Cousins

It's become a tradition for my maternal first cousins to meet once every three months for dinner, along with our spouses and sometimes our children, on the evening preceding the board meeting of a family foundation. Because my wife and I lived abroad when this tradition was being formed, and because the dinners are held in Boston, whereas we live in New York, my wife and I have attended relatively few of these dinners. But recently, we went up to Boston to dine with my cousins.

We did so because an unusually large number of cousins would be attending the dinner in honor of my sister and her husband, who would be celebrating their 51st wedding anniversary the next day. The foundation will expire next year and it's not at all clear that the tradition of cousin dinners will continue after that. Who knows how many more chances I'll have to see that number of cousins again? So although we had just come back from a long weekend on Cape Cod, we went yet again to Massachusetts. It was there that I realized, to my considerable surprise, how much I enjoy being with my cousins, how warm is my feeling for them, and how precious I find my connection with each of them.

I was surprised because we are a heterogeneous lot, and if we met one another as strangers, at a party, for example, or in the next seat on a transcontinental flight, we might engage in a pleasant conversation, but I wonder how many of my cousins would ask for my e-mail address. Our personalities and interests are different enough that it's unlikely many of them would do so.

But we share our childhoods, and that makes all the difference. My parents summered with my mother's sisters either in the same large house or in nearby houses, when we were children, and during the rest of the year, we children were often in each other's homes, all but one of which were within a fifteen minute walk of one another. When I heard that one of my cousins, who was not at the meeting, was seriously ill, I felt a rush of concern for him, although I've seldom seen him since I left home. But that didn't matter: he is only a few months younger than I am, and we played together as children. The age difference between my younger cousins and me meant that they were never my playmates, but nonetheless I met them often at family dinners, particularly at Thanksgiving and Passover. They were part of my childhood too.

Many of my cousins have retained their Boston accents. When I hear them speak, I'm transported to a time long past, and I can almost believe that my parents and my uncles and aunts are in the next room, at their own dinner party, one for the grown-ups, a party from which we children have been excluded. Who says one can't go home again?