Cousins: The Ties That Never Fade

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I have a lot of cousins. I was going to count them, but I got bored. There are somewhere in the range of 40—that doesn’t include 2^nd cousins, a goodly number of whom I grew to love as a child. You’d think with that many relatives floating around, the odds are I won’t know them very well, or maybe even have never met one or two. But I was lucky. My parents made sure that no matter where my dad was assigned, we always used some of his annual leave to spend time with family.

Some of my cousins are famous: one 2^nd cousin is a former Miss America, and one cousin’s son was nominated for a Grammy this year. You might conclude that sounds like we’re one of those extraordinary families who seem to ooze talent and success. Nope. Most of my cousins are like me, just holding on and doing what they can to ease the burdens of their children and grandchildren.

Because my family line is filled with early Utah/Nevada pioneers, there are several cousins I’m related to on both my mother’s and my dad’s sides. Even for me, it’s still often too confusing to explain. Suffice it to say, when I was a girl, arriving in Las Vegas for a visit meant complicated machinations so that the five girl-cousins my age could spend as many sleepovers together as possible. Three of us were Leavitts, and three were Stewarts. (Since my mom was the daughter of a Stewart and my dad a Leavitt, we were all related to each other in one way or another. It was weird enough that now my adult children have trouble figuring it out.)

We loved hanging out at Grandma Nettie’s house–my dad’s mother. She only lived a couple of blocks from the famed Fremont Street in Las Vegas. We were too young to be allowed in the casinos, but walking down the street was a tantalizing adventure into a world of money and self-indulgence. (There’s a reason none of us ever became gamblers.) Instead, we frequented the local bookstore just a block off the main drag. We’d each buy a burger and drink at a nearby drive-in and pick up a $1 Nancy Drew mystery at the bookstore (since there were about a million books in the series, we had no trouble finding a separate title each). Then we’d sprawl in the shade of one of the old trees on the lawn of the U. S. Post Office building and eat and read. Once we’d finished our own book, we’d pass it to the left (or right, depending on who read faster) and start again. When the sun insisted on shining at over 100 degrees, we’d change the venue to Grandma’s living room.

At night, we had protracted wars involving Monopoly or Risk. I have a fairly short attention span, so I almost always lose. On the other hand, I played a killer hand of Hearts. Long after midnight out on the ranch–which was the home of three of those cousins (one Leavitt and two Stewarts)–, we’d sneak out with my brothers and a half-dozen of our same-age male cousins to play Kick-the-Can under a clear, starry sky. I was shocked years later to learn that my parents and their siblings knew exactly what we were doing. (So much for youthful rebellion.)

It was a delicious surprise to discover that when I headed to BYU from clear across the country during my dad’s assignment in Baltimore, Maryland, there were a couple of crossover years when four of the six of us were in college at the same time. Though we were never roommates, once a month we met for lunch at a big round booth in the Y Center to talk and laugh for a couple of hours at a time. We gossiped about boyfriends, lamented our sinking grades in math or English, and plotted adventures now that we were old enough to be free of parental supervision. One was a bridesmaid at my wedding.

 Over the years, marriage, work, and children separated us geographically. In the days of expensive long-distance phone calls, we kept in touch through the complicated grapevine of parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Though I hadn’t physically seen her in 20 years, one of those cousins cornered me in the cultural hall of a church building in Las Vegas, where we both happened to show up at a Leavitt reunion. (By then, she had married into another familiar pioneer family name).

“I just wanted to say thanks,” she said with tears in her eyes after we’d spent 10 minutes catching up on one another’s lives.

“What?” I said. I had no clue what she was talking about.

“My son,” she said. “He went to Budapest, Hungary, on his mission. The language was impossible. Every day was harder than the last, and he finally just gave up. Told the mission president to send him home. He’d never be able to teach the gospel.”

I nodded. I knew that many scholars thought Hungarian was one of the most difficult languages in the world. Unlike other European countries, it isn’t tied to the same Latin or Germanic roots, so there are no familiar similarities for English speakers to build on.

“Instead of sending my son home, the mission president assigned him to be the companion of a tall, outspoken kid named Elder Voorhies, who was just bossy enough that he wouldn’t let my son give up. Because of him, my son stayed. And learned.”

Really? I was stunned. I had never heard this story from Son #1. Later when I mentioned it to him, he said, “Oh yeah. Elder ______? Great guy!”.

I don’t know if there’s some as-of-yet undiscovered leap of recognition when we meet someone who shares a link to our genetic make-up, but I do know that my cousins were the anchor that held me safe and steady when my everyday world was rocked at the whim of the U. S. Air Force. It was good to hear that down the road, one of my sons was able in some small way to repay that favor.