First Cousin

Lynn 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 aunt or uncle or two along with my teachers and his teachers, and I always came up short.

Of course, I was lazy and insubordinate while Lynn was diligent and studious, so our teachers regaled him as “Student of the Month” every other month, which was front page news at Pine Tree Jr. High. Try as hard as they could, my parents never missed an issue, thanks to Lynn's mother, who probably carried a wad of them around in her purse.

She was a little passive-aggressive before it was fashionable, bless her chubby little heart.

Lynn had freckles and rusty red hair that never seemed to need a comb, and he wasn't movie star handsome, but he was cute. Better yet, he had a confident, folksy, Arthur Godfrey style. Total strangers liked him immediately.

Though I was a better natural athlete. I took him on once in a back-yard boxing match, and he bloodied my nose right off. I haven't laced up another pair of boxing gloves since, but I didn't and I don't blame him. He was doing what he was told. "Wait for him to drop his guard and then punch him in the nose."

That's what he did because he was studious and diligent. My boxing coach probably told me, "Don't lower your guard or he'll flatten your nose," but I pooh-poohed that.

"You're not the boss of me," I probably muttered. Or something equally smart-ass stupid.

Of course, the second I dropped my guard, boom. Lynn caught me with a beautiful upper-cut, and just like that, I was flat on my ass, snorting and sniveling blood and trying to uncross my eyes.
Lynn almost panicked. "Hey, I'm sorry. ‘R you OK? I didn't mean to..."

I smeared blood with the tail of my T-shirt and tried to wiggle my nose to determine if it was still there. It hurt. I won’t lie about that. It stung like a bitch, but it wasn’t broken, mostly because there’s not much there to break. In short, I walked away with nothing worse than a bloody nose, while he left with a minor identity crisis, and why? Because he was so dang nice.

Lynn had a smile and a kind word for everyone. He rarely if ever cursed, whereas I cursed constantly and perfected a smart-ass, know-it-all attitude that landed me in the principal’s office once or twice or on the raw side of my mother’s last nerve regularly.

About the only bad thing I can say about Lynn is that he beaned me twice during a Little League baseball game. I should have been furious, but I wasn't because it got me to first base twice in one game, which for me was a personal best, so I was ecstatic.
Perhaps that was his plan all along. Perhaps he plugged me twice because he’d grown tired of watching me strike out in four pitches. Maybe it was his way of saying, "I care." It would have been just like him.

Beyond the confines of public education and youth sports, when it was just the two of us, Lynn was curious about the world in the same way I was. We spent hours and hours riding our bikes up and down dusty paths carved into the stands of loblolly pines behind our homes. We climbed them, built rickety treehouses in them, built forts under them, and combed the creek bed at the bottom of a steep ravine for arrowheads and cast fossils.

For several years, Lynn’s family lived either next door to us or just a few blocks away, so we walked or rode the school buses together, watched TV, listened to the radio and spent our Saturday mornings watching Tarzan, Dracula and "Lon Chaney as the Werewolf" movies at the Arlene Theatre in Longview.

Now and then, I’d wear one of his hand-me-downs, and he'd wear one of mine. My younger brother has reminded me that we sometimes threw rocks, dirt clods and homemade spears at each other.

Shirt buttons didn't stand a chance.

Our dads got along pretty well because they were pretty much alike, but our moms did not, but that was OK because almost everyone back then attended the summer family reunions at my grandparents’ house or, later, at a roadside park outside Jasper, whether they wanted to or not.

I’ve found a few photos from those days, and Lynn and I are generally standing side-by-side, surrounded by brothers and gobs of cousins.

We lost touch somewhere around my freshman or sophomore year of high school. We moved, or they moved, or we both moved too far away for us to just bop in and out of the other’s house unannounced. And then, we moved to White Oak, a tiny country town sitting on a patch of oil between Longview and Gladewater.

For as much as I protested, the change of scenery played out well for me. I began to enjoy the same kind of success Lynn had experienced for years, and he ended up dropping out of high school to marry a woman I'm not sure I ever met.

I wasn’t invited to their wedding, which was just as well. They divorced, and he married Sharon and made a home for her five children in San Angelo, which is four hours from Austin, and you have to really want to go there to get there, so I only saw him two or three times since, generally at family funerals.

The first was his mother’s. The second was Kirk's, his youngest brother. He’s the sweet little boy front, row far right. He died of a heart attack, and it was a staggering shock to everyone. I arrived at the funeral home early hoping to find Lynn, but I couldn't, but fortunately, he found me. I was gabbing with a brother and a cousin or two when I wheeled around, and there he was, about to put a bear-hold on me.

We enjoyed a quick assessment of our lives before he was summoned to duty. After the eulogies and “Amazing Grace” and the obligatory church membership campaign, we wandered out into the parking lot to hug and cry and say our goodbyes. Lynn and I promised to stay in touch and even entertained the notion that we didn't need a casket and a grave to justify getting together, but we never did. We were Facebook friends, but that's not nearly as good at connecting people as it is for ripping them apart.

Like almost everyone in West Texas, he moved right while I, like most everyone in Austin, leaned left, and social media almost convinced us that our former friends and neighbors were our enemies. I came close to writing off several essential relationships to Facebook postings produced in Russian meme factories, that didn't happen with Lynn. He might have read or a least scanned a one or two of my social media posts, but if he responded at all, it was a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

That was plenty for me. At least he never called me a libtard woke joke snowflake or claimed my grandparents would be ashamed of me because I had forgotten where I came from. For the record, I came from a place where regular people valued honesty, humility, generosity and democracy.
Oh well. Enough of that.

Lynn was an audiologist, and I’m half-deaf, so he offered to help find the perfect pair of hearing aids, but that didn’t happen, either, and it never will. He died of brain cancer on Saturday morning, Nov. 29.

I began writing this right after I heard he’d been moved to hospice because I was told he didn’t have much time left. As it turned out, he didn’t even have that much.

I’ve been rewriting and editing it since. I want it to awaken a few more memories of him and me and us with Kirk and Randy and Jerry and Kenny and Mike all the other cousins because my feelings for him are still right there, like it all happened yesterday. We were feral boys, perched high on our bike seats like buffalo hunters, surveying the pine needles and muscadine vines, then blasting off, flying downhill into the woody ravine, cheering, choking on dust, slinging sweat, and bouncing and skidding into the sandy creek bottom where the wild game and lost treasure waited to be discovered.