All right, I know I belong in the DUmpster, but I'm still working my way through something, with people who were children and adolescents alongside me in the Sandhills of Nebraska long ago.
In explaining what I'd been doing the past years, decades, eons, when they were out of my life (I pushed them away), I've been doing tons of writing, to explain myself; tens of thousands of words, I'm wearing down the keyboard. These are things of a nature one wishes only to share with friends from one's childhood and adolescence, though.
Anyway, I wrote this, describing something that'd happened during my years in the wilderness, and got an awesome reaction. It's from something about my testy relations with an aunt; I was living in Pennsylvania at the time.
- - - - - - - - - -
In the late 1970s, a most curious phenomenon began evolving among the grandchildren of Joseph [xxxx] and Mary [xxxx], although it was not until twenty years later that we noticed it’d happened, and come into full flower; some sort of collective cousin unconsciousness, in which we arrived at the same place but drawn from different directions, and independently of each other.
As we were all children of the Age of Aquarius, this was an anomaly, definitely contrary to what was going on with our generation.
I had many cousins, and of course there were eight [in my family], nearly all of us born 1951-1961, with only a few before and a few after. And there were of course exceptions, mainly in my own family, although [a brother who died at the age of 40] too near the end was affected, but alas had little time for it to evolve.
In religiosity, our parents had ranged from the standard devoutness of my mother to the total indifference of her brother, but essentially the children of our grandparents, our parents, merely observed Roman Catholicism in form, but not so much in belief and actions.
But beginning about this time, and for the next twenty years, most of we cousins, again, independent of each other, gravitated towards some sort of “center,†exclusively ours, becoming in sincerity, more Catholic than the Pope himself; an overpowering consciousness of the Glory, the Majesty, the Power, the Compassion, of God, and where nothing else mattered.
Although this phenomenon happened about the same time, this was not a consequence of the influence of the rising “religious right†or the popularity of televangelists; we’d all been raised Catholics, and that was never any part of our "culture."
It just happened, and it seemed to have happened as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
