First Cousin

     Lynn Kirbow was as good a person as I’ve ever known, and that was a blessing and a bit of a curse because he and I are almost exactly the same age and were often seen as something of a package deal. 

    My father was his mother’s older brother. The two of them were among the youngest my grandparents produced. Let’s see, they had Ailene, 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 want to hammer the point that I grew up with a passel of cousins, and Lynn was the best of the best, and that’s why it was a just a little bit of a curse to have been super-glued to his hip for a good part of my childhood. From first grade through junior high, my bad judgment and poor decisions were constantly being compared to his by my parents and his parents and other relatives up and down the Hawthorne side, and especially my teachers, and I always came up short.

    I was lazy and disobedient, and he was diligent and studious, and he was chosen “Student of the Month” every other month, which, apparently, was big news at Pine Tree Jr. High because his official school picture regularly graced the front page of the little student newspaper.

    He looked a little Opie Taylor. He had freckles and rusty red hair that never seemed to need a comb. He wasn’t what I’d consider cute or handsome, but he had a confident, folksy style — sort of like Arthur Godfrey. People liked him immediately. 

    Though I was the better natural athlete, he started both ways in football while I rarely played a down. I faced him one time in a make-shift boxing ring, and he bloodied my nose. I never laced up another pair of boxing gloves, but I didn’t hold it against him because I knew it hurt him more than it hurt me. 

    That was a handy phrase our parents used to justify the whipping we earned for setting the yard on fire or cracking a coffee table in half. The phrase was patently inaccurate. I don’t think it did hurt them a bit, but in Lynn’s case, it think it probably did. I suffered a bloody nose, but he suffered a brief identify crisis.

    That’s because he was so damn nice. He had a smile and a kind word for everyone, and he never cursed, while I bristled with a smart-ass/ know-it-all/ son-of-a-bitch attitude that landed me either in the principal’s office or on the wrong side of my mother’s last raw nerve.

    About the only bad thing I can say about Lynn is that he once beaned me twice during a Little League baseball game. I should have been furious, but I wasn't because it got me on base twice. Now that I think about it, he probably plugged me because he’d grown tired of watching me strike out. It was his idea of showing me mercy.

    Beyond the regulatory confines of public education and organized 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 red clay paths through the pine woods near our homes, climbing trees big and small, building forts and combing creek beds at the bottom of a deep 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 radio and spent our Saturday mornings watching Tarzan, werewolf and vampire movies at the Arlene Theatre in downtown Longview.

    Now and then, I’d wear one of his hand-me-downs, and he wear one of mine. Our free-wheeling abd feckless dads got along pretty well, although our moms did not, but that was OK because 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 were generally side-by-side, flanked by our brothers and other cousins.

    I hope to find more of these photos.

    Lynn and I lost touch somewhere around my sophomore year of high school. We moved or they moved a little too far away for us to just bop in and out of each other’s houses unannounced. And then, my family moved to a smaller town about 10 miles and what seemed like 20 years away. 

    For as much as I protested, the change of scenery worked out really 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 met once or twice. I wasn’t invited to their wedding, which was just as well. They later divorced, and he married Sharon. They lived in or around San Angelo, which seemed to us back then to be a mile or two south of Albuquerque, so I only saw him twice later in his life — at his mother's funeral and at Kirk's funeral. 

    Kirk was his youngest brother, and his death shocked everyone. I knew would be there, but I couldn't find him, and then, he right behind he, about to put a bear grip on me. At that point, of course, I recognized him immediately, and we had a brief chance to re-live some of the finer moments of our childhood. We promised to stay in touch and maybe even get together at some point, but we never did. We were Facebook friends, but that's about as good at connecting people as it is for ripping them apart. 

    Like everyone else in West Texas, he shifted right while I, like everyone else in Austin, leaned left, and I came close to losing several  important relationships over politics, but that didn't happen with Lynn. He read or read at a few of my posts but typically limited his response to an emoji or a thumbs down. 

     That was fine with me. At least he never called me a commie libtard woke-joke snowflake or suggested that my parents and grandparents would be ashamed of my fondness for honesty, accuracy and democracy.

    But, enough about that. 

    Lynn was an audiologist, and I’m half-deaf, so he offered to help me 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 a few days before his death. He'd been moved to hospice, and I was told he didn’t have much more than a day or two left. As it turned out, he had only a few hours. 

    I hope writing this stirs a few more memories because my feelings for him are still right there, like it all happened yesterday, back when we were feral boys, perched high on our bike seats like buffalo hunters, surveying the landscape, then racing toward the woody ravine, screaming and choking on dust and sweat, then bouncing and skidding into the creek bottom where all the wild game and buried treasure waited to be discovered.