A Celebration of Cousins

A Celebration of Cousins May 8, 2012 ; One Day, One Journey… By Tom Bartlett A scattered group of men are tapping on the sand of a hard-packed beach with the butt ends of their clamming forks. I follow their lead, as I’ve never done this before. Souther’s already filled half his milk crate, the clattering of his shells a steady backbeat to our quest. ‘It wakes ‘em up !’ he shouts over to me, as he pounds the shaft of his rake onto the sand like a conjuring wizard. ‘Watch ‘em squirt, then dig like crazy!’ He’s about 20 yards away on the edge of low tide, under a muddy sky. Dad and Farmer John have also paused to take in the wisdom of a veteran. Apart from Souther, we’re also watching a guy who was already out here in the drizzle at 6:30 a.m. when we arrived ; clearly a ‘regular’, his basket is nearly full. I squint down at the sand, zoned onto an airhole looking like the open end of a straw. There’s nothing squirting out of the hole, but I stab my fork vertically into the sand and lean back heavily on the shaft – causing it to snap where it’s fitted into the metal fork. The sound catches John’s attention : it’s his rake. ‘Sorry !’ I yell, lifting both pieces with a shrugging gesture. ‘No problem !’ he shouts back. ‘Expected! Just means you’ll have to dig from a crouch!’ I go at it again, indeed crouched and sometimes on hands and knees in the sand, following the airholes… and finally extracting a few saucer-shaped quahogs out of foot-deep depressions. The drizzle is intensifying, and Souther has started back to the car, his crate full. He’s brought a trolley with large wheels to pull the crate across the sand, and it doesn’t take him long to disappear over the grass-topped dune that forms part of the spine of Beach Point. I glimpse at my watch, as this is the day I’ve planned to visit my four New England-based cousins, following a zigzag itinerary on a drive north, ending in southern New Hampshire. There are four clams in my basket; it looks empty – but what the hell. Male bonding, out in nature, no gadgets, targets or pressure… Being with Dad. I feel the need to get going, so throw the two pieces of my rake in the basket, and shuffle off across the sand to the car. Dad and Farmer John are both carrying baskets that are half-full ; I’m tempted to shout a version of the glass half-something metaphor over to them, but succumb instead to the natural impulse of silence on this windswept finger of land that divides Plymouth Harbor from Cape Cod Bay. It has been valuable time, and I’ve still kept to my timetable: within two hours I’m sitting in cousin Anne’s kitchen in Milton, just south of Boston, sipping strong coffee and nibbling on a sweet piece of cake. Heavy flavors, but the conversation is light and convivial, the laughter frequent. Mostly we talk about our kids, and our together time last summer in the family ‘Compound’ ; them up the hill in the Portable, and us in the Big House overlooking the bay. Anne and I share the hope that we’ll be able to replicate the experience during the coming summer ; children a year older, that much taller and wiser… but still family. Still friends. When the timing seems right, though I’m kicking myself figuratively for the mad, inadequate timing of this day, we bid our farewells, and I’m back on the Southeast Expressway. I’ve made a plan to meet cousin Charlie in Harvard Square for lunch, and find a parking space near his imposing, tree-shaded apartment building off Mount Auburn Street. Ring the buzzer to his apartment. No answer. I walk away, phone his number, leave a message. A few minutes later, he phones back. He was in the shower. As we walk towards the Square, our conversation quickly goes deep, as I expected it might with the cousin closest in age and experience: spirit, faith, personal issues, recovery / perseverance. I point out a restaurant with a fun name: Charlie’s Kitchen… but it’s off limits – Charlie used to drink there. No more. Instead, we settle on a burger place, and I order a ‘Cousin Oliver’, just for the name. The tables also have names, and we sit at ‘Gus’ – the name of our late uncle, Anne’s dad. A sound system is playing Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’; coincidentally, Charlie and I had just been talking about The Boss, as I had been to a show the week before. After lunch, we stroll through Harvard Yard, and try to gain entry to a locked Appleton Chapel (Charlie’s mother is my aunt Apple; short for her middle name, Appleton.) We walk further through Radcliffe, then back to the car. We make a plan to meet in the summer, when I’ll be back from England with my family; a plan I make that day with all four cousins, knowing full well that it’ll be a stretch to link up with all four. But it’s important to plan. Charlie’s taken a day off work for our get-together, and I again feel a pang of regret and guilt about my rushed itinerary ; but he’s good-natured about it, and wishes me well as we part. I’m next due to meet his brother, Harry. On I go back out to the suburbs, heading west on a busy Route 2. I get lost in the town of Concord before remembering that Harry’s in West Concord. I have no satnav, and only a large-relief roadmap of ‘Northern New England.’ West Concord doesn’t feature. A phone call makes all well. His office is in a converted mill building next to a lively rushing river; creative space for creative people. Harry’s forte is website design and other web-based action, all of which eludes my grasp. Starting in his relaxed, open plan office, where I meet his friendly co-workers, we talk of our children. Like me, he has one named Sam, and we discuss a summer reunion with my father, also a Sam. Another of his sons is managing diabetes, and I mention the endless stream of correspondence I receive from the Joslin Diabetes Clinic. My wife’s brother is also managing, and with levels of obesity being what they are… there’s going to have to be a lot more management in the future. We have coffee in the bakery below Harry’s office. One of the rooms in his workspace is called ‘The Hot Room’, as it is located directly above the bakery ovens. I can’t envision any heated conversations in there; Harry and his colleagues just seem too laid back for it. The rain starts to pelt down outside as Harry and I finish with a discussion of my journey north : 2 to 495 to 3. Just numbers on a map, but each with memories of journeys past. To and from. Richard and I meet just off the highway, near Nashua, New Hampshire, at The Common Man, one of a small chain of popular NH restaurants ; my family have had summer get-togethers at the branch further upstate, in Lincoln. It’s all about the rustic décor, and in the men’s room, my first stop after the drive north from Concord, there’s an endless recorded loop of homespun Yankee yarns and corny jokes. But it’s a cozy and welcoming mega-barn of a place, a familiar face, and Rich and I head upstairs to the bar. Like my other cousins, he’s an old friend; someone I regret not seeing more of, my excuse being a two-decade spell as an expat resident of England. Our conversation flows easily, covering family, tennis, travel plans. The details are lost beyond memory; it’s enough to remember the laughs, the recollections, the shared history of grandparents long missed… One flashback takes us back to a scrubby park in Alexandria, Virginia, and a racially-charged touch football game between the three of us, including his brother Robert, and some black kids. At the end of the rough-and-tumble game words were said, accusations and insults shouted, and the interlude ended with the three of us running down a street, dodging rocks being thrown at us. Life in early 70s, post-civil rights America ; Richard and I share a few rueful chuckles at visions brought back, joking whether this and other encounters may have sparked our shared interest in running. He relates another incident when he lived on Puerto Rico; I relate my several subsequent brushes with racist violence in school corridors during the two years I lived in Alexandria. About this time, a tweedy, professorial gent walks in and plonks his laptop down on the bar. The bartender busies himself with booze and eases in a large glass of rouge next to the computer. Clearly a regular. In a conversational digression, Richard and I have moved on to a fractured min-debate on the attempted assassination of George Wallace at a shopping mall not far from Alexandria. He insists it happened during the ’68 campaign; I recall it taking place in the early 70s. The professor overhears us, and calls over, “Definitely, early 70s. ‘The Smiling Assassin’, Arthur Bremer. Hold on, I’ll check.” Guy talk in a bar. He buries his nose in his laptop, and a minute later gives us the thumbs-up. But by now, Richard and I are onto the summer, and plans for a possible family get-together. The time had come to go, and we part with a backslapping bear hug. It’s been an age without much contact, but that doesn’t matter. The reconnection and affection, as with my other cousins, had resumed naturally and instantaneously. The last leg of my journey north is to a second Concord, the state capital of New Hampshire. The steady rain blurs my view through the windshield, but for this final leg of the day I’m on autopilot, and that’s not the beer talking. I’ve made almost as many drives up this Route 3 as I have the one on the South Shore, and I aim the car from the onramp into the fast lane with confidence. Later that evening, in a back room of their house made mellow by candlelight, I present my friends with the shopping bag that has held the sea clams through the long day. I reach in and pull one out, feeling the coarse ‘America’s Hometowne’ sand that has stuck to the shell, and which now sprinkles off onto the floor. One by one Bill’s young sons reach in as well, until we all hold the prizes aloft, then wave our arms around – flying saucer movements. When we stop I explain to the boys how these creatures have come into their presence, even passing on a bit of biological history in telling them how these shells were designed to last generationally through the millennia of history, enabling the clams to survive under the sands of Plymouth Beach. ‘Rocks!’ blurts John, the youngest. ‘But alive on the inside,’ assures his next eldest brother, William. ‘Or are they still alive? Maybe dead now?’ Bill and I glance at each other, wondering how to handle this one. James, teenager with knowledge, rescues us, holding his clam up to his face, in a Hamlet /skull pose. ‘I’m sure they’re still alive in there’ he whispers. ‘We just can’t tell, because of the… rocks… they live inside. And before now… we weren’t there to see them move…’ “A lot like we can be sometimes,’ muses Bill, ushering all to seats near a flickering candle on the window sill. ‘Hard on the outside, and soft in the middle. Maybe a lesson of life is to be more soft on the outside AND inside.’ ‘We’re not so far apart, these and us,’ continues James, calmly. ‘I learned it in Biology. DNA. Living, breathing, eating, excreting…’ ‘Ex-what ?’ interjects William. ‘Rocks!’ blurts John again, it now being his favorite word, it would seem. ‘Animals’ answers James. ‘We’re part of the same family tree, or something like that.’ William turns to me; I’ve held back, fascinated by this unfolding of conversation, much as I was intrigued so many hours ago by that of the three other guys on the beach, then by that of the individual encounters with my close relatives. ‘So,’ he begins. ‘Sort of like cousins?’ We all smile. Bill stands up and collects the four shells back into the bag, walks out of the room to put the mollusks into the fridge, promising a special chowder in the morning. When he returns, a candle waves tremulously from the imperceptible backdraft.