Cousins

My Fundamentalist youth began, of course, the day I was born, at Kentucky Baptist Hospital in Louisville, to Fundamentalist parents – July 6, 1961. 

But I wasn’t supposed to be born that day: my due date was, in fact, June 16 – I was late. I got crowded out of that day by my first cousin Kirk, the son of my father’s sister, born in New York. He could have simply been born on his own damn due date, June 2 – but nooooooo, he had to horn in on my due date, making me even more overdue than he was. I’m not sure my mother ever forgave his mother.

All of this is a lengthy way of starting this tale by pointing out that my cousin and I are almost exactly the same age, and experienced almost exactly the same Fundamentalist upbringing. He and I are closer than brothers, both in the simultaneity of our arrivals and our relationship over the decades; put another way, he figures into the tale, and bookends it.

I like to say, when explaining our kinship to others, that he and I experienced contemporaneous gestation, mostly because I just love saying contemporaneous gestation. It’s so many more syllables than born at the same time – and anyone who knows me will tell you I never use one syllable when 10 will do.

Why is he telling us this?

I’m telling you this because the similarities between me and my near-twin cousin greatly inform my status as misfit in the world in which I grew up; he and I are of a kind, and that kind just couldn’t persist in the Evangelical universe. That list of things he and I have in common explains the reasons why.

Born in the summer of 1961, among the contrails of Project Mercury and the second 100 days of the Kennedy Administration, we qualify as Tweeners – squeezed in between the end of the Baby Boom and the onset of Generation X. We’re in that small group of kids who came to social awareness during the Fall of Nixon, making us more cynical than our older siblings. Too young for Vietnam and too old to be seduced by disco, we were a micro-generation in ourselves. 

This in itself sharply customized our early years, but experiencing it all through the filter of a Fundamentalist upbringing made our parallel journeys all the more unique. Our sibling parents had grown up in such a family, carrying the template of their own experiences into the families they had begun creating – a template that was rigid, inviolable, role-driven and, in hindsight, elitist (in a disturbing social pecking order sort of way). None of these attributes were outwardly obvious, not one of them would be granted by our family members (then or now), and it’s only in looking back that they are at all apparent; when you’re born into a family with such a template, that’s just the way it is.

On the plus side, our stringent childhood had much going for it – safety, first and foremost. Fundamentalist families in that day and time lived largely in isolation from the world, socializing only with each other, basing most if not all family activity on the church. The stern rules of living we took for granted allowed for little straying into dangerous territory; we were socially sequestered, to be sure, but in such a way that little harm was likely to befall us.

We didn’t lack for community. However separated we may have been from the rest of the human race, we were a family among many families, all connected, all very social. I was far closer to the kids in my church than I was to the kids in my school back then – and I can remember the first names of most of their parents, where I seldom ever met the parents of my schoolmates.

There was also a distinctive, undeniable cultural thread in the fabric of our church-driven lives. Our particular brand of Protestantism is highly musical, and Kirk and I were born into a family that was at the top of the heap: talent in this domain pervades the families of our parents and their siblings. Both of our mothers played piano in church, and participated in choir; both of my own parents were solo-quality singers. Most of our cousins inherited these gifts, and it was a cultural impetus of our larger environment to cultivate them.

On the down side, the ugly attributes of Fundamentalism so prominently and unapologetically paraded by the Evangelical faithful today were just as pervasive back then – they were just kept more politely out of sight. The church was lily-white, politically far right, and there was plenty of passive bigotry and overt, crushing misogyny baked into its center – it just wasn’t paraded.

It was with the dawning awareness that accompanies coming of age that my cousin and I began to understand the world in which we were expected to live out our lives. We didn’t actually discuss it outright until we became adults (which is where this story ends). Our parallel experiences led us to the same point, in the end – but on the journey itself, we were far more focused on those things we shared personally.

Some of that did indeed derive from Fundamentalist culture – our immersion in music, first and foremost. We both became not only multi-instrumentalists but composers. Most of our common experience, however, was far afield of the church, and those things populating it explain our eventual destinies: the fiction of Asimov, Ellison, Heinlein, et. al.; Star Trek; chess; classical music. And later, history; philosophy; technology; mathematics.

Finally, it’s noteworthy that we only shared this path with each other. While there are some exception overlaps, in general our own siblings didn’t share these things, at least not to the total-immersion degree that Kirk and I did. Even though we seldom saw each other growing up (though we were pen pals for a time, in that pre-Internet era) - we probably didn’t cross paths more than a dozen times in our first 20 years – we were completely in step.

Most of those steps comprise the tale that follows.