The Honeycomb by Ginger Truitt
Boone County Sun Times
March 17, 2004

This weekend I am attending the wedding of my younger cousin Crystal.  She is beautiful, smart and funny and has her tongue pierced. Because she is family I can get away with asking her pressing questions such as, “If you swallow a piece of steak, but gristle gets wrapped around your tongue piercing, does the meat bounce back up into your mouth?”
  
Crystal, the daughter of my mom’s youngest sister, is a cousin on the Pickel side of the family.  I haven’t written much about my mom’s relatives and they have heavily questioned me about it. They are by far the most colorful bunch in my family tree and there is definitely a lot of material there. However, most of it should be printed posthumously to save unnecessary embarrassment.  
  
My Grandmother Pickel, the matriarch of the family, is eighty-three years old and as feisty as they come. She lives alone, not counting the cats, dogs and birds, and as of last summer was still doing such heavy chores as mowing her own grass.
  
I won’t spend a lot of time describing the aunts and uncles in this article. Not only would it be way to time consuming to detail the fascinating, and somewhat nefarious, lives they’ve led, most of you would probably think I was making it up anyway. Instead I’ll skip straight to the cousins.
  
As adults we are a pretty diverse bunch. Michelle is a radio personality and the mother of five. Kim has her master’s degree in something really impressive and has an equally impressive job at IUPUI. (I really need to pin her down on what she does exactly.) Crystal is a graphics designer. Tina is a manager at our local KFC. I am a homeschool mom of three. Clint is a Tae-Kwon-Do instructor. And Mandee is a restaurateur. All together there are fifteen of us and, except for Clint, our most common threads are butt and bust sizes. Recently when my cousin Michelle gave birth to an underweight daughter it was pointed out that as a Pickel woman it would be the only time in this child’s life that
she would be told to fatten up.
  
My husband has developed quite an affinity for my female cousins.  He is looking forward to this wedding more than I am. He always says he’d much rather be with an overweight, fun-loving woman than a skinny, depressed one, and this reception will be a fun-loving, chubby girl bonanza! Imagine in your mind what a “jolly good time” looks like and you will understand why he enjoys himself at these events. 
  
The first time hubby met my extended family I was afraid he might run the other way and never look back. In all fairness to the cousins, he did set himself up for torment. Why he chose to show up to a cook-out wearing dress pants, a pink oxford and his original Ralph Marlin fish tie is beyond me.  Yes, he actually had a fake bass hanging around his neck.  When I saw him get out of his car I knew it was a lost cause. Word that my boyfriend had arrived spread quickly and before I could put a stop to it, several of the cousins had surrounded him in the street.  I was helpless to do anything but stand back and watch as they broke into a chorus of “Doom, despair and agony on me,” followed by a rousing rendition of “Where oh where, are you tonight?”  (Did I mention we are big Hee-Haw fans?)
  
I knew what was coming, but there was no way to warn him. Suddenly these people he had never met got to the part of the song that says, “You met another and plplplplplplpl you were gone!” When all the cousins blew raspberries into the face of my fish-wearing future hubby and it didn’t scare him off I figured he was a pretty good fit. 
 
Then it was time to meet Grandma. As she hobbled towards us, tugging at her tank top and straightening her baseball cap, I couldn’t help but wonder if he realized that the girlish figure I had at nineteen might someday end up as her exact replica. Just as she pulled hubby into a big, chesty hug I noticed that no one had drawn her attention to the chunk of food stuck in the front of her dentures. But my darling didn’t recoil in the least, and in fact he engaged her in a lengthy conversation about fishing. I guess he knew what he was doing when he chose that particular tie for the day. 
 
After that he met my aunt with the fake boobs, my other aunt with the fake nose, my lesbian aunt and her partner, and my angry, religious uncle.  And that was just the tip of the iceberg. I couldn’t help but smile when I thought about what a drastic difference this was to a guy whose maternal family reunions consist solely of quiet, Quaker aunts and cousins whose worst vice is letting a dab of clear toenail polish peek out from under their long skirts. 
  
In defense of my family’s eccentricities I would like to point out that we are directly descended from Charles VI, king of France. Tracing the descendants of his three children you find celebrated names like Celine Dion and Princess Diana. I’m a little confused as to how our branch ended up in Putnam County, Indiana with the surname of Pickel.   
  
Grandpa King Charles was also known as Charles the Mad. In other words he was a raving lunatic. His wife, Grandma Isabel of Bavaria, had enough of his rantings and in her own moment of lunacy she took it upon herself to draft a treaty that disinherited their son from the throne, ultimately ending the Hundred Years’ War and effectively barring any Pickels from ever laying claim to a royal title. I mentioned to a friend that the women in my family must have acquired Isabel’s strength and business savvy, but she said it seemed more likely that we inherited Charles’ history of mental illness. Either way, once you get to know my family you will agree that the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Copyright © 2004