First Cousin
L ynn Kirbow was as good a person as I’ve ever known, and that was a blessing and a curse inasmuch as he and I are almost exactly the same age and, as first cousins, were often seen as a package deal. My father was his mother’s older brother. The two of them were among the youngest my grandparents hatched. Let’s see, they had Allene, Carroll, Violet, Amos, Polk, Jr., Hollis (my father), Marcelle (Lynn’s mother) and Bobby Gene (my namesake). Marcelle’s twin sister, Martha, didn’t survive infancy, and Bobby Gene drowned the summer before his senior year at Kirbyville High School. I mention all of this because I intend to hammer home the point that I grew up with a shit pot slew of cousins, and Lynn was the best of the best, and that’s why it was occasionally inconvenient and irritating to have been clamped to his Hush Puppies for a good chunk of our childhood. From first through seventh or eighth grade, I was constantly being compared to him by my parents and his parents and an a...