My Outdoor Cousin

When I go to the restaurant I know, I order the same food. I don’t like having to figure out what I might want again. I don’t like being disappointed when I could have had what I already know I like. When I drive to a place I like to go, I take the route I like, I don’t usually wander. I look forward to the sights I know are coming, and I don’t want to give them up for something that might not be there.

Most folks will tell you I’m not much of an outside person. I like to be near my music and my computer.

But whenever my cousin, Joe, is around here, or I’m around where he is, we always end up outside or in the car going somewhere. Joe is my outdoor cousin.

It started one Saturday afternoon that I was home from college, walking down the street in the town where we both lived. He offered me a ride home. We decided to go out to lunch at the local root beer stand−frozen mug root beer in the car and all. We had such a fine talk that we decided to keep talking. He suggested that we go hiking at the Rock.

I said, “Are you kidding? Who DO you think you’re talking to? I hate the fall winds.”

“Aw C’mon, We’ll keep talking. You’re only home for the weekend.”

He had me there. I did like talking. We drove to Starved Rock State Park and walked out to the cliffs over the river. It was fall. The wind was cold, but the friendship was warm enough to make a difference. The space and the trees make talking so easy that my ears forgot to hurt when the wind rushed through them.

That’s the day Joe and I decided that both of our families were totally crazy. We divorced our parents and our siblings on the spot and started a separate family of our own. Of course, we never told them. We walked, laughing and talking like that for a couple of hours.

Then we went into the fabulous, old park hotel lobby. It was built by depression recovery workers, using giant old logs and stone. We drank hot cider in front of the 8-foot walk through fireplace, on mustard yellow couches under floor lamps with fringed lampshades, the two of us still talking. Sometimes we were quiet. We pretended we were in another country−Luxemburg, or Lithuania, or maybe it was Russia. At one point we walked out the French doors along the back to let the view know that we’d been there.

That was a couple of decades ago, give or take ten years, or maybe it was yesterday.

I’m still not that much of an outdoor person, but whenever the mention of a State Park in the fall comes up, I think for a second of how my ears might hurt, and then I think of my outdoor cousin.
Sometimes the last thing you want to do is the one you’d do again in a second.

−me strauss Letting me be