family, or, a funny thing about facebook

Paul and I are now Facebook friends. I'm not sure how or when it started, but I think it was that I somehow ended up on his sister's email list a year or so ago, and then in turn found her on Facebook, and then their mother found me on Facebook, and then yesterday I noticed that my brother and he are now Facebook friends (and so it goes, and so it goes).

So I sent him a friend request last night, and he accepted. (What follows here now, highly subjective and probably not all true, is what I remember best, and what I still carry close to my heart, and why I find it so soul-satisfying to be connected again to Paul, however slightly, however tenuously, and where these thoughts take me.)

Paul is one of my cousins, you see, and many many years ago, going on a quarter of a century now, he was probably my favorite cousin in all the world. (And when one has had at various times over the years, by blood or marriage, six uncles and eight aunts, give or take, there tend to be a fair number of cousins.)

It was Dana, Paul's big sister and a whopping five years older than me, whom I idolized as a little girl, and who taught me to play Uno and who introduced me to the world of Duran Duran and Bon Jovi and the '80s in general, and the cousin who's hand-me-down clothes my parents were hard-pressed to get me out of. But it was Paul, a mere two years older than me, with whom I ran around in the fields and the tall grass surrounding our grandmother's cabin in Sunlight Waters, near the town of Cle Elum, in the vast great middle of Washington State.

We chased grasshoppers and chipmunks in those fields around our grandmother's A-frame cabin (built by hand by our grandparents, my parents, various other friends and relatives -- oh the stories I grew up with about the building of that house!) and fought over who got to sit in the rusted tractor seat perched on a log at the end of the driveway.

We dropped water balloons onto the heads of unsuspecting passers-by from the deck overlooking the front porch and chased each other up and down the spiral metal staircase to the sleeping loft above the main living area.

We spent hours, whole afternoons, entire days, at the Cle Elum Country Club (appropriately on Clubhouse Road, maybe a twenty-minute walk from our grandmother's house, past trailer homes and decrepit cars and rusted metal swingsets and the house with the red-headed daughters with whom I sometimes played and piles and piles of old tires and mailboxes mounted in rows on weathered wooden posts alongside the road -- decades later my then-boyfriend and my brother and I drove out to the old cabin, just to see it, just to make sure of it, despite it's having left the family years before, and the then-boyfriend, New York City boy to the core, looked slightly flabbergasted and said he bet there was a lot of organized dogfighting in the area), which consisted pretty much of an outdoor pool (home to entire imaginary worlds) and an indoor pool table in an otherwise large empty room.

We went for long walks in the winter snow (just the two of us because we were big kids then, though I remember following in Paul's footprints, step for step, still too little to go my own way) and played in the black of the windowless upstairs bathroom with glow-in-the-dark yoyos, telling each other ghost stories of our own making.

There is a picture, one of those old rounded-corner photographs in one of our grandmother's (now my mother's) photo albums, of us sitting side by side in two plastic inflatable children's chairs. The picture is taken from behind us and we are looking forward through the window of the cabin's front door, looking out at the porch and the fields and the woods and the mountains and the whole world in front of us, my blond towheaded self in sharp contrast to Paul's bright orange mop, and we are leaning in towards each other, and I like to think that we are whispering or giggling, sharing some secret joke between us.

This is all, as I said, going on a quarter century ago now. Our grandmother, matriarch of that A-frame cabin in the seeming wilderness of our childhoods, passed away when I was nine and Paul was eleven. I know we saw each other after that, perhaps as late as high school, perhaps later though probably not, but these earlier memories are the strongest, are the ones that I wrap around myself, around my notions of the past, of where I, of where we, come from.

Paul and I are friends now, Facebook friends, and we are all grown up and living our seperate lives on opposite sides of this vast country. And I don't know what that means, if anything at all, yet there is an unexpected comfort in the notion of being once again connected to him, to his sister, to their mother, to my brother and our other cousins and family friends, however deep or complex or simple or superficial these connections may be.

I was talking with Erica not too long ago about the strange Facebook phenomenon of connecting or being connected to practically everyone we've ever known, in whatever context that knowing may have been. We were talking specifically about 'defriending' people, about paring down these relationships to the ones that really matter, and she said something that has haunted me, something about the idea that even though the tens and hundreds of Facebook 'friends' might not all be people we are close to now, there is a certain sense of safety, of personal history in what can be a very frightening world, in having a network of people who care, or have cared, about what we have been doing, how we are doing now, where we are coming from.

Of all of these connections, outside of those immediate friends with whom I most interact, it is the family ties that I find most satisfying, even if it is just knowing that they are there, and reachable, not lost in the distance of childhood or dependent on family funerals or weddings for reconnection. Facebook and all those other networking sites seem to me, in a certain light, to be a modern incarnation of that interconnected family kind of thing, and even as my sarcasm-laced outlook demands mockery of these sites, there is an unarguable part of me that loves them.