2nd Cousin –

In my case everyone could pick my brothers out of a lineup – at least if you knew me and then saw them. But something that very few people knows is that I have six sisters. People don’t know that they’re my sisters for a couple of reasons. First, they have hair – this is defiantly a positive in their eyes. Another reason is that we have different last names – at least they do now. They all got married before it became cool to put a hyphen between the old and new last names. Since our parents have died I don’t know if any of them would even hyphenate now because people would know that they are related to me.

I guess I had a few cousins growing up – but not very many and especially not my age. None of them had the same last name either. Now you can understand why I was so excited to learn that my second cousin was moving in across the street. Now I had never met him or any of his family for that matter. As I understand second cousins are ¼ of the same bloodline as you are. Not a whole lot but at least he was a blood relative, a boy and only one year younger. This is kind of like finding out that you’re getting a little brother that’s twelve years old – a mini me per say.

I loved sports and spend just about every waking moment either participating of thinking about playing sports. I wasn’t that great of a student and hated to study. Physically I was larger than most kids my age and scared some people because I was large, athletic and loud. You normally knew when I was around. It helped and/or hurt my reputation because my I hung out with the toughest kid in the world.

Well you can understand my disappointment when Harald moved in. First of all Harald isn’t a tough guy name and especially when he is wearing a calculator on his belt and has a pencil guard in his shirt front pocket. He hadn’t played any sports, unless you count playing the organ and cello sports. Now this was the 70’s – the beginning of the computer revolution. The word genius could have been appropriate but we didn’t know what he was talking about. Luckily I hadn’t told many people he was moving in so I didn’t have to explain the only ¼ blood thing. The in common thing must have been the part each of us has missed out on. Oh he was a nice kid but we weren’t going to be spending a lot of time together.

I remember when he showed up for school – he seemed not to know you could leave your books in your locker since he carried everything he owned around in his arms as he bounced down he hall. That first day we were walking down the hall a little ways behind Harald. As I pointed him out to the toughest guy in the world, all the sudden a couple of guys started to give him the business and tried to knock things out of his arms. As Harald collected himself and rounded the corner, we happened to reach the two that were giving him a hard time. Now remember we were about a foot taller than just about anyone else and these two were the ones that started picking on someone weaker than they were. It just became our opportunity to show them what their medicine tasted like.

We grabbed one each and pinned them up against a locker and explained that Harald was our friend and that if they mess with one of our friends they mess with us. I think we could have also asked them to sing a couple of songs and do a dance and we wouldn’t have heard any complaints. Word got around pretty quite not to mess with Harald or the two loudest and biggest kids at school would want to talk to you. He was still a little different so I’m sure on occasion he had to put up with a little grief, I’m also sure he called me a couple of things on occasion but I probably didn’t understand them. Today I would still call him a friend. He ended up in silicone valley and the rumor is he could buy his own island if he wanted too. Now I know I’m glad to be ¼ the same bloodline, but I still think he never knew about what happened the first day of school.