My mother came from a large family of eight children. She was the youngest and often liked to boast that competing with her brothers and sisters made her wise and resilient. The truth was that she fiercely loved her siblings with every fiber of her being. They were a close knit lot who gathered at my grandmother’s house almost every Friday evening. 

Those visits became a kind of bedrock of certainty for me after my father’s untimely death. As a child being with my loving aunts and uncle and my many cousins was the highlight of growing up. It was in their midst that I felt safe and secure. I knew their love and concern for me and my brothers with every encounter. I suppose that they molded the person that I would ultimately become. 

We had so much fun on those glorious Fridays when the adults played cards and kibitzed with each other as siblings so often do. It was noisy but happy in the smoke filled rooms. Much of the time I wondered if they even noticed what we children were doing while they bonded as though they had never left home. We were gloriously on our own, playing games outside on Grandma’s front porch or in the middle of the street. 

My grandmother lived in a tiny house on North Adams Street only a few miles from downtown Houston. Her neighborhood had changed from the time when my mother was a child. We kids saw the industrialization of the area that had left only a few homes surrounded by office buildings and manufacturing. A few steps took us to the intersection of Navigation, a wide road leading to the Houston Ship Channel. 

Across Navigation there was a corner bar that was always lively on Friday nights but none of those things kept me and the cousins from having a glorious time. Somehow the scene seemed a bit more delightfully adventurous with its colorful array of humanity adapting to change. We were having too much fun to be fearful that maybe we should be a bit less daring in a place that was not as uneventful as our neighborhoods back home. It was all just part of the ambiance that was wonderful in our kid world. 

We were not particularly creative but we did set rules for a game that we called hide and find. Of course somebody had to start the fun by pulling the short straw and becoming “it.” That person would close his/her eyes and count to twenty five before searching for the others. The trick was to get back to the front porch without getting discovered and caught. With only one person peering in the corners of the backyard and in hiding places up and down the street most of us made it unscathed back to the free zone never imagining that maybe running around in the dark and hiding behind the fences of warehouses may not have been the safest thing to do.

We were young, innocent and without worries. The world seemed to be such a safe place back then. Our naivety both endangered and protected us at the same time. We had not yet noticed how dangerous the world might be. Like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn we were free ranging children who somehow never encountered a single problem on our Friday night adventures. We embraced each other and only competed to get to that porch. Otherwise we simply loved everyone who was part of our special family group.

As we grew older we often went our different ways on Friday nights until one day those times were no more. Our grandmother died and our parents mostly talked on the phone rather than gathering together. We were busy being teenagers and then adults. We married and began our own families, only meeting on Christmas Eve or sadly at the funerals of our aunts and uncles. 

Now we are spread all over the place and many in our ranks have left this earth. Each of us miss those wondrous days when we were young and the love we forged back then has never dimmed. When we find ways to be together again we pick up right where we left off and feel as comfortable and natural as ever. We have an unbroken bond that even our spouses and children will never quite understand. We shared a golden time of life that somehow cemented our relationships forever. 

I sometimes drive down Navigation Street to North Adams. Amazingly my grandmother’s home is still there. It belongs to a stranger now and is the only house left on the street. It’s windows and doors are protected with bars but somehow I manage to see past all of the changes whenever I go back there. I have a picture in my heart of a house bursting with joy and love. It is a comforting thought that reminds me of my good fortune. I think of my cousins and how few of us are left. I hope they understand how much they mean to me even when I don’t take the time to get in touch with them. They were my extra brothers and sisters who shared in the glories of childhood. They are me and I am them.