The Sister of the Boyfriend Who's Actually a Cousin

This post is brought to you courtesy of Celia Cruz's "Rie Y Llora" and my gorgeous sister Tara who let me make her wear colanders and fake cakes.



If there's one thing about living in a small town that is distinctively different from living in a larger city it's the great big familial tangle that happens when a smallish pool of people are born, live, and die within a tight square area of relatively short miles.  Oh sure, a few of them go abroad to acquire a bit of cosmopolitan polish with which to snag a mate from another county or to impress the potential partners they grew up with.  (People grow up with each other in small towns like this one which I didn't know actually happened anywhere.)

For three decades I have lived comfortably assuming that I'm not related to most of the other Laforests, Basses, and Johansons* in the white pages of the phone book.  In my previous life it has always been a smug understanding of mine that even if there are 40 people in the phone book with the last name of Williamson, it's 99% certain that not a single one of them is related to each other.  (Except by their most dubious claim to all be "related" to Robert The Bruce.) 

This is no longer the case.  In my small town it is almost certain that if you are looking up the Thompsons, at least 50% of the "Thompson" listings are people who share some genetic information with each other.  What this means is that (theoretically) you can dial up a Thompson and have a fifty percent chance of being able to get a message forwarded to the actual Thompson you're looking for through the Thompson grapevine rather than wasting valuable time trying to sort through all the listings because you can't remember which Betty Thompson is the one who owes you money.

This is an undervalued benefit to many people being related to each other and I freely admit that it hasn't made my life any more convenient than it was before because my phone book adventures actually got me into trouble a while ago when I wanted to write up a little article about a local farm called "Jones Farm"** and I couldn't remember the address and phone number of their farm stand which I wanted to include so as to direct people to go and buy from them because I love them.  Being an ignorant city girl I looked up the Joneses in the phone book.  I have to tell you that people named "Jones" who have lived in one area for generations generate a lot of listings of Joneses and they don't live all that far away from each other and you can almost see the DNA profiles having a party on the pages. 

I ended up giving the information for "Jones Farm Inc." which made some uncomfortable attention be directed at me. 

See, the other thing you have to think about (so as to avoid any awkward social situations) is the family business phenomenon.  If there are 30 Joneses in your town the chances are good that 15 of them are related and of those 15 of them, at least 6 of them are cousins whose parents took over their own parent's business and that the cousins have now also taken over the family business in their turn.  This means a lot of Joneses in the same vocation.  In a small town. 

"Jones Farm" and "Jones Farm Inc." are not the same, though the outsider's assumption that there couldn't possibly be two farms with the family name of "Jones" is terribly reasonable, woe to the person who puts yet another wedge of splintered cross-shaped wood between rival family farms that live within spitting distance of each other and all share at least one set of grandparents together.  In the city this kind of crap never happens.  These kinds of coincidences are hokey.  The kind of thing that stupid sitcoms about country life sketch up for your pretend amusement.

(Insert a 1970's laugh track here including the fake cough in the background for authenticity.)

Yet, as ridiculous as it might seem to city folk, this is very real in small town life.  So if you see two Real Estate companies that sport the same name but a different logo, assume that the companies are run by people who are related and are now bitter rivals.  This might come in handy if you're the devious kind of person who can turn rivals against each other for your own personal greater good, but sadly, this is not a skill of mine.

Another way that the umbilical connection can trip up a newcomer is that because families tend to extend generationally in small towns, families know other families almost as well as they know themselves.  Casual chatter is dangerous at all times and in all situations because at any moment you may inadvertently be discussing someone you met last week who might have inspired a little comical sketch you were excited to share only to discover, to your long lasting horror, that the person you are talking to is the best friend of the person whose personality, (or teeth), you have just put under a rather unattractive fluorescent bulb for critical viewing. 

Or, in another gaff from which there is no known extrication, you might be talking to the sister of the boyfriend of the person you are talking about who is actually a cousin and you won't have time to ask yourself if that's even legal because you will be looking for a rope with which to hang yourself.

You can share mine if you need to. 

But first let's fashion some hats out of tinfoil and break out the Everclear and have a blast going down in social flames!






*Someday I will tell those of you who don't know how it comes about that I have had 4 last names but only one marriage.

**You don't really think there are any farmers named "Jones" do you?  No.  People named Jones are never farmers, they are paper pushers and annoying go-getters who are always making everyone else spend too much money and run too hard in the wrong shoes.  So obviously I am making a weak attempt to save what is left of my social standing by using fake identities and situations in order to confuse no one but feel that I have at least made an effort to blend in and not brew more complications than I can handle in one week.


More on life in McMinnville:
Life In A Small American Town