All my prophets are dead and gone

Yesterday found me and N in Windsor Terrace celebrating my aunt's 75th birthday with 19 of my closest relatives whose names I can barely remember.

I generally prefer to live in an alternate universe in which my extended family does not exist. This is not because they're terrible people--no, they're decent, and they know how to party.

All my second cousins are dark and bodacious and full-lipped, and in comparison I am thin-lipped and wan. I am old enough to be boring to them, and young enough to be boring to their parents, my first cousins. We sat crowded around a table with four leaves in my aunt's mirrored dining room, with my father on one side of me, yelling at my Aunt Linda not to put ice cubes in the Chianti he brought, and N on the other side, politely eating each of the courses: a light meal consisting of antipasti, macaroni pie, ziti with sauce, braised ribs, bracchiole, hot and sweet sausage, and meatballs. Dessert included rice pudding, cheesecake, and a pink frosted bundt cake. I rolled out of there what seemed like ten hours later, indolent and stuffed full of carbs, entreaties to visit more often, and that immense dis-ease of being part of yet not part of this family of strangers. As the Greenwood Cemetary disappeared behind the merging traffic on the Prospect Park Expressway, I realized that to become intimate with them, to even remember all their names and affiliations, would require years of effort, and it's doubtful that any of us relished the thought.