Never Kiss Your Cousins

Can you believe that there’s a diagnosis for being too happy? I once went to psychologist who gave me a personality test and decided that, “There’s nobody that damn happy.” He then sent me to a psychiatrist who told me I needed a mood stabilizing medication. I knew enough about this medication to know that it could kill my liver. I also knew plenty of people who were on three or four mood altering medications and were still in a bad mood. It seems that when one doesn’t work, the shrinks keep adding more. I refused the medication. Anyway, who ever heard of trying to cure happiness?

People seem to get an itch whenever anything unfamiliar rubs up against them. One thing I like about country people is that they don’t think everything has to be “fixed”. Lots of their people are different; but they seem to celebrate differences, as long as the “different” folks are their folks. They even have a phrase to describe the mentally ill and brain damaged in their families: “He/she ain’t right.” In the country, people seem to look at themselves and their familiars for a way to accommodate the itch. In the city, they seem to look to the experts to “cure” the itch – and cure it in a hurry.

I’m generally considered “not right” by folks whether in the country or in the city. A lot of people like that about me. Richard married me to “bring some life” into his house. Richard is a stoic New Englander who grew up on a nice, stable chicken breeding farm. I tried to warn him that he wasn’t ready for the life forms that I was going to drag through his home. He didn’t know better because he had never been married, even though he was forty-eight years old. So he took the plunge.

My Cajun grandma used to brag that my sister married one of our cousins. She grew up in an era when you judged marriage prospects by who “their people” are. In order to make a good match, you had to have close interfamily ties. When my daddy brought my mama from Bayou Teche, less than one hundred miles away, to Bayou Lafourche to meet his mama’s mama, his grandma started crying, “Oh, Leonard, why you marrying a foreigner?” Daddy’s grandma spoke only Cajun French; Mama’s people spoke only English. And Daddy’s grandma didn’t know any of Mama’s “people”. By great-grandma’s standards, Mama could have just as soon come from another continent.

I guess my mama’s folks weren’t foreign enough. While it’s true that sometimes you win in genetic roulette by breeding like with like, often the weaknesses in the offspring far outweigh the strengths. Even though rural folks used to marry their cousins because they lacked transportation into and out of isolated pockets of population, today’s country people generally like hybrid vigor in their livestock.

I’ll admit that I’m rather high strung, but so are thoroughbred horses. My family all tends toward the “high strung”, and most of them married high-strung people – and have high-strung kids. That makes for family gatherings with a “whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on”.

Richard hasn’t yet asked to get off the roller coaster of our combined lives -- not even when I dragged him to a reunion of our family one summer. I like that about him.