My cousin’s kid is playing baseball against a rival school. It’s the final game of the year, so I came to support him.

Cousin: “Here. I got you some food.”

She hands me a hot dog, but it’s wrapped up in flatbread instead of in a bun.

Me: “Is this… garlic naan?”

Cousin: “Yeah, it’s traditional. ‘Cause of the mascot.”

Me: “Huh? I thought the mascot was just a tiger.”

Cousin: “It is now, but… for a long time, before anyone worried about that kind of thing, the mascot was the Indian Chief. Some kid would wear a fake war bonnet and dance around with a bow and arrow and all that. Then, one day, someone from [Native American Tribe] pointed out that this was kind of offensive, and also all the traditions were wrong, so we stopped.”

Me: “So, is the bread just a pun?”

Cousin: “No, that came after. They had a big meeting about the new mascot, and they’d already made this big display where the cheerleaders would carry around giant letters that spelled out ‘INDIAN CHIEF’. So, in this meeting, the owner of the local curry takeout place said, ‘I’ve got the solution: my restaurant sponsors your team, and all you need to do is throw away the I in “chief”.’”

Me: “So… why the tigers?”

Cousin: “The [County] school board got upset because people were more excited about the food than the game. So, the restaurant owner said, ‘To heck with it; let’s do tiger habitat awareness instead.’”

My partner is mildly allergic to cats, and both of us travel too frequently to have a dog. I get it, but I miss having pets, so when one of my friends says in the shared group chat that she’s found a stray kitten who needs a permanent home, and my partner says he’s willing to meet the kitten, I’m delighted. I don’t go with him to the first meeting because I don’t want to push him into a pet he doesn’t want, but I shouldn’t have worried; he’s swept away by kitten cuteness, and even better, the kitten turns out to be at least partially a low-allergy breed, so my partner doesn’t get more than a slightly stuffy nose.

I’m so delighted to be getting a cat that I’m more than happy to let my partner pick out a name. He could name the little furball Beef-And-Cheese-Combo, and I’d still just be excited to be getting a pet! Being my partner, however, he spends a solid week picking out a deeply symbolic name in archaic Sanskrit, meaning “Zen” and “the root of all wisdom”. It’s a bit big a name for a very small kitten, but who cares? We’re getting a cat!

We’re a few months into blissfully being owned by a (now very pampered) cat when we go over to my cousin’s for dinner one night. My cousin mentioned that he and his wife had recently gotten a cat, too, and we very quickly meet her: a beautiful long-haired princess who comes to greet us at the door.

Partner: *Happily petting her* “Awww, what a sweet girl! She’s getting along okay with your dog, then?”

Cousin: “Yep, they’re friends. I think he scared her a little at first, but one hiss, and he backed off, and they’ve been getting along great since then.”

Partner: “What’s her name?”

Cousin’s Wife: “Garby.”

Me: “Like Greta Garbo, with that thick fur coat?”

Cousin: “Nope, short for Garbage. We found her living in the dumpster, so we named her Garbage.”

Noticing my incredulous expression, his wife explains further.

Cousin’s Wife: “We tried coming up with something a little classier, but we couldn’t find anything we both agreed on. And by then, she was already responding to ‘Garbage Kitten’, so we just went with Garby.”

Partner: “…”

I had to chuckle, while my partner laughingly explained how much thought he’d put into naming our fluffy little hellion. Both strays found their forever homes — but with two very different approaches to pet naming! Neither cat seems to mind, as long as we keep the treats coming.

A while back, I posted this story about my Cousin Lisa, who’s nearly two decades older and is the best cousin ever. This is despite the fact that she’s technically not my cousin, since she’s related to my married-in uncle and not my parents. Lisa’s so much My Cousin that I never even questioned HOW we might be related until my great-aunt started getting upset that Cousin Lisa was invited to a wedding but way-off relatives I’ve never met in maybe fifteen years aren’t.

What I didn’t tell people is that I also have a younger brother.

When Timmy was in high school, he was a very good soccer player, and his team got to travel interstate for a competition. This involved an entire team of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds traveling alone with only the company of chaperones.

Sometime during this trip, Timmy and several of the other boys snuck out one night and apparently went to a bar… where they proceeded to get drunk. (Yes, Timmy lied about his age.) And then, Timmy got injured. Timmy swears it was a bar fight, but he’s full of it and was probably just being stupid. The chaperones had to take him to hospital to get a cast on his broken arm, his best friend got a concussion and stitches, and when he got home, he was grounded for more than a year.

Up until now, I thought that was all there was to the story.

It turns out, the full story goes like this.

Timmy, his best friend, and his teammates did sneak out. But then, sometime during the night, some kind of miscommunication meant that Timmy and his friend got left behind at the bar when the rest returned to the hotel. Thus, you had two drunk seventeen-year-olds alone in a strange city.

This is when they got injured — alone, drunk, in a strange city. Being very intelligent seventeen-year-olds, they decided that they would not call their parents, the chaperones, or even the police or an ambulance. The reason? They were scared they would get in trouble.

Fortunately, Timmy was drunk enough to make dumb mistakes but sober enough to remember that he had Cousin Lisa’s number in his phone and that she lived nearby. So, he called her.

Cousin Lisa, despite all reasonable expectations, answered a phone call at 2:00 am on a weekday. She somehow understood what Timmy was saying and went to get them. 

It was after picking them up from the side of the street that Lisa discovered they were injured, as opposed to just drunk, so she then took them to hospital, wrangled any paperwork and phone calls with chaperones and parents so that she was allowed to sign the forms for them, and sat with them in the emergency room for hours until they were seen. 

By the time she personally escorted them into the hands of their chaperones, the wee hours of the morning were not so wee anymore. Lisa has confirmed that, since she had a uniform in her car, it was late enough that she just went straight to work.

The kicker is that Lisa did not live in this city. She lived close by, which is to say she lived in another city about an hour and a half or two hours away.

Based on the hospital record and the phone record, she had to have picked them up within fifty minutes of getting the call.

Timmy and his friend were both in VERY big trouble, but Lisa herself has never thought the story worth mentioning until swearing this story is getting retold when Timmy finally gets married. As far as she was concerned, her youngest cousin called a safe adult for help and that’s all that matters.

And people wondered why I’d never questioned how we’re related.

Related:
We Could All Use A Cousin Lisa In Our Lives

In the 1970s, my cousin and I were watching TV, and there was an ad for a movie. It ended with, “Coming soon to a theater near you!” 

My cousin gasped.

Cousin: “[My Name], how do they know where we live?”

My oldest cousin is eighteen years older than me, and her children are within ten years of my age.

I’m babysitting them one day when the youngest, about six years old at the time, pulls out his little collection of Lego he brought to play with.

Me: “Oh! Super cool! You’ve got Lego with you!”

He looks up at me like I’ve grown an extra head.

Cousin: “You know what Legos are?! But you’re old!”

Ouch, kid.