I guess the crisis with my cousins came when I was twelve. That’s when they really got into scrubland hunting, and I became a pacifist. They’d take their air guns and hike behind their houses to the undeveloped low mesa. There among the dust and tumbleweeds and sage and manzanita they would shoot at rabbits and birds. They never brought anything home. They rarely sought the victims they managed to hit. I know they left countless small creatures to die under dry bushes of bloody wounds.

I was horrified. I began debating about it with them (they literally turned deaf ears and walked away from me, brown guns slung dangerously over their shoulders). I wrote protest poetry. I gave them another way to make me the object of family mockery.

Nancy and Debbie didn’t show them disapproval. Even my brother went along with it; we didn’t have any guns at home, and he was eager to learn how to shoot. Now that I think about it, there were some small set fires then too (one in the schoolyard on a Saturday evening kind of got out of hand), and my brother actively participated in the arsonettes.

One ally emerged for me out of the mess. My cousin Lloyd began to drop back and walk with me, to talk with me earnestly, to listen with what started out as sympathy and became empathy. It meant a lot to me, especially because he was three years older than I and the best-looking of the cousins. Maybe he was different from the others because he was an only child and they all had siblings. Or perhaps it was the fact that his father died when he was seven, so he lived alone with his mother and became more feminized/sensitized. Probably it was both of those, but mostly I think it was because he was smart.

I’ve talked to many children of divorce (of course!) and I guess the saddest part of it to me is the surprise. Just about everyone really thought their family was a happy one, no matter how much arguing they heard, until the split came. It rocked their world to lose the ballast of that assumed-happy foundation.

That didn’t happen to me. My parents are still married and probably happy. But I grew up assuming my whole family was smart. My parents are intelligent, there are books everywhere in their home, and our mealtime discussions and excursions were often laced with history, astronomy or mathematical puzzles. We’re Jews, and I thought we valued justice, education, and the rights of the underdog. I just assumed my father’s siblings would have IQs like his. And maybe they did (I think not). Maybe they were subsumed under marital behavior and maternal worries. It doesn’t matter. They acted stupid. And my cousins, except for Lloyd, were moronic.

“Don’t go getting intellectual on us,” my oldest cousin Bruce would warn. Or: “Eeeww, she’s getting all heavy again” I’d hear from Mitch.

My cousins are grown now, and have mostly reproduced themselves. The next generation seems even duller to me, which is probably the combined effects of low genetic intelligence, poor parenting, and the increasingly toxic environment in the LA basin. I have an old friend named Peter, brilliant and funny and difficult, whose parents were born in Greece. He visited the old country (Sparta) a few years ago, and he reported that his cousins were nice but stupid. Peter conjectured that the smart ones had come to the new world, and that made sense to me at first. But Peter has three younger brothers who are illiterate idiots. He’s a doctor who decided at 23 that he couldn’t risk reproducing any of his siblings, and who used his medical connections to arrange his own vasectomy at 25. I think Peter’s brothers disprove his theory. I think new immigrants have bustle and energy and challenge, and the vigor wanes for each succeeding generation in this great land of ours. My grandparents were heroic, my parents were energetic, my cousins are morons. I almost never see them.

Except for Lloyd. We remained close. We were a couple for awhile and shocked them all by planning to marry. But we each fell for another after college. We’re like best friends though. And as childless as we would have been if we’d gone ahead with it.

We weren’t ever worried about the cousin thing. It’s more that we’ve both gone from thinking we came from intelligent stock to concluding the opposite. We know we’re smart, but we think that’s a fluke or a throwback or something. We’re not confident that we’d pass genes for intelligence on to our offspring. And neither of us could bear to bear a kid like one of our cousins.