MEDIUM RARE
Cousins are friends who happen to be related by blood.
That statement is based on my own personal experience, especially after several of my cousins – all of them from my mother’s side – gathered recently for a first, a grand reunion.
Cousins are the friends you grew up with, particularly if they lived nearby or shared one big roof with you. Cousins you may or can confide in, cousins who advise you in certain limited areas of your young life. But cousins, as it often happens and especially during the growing-up years, belong to factions or teams during playtime, and it is up to you, if only for survival’s sake, to choose which side you feel “safe” with.
There are first cousins and second cousins and so on down the line. Some of the former become so attached to each other that they fall in love. Neither the Church nor the laws of the state encourage such relationships, as natural as they may sound to the romantically inclined. In truth, such situations are likely to be nipped in the bud before they lead to the altar and legal or heredity issues. Unless I’m mistaken, cousins who plan to marry need a special dispensation from the Church.
There were 20 of us when we sat down for one big lunch on the occasion of the return to Manila of cousin Amy after many years (too many to count) in Cagayan de Oro. What was more, it was a chance to meet her husband and children – about time, too! What was important was that we were present to welcome her back, each of us senior enough to acknowledge how the tyranny of time has asserted itself so dramatically, ehem, and now we are uniformly, suddenly so elderly, each with our aches and pains, to put it nicely. Thanks to cousin Ann, the shepherdess of lost sheep, the reunion was loud and lasted long enough to be a rousing success.
Cousins and childhoods go together, along with the stories told of aunties, uncles, grandparents and the emotions attached thereto. I cannot think of anyone growing up normally – aha! — without some mention or other of their cousins, the ones who made their lives colorful, or now-and-then painful, but always unforgettable.