How pleasant when my thoughts meander onto my sister. Her crazy red hair, freckles that stretch across her body like a whole entire star system that a die-hard astrologist would love to map out even while recognizing the impossibility. The way she holds entire worlds inside the smallest lazy-lidded perception. She is a creature who I fight with, feel angry with, feel intangibly neglected by sometimes, and yet is the most solid assurance of reality and continuity that is available in my eternally changing and unstable life. She is always there, even if she’s being hard-heartedly honest with me, unpitying, ruthless and brutal with her perceptions on the way life is, the way it carries us forward, and the things in life that must be endured, and preferably endured with as little self-pity and wallowing as possible. She doesn’t let me get away with stuff, and yet she holds everything that I ever have been or will be. And still keeps coming back, coming back.

A comment made recently that got me thinking: “Your sister is the funniest person I’ve met. I’d pay money to watch her onstage.”

When I think about it, it’s true: Seinfield has real competition in some of the observations my sister spouts almost as if she is not thinking about them, but really she is… thinking hard. Thinking harder than sometimes her mellow and be-happy demeanor would want to indicate. She’s funny. She sees the world as a big cosmic joke, and as any comedian would probably say, equally a big cosmic tragedy. The comic is truly found in the realm of the tragic.

And so, hers are words that I think about, slowly tracing the permutations and subtleties of in-your-face Pow and yet not-always freely given language of oldsoul.

Likewise, consideration of the position of cousin is strange and inexplicable. Because. Let us count the ways.

To put it mundane, I can’t imagine any situation in which my child and my sister’s child wouldn’t know each other as intimately as I try to know my sister (and often fail, but try is the key word). They must connect, to carry on the irreplaceable history and self-made security of family.

This in itself is enough reason to explain why the contemplation of my cousins is exotic and yet comforting to me.

Yet, I know relatively nothing about my cousins… mostly hearsay and familial gossip, which is always carried on in the most abstract and yet loyal of fashions. Cousins is my peeps, and even if the peeps are distant, unknown, and extremely foreign (as any of the Texan-born are bound to be), they are of me and mine, connected to the same history and the same genetic determinism that rushes around me whenever I find myself in the vicinity of these people who keep coming back, coming back.

Home. Something you can’t understand and you can’t ever overtly feel (at least for me, the nomad), but nonetheless is real and present.

And so, my cousin K came to town and I was undeniably excited and yet still at a loss for how to Behave. What to do, what to do, with someone you don’t know but feel instantly Comfortable with. Point of immediate clarification: not “comfortable” in the sense that I have any iota of what to say or do in order to demonstrate my affection and camaraderie, but “comfortable” in the sense that I know she will always be family and I will always be family and although I might make, and probably will make, a complete ass of myself, we still will always have these bonds of near-memories, same-grandparents, and love for our parents, the aunts and uncles of our childhood who spoiled us and yet wagged fingers in Adult Disapproval. There is something so precious in these memories, and maybe that’s what makes us so nervous and yet “comfortable” around each other.

It took so many hours to loosen up around K, perhaps because I was bogged down by the equal desire to show her a good time, to recover from Ecuador, and to connect with all the millions of people I needed to connect with in a short brief run-through of a town that lies like the lead weight of a home-that-could-be in this heart weighted by hard memoried corners. She has come at a crucial period of my life and I am distracted by so many things, but she is equally one of them, a good one of them.

When she is around me, I think of all the muggy afternoons spent playing Uno and lying on queen-sized beds learning to shuffle cards. She and her sisters were the ones who taught me, at age seven, to shuffle. Such a turning point in a child’s life, or at least that was how I felt it. At the time, I was certain that if I could master this one trick, I had probably mastered one of the requirements of entering adulthood. Shuffling. (And how right I was). Or the memories of swimming endlessly, Marco Polo, with upside-down inflated kayaks holding us separate from the world, but still with air space, and Grannie’s red jello waiting on the deck for us.

Ah, yes, my Grannie, who was the one who gave me the beloved Chocolate Brownie recipe and the Snoopy chef hat and apron. The one who instructed us, more than once, to wait for an hour after eating before entering the pool again. Those three weeks with my cousins and Grannie are one of the most vivid of vivids. I even remember calling my mother when I was homesick and having her describe how my sister was swimming in the green-frog wading pool in our backyard. As in the memories of such small children, I remember the grass growing underneath my small sister as she played with a mother who was all her own. I remember it like I was there, even though I was miles away feeling homesick with my Grannie who tucked me in bed in the room that was briefly my mother’s as a teenager. (I imagined my mother climbing out the window onto the roof and shuttling down the drainpipe. I imagined her telling me this story, and as is the way, I can’t remember the truth from the things I thought).

These are the moments that rush upon me as my cousin joins me in foosball and we laugh and spin the knobs wildly and I wildly hope she is happy, as happy as me, as happy as I am in this moment with P and A kicking our asses. She plays defense and then switches to offence. I am too distracted by memory and the moment to really notice which of us is better at which, but I am still intent on snapping the rod and slapping at least one shot of pure here into the opponent’s opening.

And a couple of nights away, she kicks my totally sloshed ass in air hockey, rightly wins the night and injures my air hockey ego, only slightly in the most mock-injured of ways. I feel content that the music is playing and we all get up and dance, and I don’t even notice if outsiders are dancing because K is, and A is, and brolaw is, and even my father unexpectedly is (he raises his arms and waves his hands and goddamn it if he doesn’t look like he does seem, after all these danceless years, to have rhythm). We all seemed to be feeling the moment just right, and it didn’t really matter if I stumbled around miserable-drunk for the three following hours.

At the party the next day, she is there and I give her a scarf from Ecuador, and hope she will have at least some opportunity to wear it when she returns to Texas (Why Texas, I always seem to be asking myself. A week or so ago, I managed—in true-me fashion—to stick my foot in it by making fun of Texas to a die-hard Texan and then back-pedaling, back-pedaling. But it’s true: there it lies like some fantasy of Wasteland, a mini-country with an excess of executions and laws so backwards the folks need to walk as such to make sense of them. The only reasons I can think of to live in that state is the music in downtown Austin & prickly-pear margaritas. But back she goes always, understanding it in a way that I obviously don’t. Sigh… I’m probably bound to end up with someone from Texas.) I want to talk with her at the party a bit, talk talk, but there’s so much around; we play frisbee instead, and I watch how gentle she is with the kids present.

That is, I love how she always finds a way to help people around her. At A’s wedding, she helped arranged the flowers. Mum tells me she helped with food at G’s birthday party too… I can watch it, watch her attending people and making sure our grandparents are happy. Generosity. Someone needs to make her feel that way. I think it is my turn to visit next time… my turn to expend and to open an eye to her world. I wonder if she’ll take me to play foosball? I wonder if she whup my ass at pool? More likely, we can go dancing and she’ll take belly shots like she did at her bachelorette party…

And so will I. We’ll just keep coming back, coming back.