time ever in her life. But they prepared her for it; they bought a TV dinner for her to make for herself. They came home to find fire engines on the street in front of the house. Hey, did you know that it doesn't say anywhere on the TV dinner box take the food tray out of the box? Well, it might now; this was nearly 40 years ago.

She continued to have many friends, and date, and got several marriage proposals, all, presumably, from men who wanted to take care of her. She really was very cute and pretty. But she never felt that any of these men was the right one for her (to her credit, I guess; she wanted to marry for love and not for security.)

And that's the first part of her story. More to follow.





waiting for MARY POPPINS :: ENTRY #2025
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