A family grows, not by babies
I got a phone call this week from my cousin Joshua.
I realize there is nothing particularly remarkable about hearing from cousin Joshua, particularly if I had a cousin Joshua. Here’s the rub. Until this past Tuesday, I didn’t know I did.
Nor did I know that Joshua’s grandfather (my dad’s brother) had a twin sister named Lily. That would be my dad’s sister who I guess over the course of my lifetime, he just forgot to mention. I’m assuming she was rather small and thus innocuous.
Oh, and cousin Joshua also has a sister, cousin Dale, who would now be in her mid-50s. I guess that birth announcement somehow got lost in the mail.
Now I realize that most families are not the ones depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting. There’s always that nutty uncle who at every gathering regales us with his amazing balloon animals, or Aunt Sarah who inevitably dabbles into the cooking sherry before doing a face plant into the mashed potatoes, thus avoiding post-dinner clean-up
chores. The difference is in my family, those people are the normal ones.
Our family tree is deciduous.
Let’s begin with the fact that my dad was one of six kids — at least until Tuesday. Four of them had the last name of Tempkins and two were Tompkins. So, my cousin, Isa — with whom I’m close — was the daughter of my dad’s brother and has a different last name than me.
This made it difficult doing the ancestry check that my family always thought would prove beyond doubt that we were direct descendants of Russian royalty. Probably the Romanovs. The problem was we failed the first question: What is your name?
Years later, some enterprising distant relative (although that was pretty much descriptive of all of them) did look into the family tree and discovered that rather than Russian aristocracy, we chose a more noble profession: We were horse thieves. That explained two things: Why I always had a penchant for counting by stomping my foot, and why I think the Kentucky Derby is the best sports event of the year.
Names in my family seemed to be optional. My dad had a twin brother whom we called Uncle George. His family in New York called him Irving and his wife’s family always referred to him as Michael. His friends knew him only as Tommy. So he was Uncle George, Irving, Michael, Tommy Tompkins. Or was it Tempkins?
My grandfather, who begat this magical mystery tour of a family, was a steel walker in Manhattan. He was extremely adept at eating lunch on the end of a steel beam on the 91st floor, but extremely uncomfortable sitting at a table with his family. My lasting image of him was that he had a face like a fist. He was mean. But not quite as much as his wife — my grandmother — who made Ma Barker look like a laugh riot.
My dad somehow managed to escape the tough confines of his Brooklyn home for California when he was in his late 20s. To his family, he was the fugitive. Our penance was that we were made to return to Brooklyn every summer of my youth.
I never did have the childhood joy of going to summer camp with my friends. I went to summer camp in Brooklyn, which was like going to summer camp at San Quentin.
I’d get to visit my cousins who, to the number, were crazier than hoot owls. And watch my father and his brothers play whist, argue and imbibe. And for that I didn’t even get a merit badge.
And now along comes cousin Joshua who tells me of another cousin, Dale, and an Aunt Lily, all of whom I have never heard of. Just my luck. I was out looking for horses to steal when somebody said, “Hey, look what I just found in the basement — it’s Aunt Lily.”