Nov 21 2008
Too Few And Far Between
In a matter of hours, the sixteen month old sleeping soundly in the room adjacent will meet up with her only cousin, a young pixie-haired lass turning one year within the next week. Together, they will probably make up stories, sing folk songs by the camp fire, talk endlessly on the phone, gossip, discover males and music, fight over boys and bands, travel to each others’ cities, moonwalk and breakdance, play in preschool and kindergarten and then find out that learning isn’t supposed to be fun in grade school through high school, get in trouble with the law, wonder why on earth anyone would want to move where ‘nana lives, go to university and hopefully learn while having fun – not mutually exclusive as PBS shows us. Maybe they’ll even learn from each other about raising their own families. The first of the two new-generation Dye kids. The first post-college babies.
But that’s not gonna happen tomorrow. Or anytime soon. Tomorrow will just be a familiarizing, a meet-and-greet. They should have a couple more of those during the next few days, but then my brother and his wife are going to take the baby with them to the East Coast, where they all live, presumably without any cousins of any kind. The daughter and the niece may see each other in the near future, hopefully within a month. And that may be it for a while. It’s hard to travel with family. It’s really hard when you’re not much of a traveler yourself in the first place.
