REFLECTIONS

Who is your favorite cousin? That’s a difficult question to answer.

Let’s give it  a whirl.

Looking at notes used to select my favorite cousin, it would look something like this. All of my cousins are favorites. I don’t want to make anybody angry with me.

COUSIN DARLENE: She was a year older than me, and I looked up to her for that. Darlene and I collected baseball cards. She and I would exit the Austin school bus at the Corning Store. Our bus driver would stop at the store and allow us the opportunity to buy baseball cards, or to buy a bottle of Coke and a bag of Planters peanuts. The nuts were rolled into the soda bottle and presto, we had our version of a Planters shake.

Darlene would ride Thunder over to my house, and we would then ride up our gravel pit. Thunder loved to take a bath on a small pond in the pit. Darlene loved animals, adopting several at her LeRoy residence. She often had deer on her front steps. She passed away four years ago, suffering from leukemia.

COUSIN JOYCE: Joyce, who just turned 80, was the second youngest of all of our Lestrud cousins. I was the youngest. She and I have something in common. We both have lost a child. We talked on many occasions about these two shining stars who will be sadly missed.

Cousins are often best of friends because they keep in contact to build upon the bond they have.

At Joyce’s birthday party, we had a chance to meet cousins we had not previously met. Cousins often resemble one another.

It is often rewarding to stumble across a lost cousin. My wife Judy’s brother received a telephone call late one night from an individual who began to ask him many questions about an aunt. It turns out that his aunt had a child nobody knew about. This lost cousin provided proof that another cousin existed. A reunion of these cousins was held and another bond was established.

Looking on the internet to find more information on cousins, all I could find were advertisements for Cousins Sub sandwiches.

If you don’t know who your cousins are, look through a phone book and see if someone shares the same last name. You might find a stumbling block when you find lots of Andersons and Johnsons listed on the Internet.

Ask your parents to tell you about their favorite cousins. You will soon discover that there are cousins around who you don’t even know.

Have a cousin reunion. Maybe, you could invite Kirk Cousins of the Minnesota Vikings.