I only have four cousins, all from my mother’s side (my brother claims to have five, but one is a “pretend cousin”). We’re all pretty close in age, and we all grew up within a few miles of each other here in northern New Jersey. We all watched “The Beverly Hillbillies” on TV as kids, but only one of us took the show’s intro song seriously. Right after college, Cousin Connie decided that “California’s the place you ought to be”, so she loaded up the truck, and she moved to Beverly …. Well, she didn’t actually move to Beverly Hills, but she definitely did make her way to the West Coast.

Cousin Connie has been in California about thirty years now. Every now and then we’d hear something about her; less often we’d hear directly from her; and lesser still, actually see her on a visit. The last time I saw her was in 1993 at her mother’s funeral (Aunt Sophie, r.i.p.). Since then, my only contact with Connie was in trying to convince her to accept a check for her share of my late Uncle Bruno’s estate (he died in 1999). She was a bit upset about being a part of a legal proceeding back in the “old country”, and told me that she wanted nothing to do with the whole thing. With the help of an Irish lawyer having the charm of a leprechaun (hey, remember Lucky Charms?), I finally convinced Connie that she wasn’t going to have her car and her family home confiscated by the IRS if she accepted a lousy $700 check from me. But I got the underlying message – she wasn’t exactly tickled pink at hearing from the folk back home.

My other 3 cousins haven’t had much contact with her either. I guess you don’t stay in California for three decades so as to remain close to an ethnic family in New Jersey.

The other day, my cousin Mike was talking about an old picture that he had of Connie. That made me think about her, so I punched her two names (married and maiden) into the Google thing, and bingo, there she is – the CEO of a computer tech company. For now, the company appears to have two employees – Connie and her husband. They’re small, but I wouldn’t write them off; they appear to have a digital tiger by the tail. They’re marketing some kind of software tailored for hand-held digital devices (tablet PCs and PDAs and stuff like that, which I know almost nothing about; I’m a troglodyte chained to my old desktop tower), and their customer list is small but quite real.

Wow, Connie as a tech company executive. She was always smart, and she did have a streak of entrepreneurial spirit in her that she got from her father, my Uncle Matt. Uncle Matt was a quality control rep for a defense company that made a whole lot of money in the 60s and 70s supplying Uncle Sam with helicopters that the Vietcong (the resistance movement in Vietnam, for you young’ns) kept shooting down. He was a Willie Loman-like character, driving miles and miles between supply plants throughout the eastern US so as to ensure that his company was supplied with good helicopter gizmos. In his spare time, Uncle Matt invested his money in stocks (and did quite well), fixed his home up into a little suburban palace (the kind of place that you didn’t like visiting as a kid because they wouldn’t let you run or play for fear of mussing something up), and urged his daughters to be successful in the world.

(But let me be fair here. Even though I was never driven by the notion of “success”, Uncle Matt and I always got along quite well. He’s actually still alive, but we’ve lost touch with him too since he retired and moved to South Jersey).

I thought at first that Connie went to California to get away from her parents. Connie was never really a hippie, and I really don’ t think she smoked too much hooch or took great advantage of the “Summer of Love” back in ’67. However, she did appear to be an individualist, someone who wanted neither to be defined by her mother’s ethnic Catholicism nor by her father’s dreams of “making-it-big”. I thought she was more like me, trying (successfully or not) to live an enlightened but non-materialistic life, an environmentally conscious life where you get involved and try to do some good without resorting to radical tactics. Now it looks like she’s been co-opted by her father’s ghosts, resorting to radical capitalist tactics in order to get rich.

Well, what the heck. I hope that Connie gets rich, and has fun doing it. For now, the only interesting observation that I can make about my cousin is that she’s gone back to using her maiden name on the company web site. That surprised me at first, given her “Escape from the Dark Ages of New Jersey” philosophy. But then again, her married name is the same as Oscar Wilde’s wife. And in my Google search, I saw reference to a play about the latter character entitled The Fall of Constance Wilde. Whoops, perhaps Mom and Dad weren’t so bad after all!

P.S., eleven years later — Connie passed away in June, 2015 after battling melanoma for several years. We on the east coast only found out about that after she was gone. She left behind her husband Chuck and two grown sons. Even in her distance — or maybe because of that distance — she was still very much a presence in our lives. She will always be a part of our stories. She is missed.