Tuesday evening we had dinner with two of my cousins that I hadn’t seen in years. At one point we were laughing about being allowed to tag along with them and their friends to some cheesy horror movie about killer cockroaches. My sister and I were reliving the whole thing, right down to the plot of the movie, and being terrified afterward by a stray cat tipping over a garbage can. My cousins didn’t remember it at all, barely remembered us visiting them for a week because they were occupied with things like boyfriends, summer jobs and college applications.

To this day I am sure they have no idea that we idolized them, and that they were a tremendous influence on our lives.

While we were sitting around the table after dinner gabbing away I looked across the room at my boy, hanging out with his cousins. My nephews are all in high school, about the same age difference as between my sisters and our cousins. The guys were passing around his mp3 player and listening to the songs, and not in a “Oh, God, can you believe the stupid songs on here?” way. They were treating him like one of the guys, as they always have, and you could see from the expression on his face that he was in heaven. There’s just nothing as great for a little kid like being treated as an equal by the big kids.

And just like my cousins, probably when the guys are grown they won’t remember these evenings as anything special, but he will look back on them as some of the greatest times of his young life. I sure hope so, anyway.

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