Where Do Your Cousins Live?

Okay, so now it's official. I am in the Writing Resolutions workshop with Molly Fisk. We were asked to introduce ourselves to the others thusly: Where do your cousins live? What's your favorite food? Who is your favorite writer? When I listed the places my cousins live I was struck by a couple of things. One, I am the only female on my mother's side, a fact I was always proud of but it probably didn't really get me anything. "We moved to Iowa before I could speak." This is a line borrowed and adapted from a poem I just read by Kathleen Lynch of Sacramento. I found her poem in a newspaper I picked up outside the hospital in Auburn where we went to visit Ginny, who had just had surgery after breaking her hip at a friend's party. There were four nurses at the party we were told so she got excellent attention while waiting for the ambulance. She never made it to the party; fell on the way up the stairs. Ginny and Bob have been married over sixty years. They grieved mightily last year when their parrot died. He had been with them for many years of that long marriage. Now Bob is trying to keep Ginny from pulling tubes out because she is so impatient to go home.
The other thing I was struck by when listing my cousin's homes was that I am not close to any of them, with the exception of an older cousin who lives in Santa Barbara and is a little in awe of how many places I've lived. He has had two homes I know of since he got married 40 years ago. I say in awe of but maybe it's really aghast over. I'm not sure. He and his two sisters and one brother grew up in Laredo, Texas, where my Uncle Mac moved when he was a young man. My uncle was the oldest of seven children and he was my father's hero, even though he left home for MIT when my father was a young boy. In the 30s I think, he was business manager for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, Michigan, then called the Cranbrook School for Boys. The community was founded by George Gough Booth, a Detroit newspaper baron and philanthropist, and Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish architect who occupies a major position in the history of modern American design and architecture. Both were inspired by the vision of the Arts and Crafts movement, which began in England in the mid-nineteenth century and soon spread to the United States.
I don't know why my uncle left his job there but I have heard the stories of his arriving in Laredo in the late 30s and being attracted to the sound of music floating out of cantinas (I may be making this part up) and he stayed, marrying a woman whose family helped found the town. He eventually bought a ranch called the Double G, one of the Gs being for my name, Gault, where my cousins had a goat as a pet. I was so jealous, My father never went to work without wearing a suit and tie and he couldn't stand animals. He was the guy who every cat and dog gravitated to immediately at a party, however. They seem to know.
Uncle Mac's youngest son was named Arturo after his grandfather and I visited their home one time when I was living in San Angelo with my first husband, who was in the army. We had huevos rancheros for breakfast and drove across the border to have cabrito at a famous restaurant, my first authentic Mexican meal. I remember one time my uncle drove into the small Iowa town where we had moved to from New Jersey (he and my father the only two siblings to have left their East Coast homes and never quite forgiven for that by the family). He was driving a sporty Thunderbird convertible and all the neighbors came running when they saw him pull into our driveway. He also raced Jaguars and had a sailboat in Corpus Christi named after his grandmother, Ida. He hunted in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and had dated movie stars (Joan Crawford's name was mentioned) and, well, you get the picture.
Even though my uncle and my father had not spent much time together once he left for college, my cousin and I were both amazed at how similar some of their traits were. Even though they had chosen very different lifestyles, they moved in the same fluid way and smiled with clear blue eyes that pierced you when they noticed you. When my father was suffering from dementia near the end of his life, he told me he had seen Mac on a street corner in San Francisco. "He didn't speak to me," he said sadly. Mac had been dead for five years. I told him, "He just didn't see you."
"Yes," he said, comforted. "That's what I was thinking."