The Paper People

One summer when I was a kid, my cousin from Michigan came to visit. Raised by a single mother and my Oma, he was an only child whose tender childhood would soon be forced into the role of adult caretaker of his tiny, dysfunctional family. My mother and her stepsister were not close, not in the traditional sense of siblings, but they spoke often on the phone, usually in German, which is how I became functionally bilingual, straining to understand familiar words heard repeatedly on these long-distance calls.

My mother announced that cousin Mike would be arriving soon after school released, via a day-long journey alone on an airplane to visit us, strange relatives he had scarcely met. My mom’s own story took her from her war reparations West Germany to America as a teenager with her mother and new stepfather, an American serviceman my Oma met in Frankfurt and who became the father of my Aunt Helen, Mike’s mom. They moved to Georgia, and my mother was thrust into a 1950s high school cliche where football boys and southern belles ruled the campus. Mature at fifteen, my mother started going out with the older girls, met my father at an ROTC dance, and married at seventeen to escape the alcoholic family dynamic, the same one that my cousin was being raised in.

Detroit, Michigan, is one of the hottest, greenest states I have ever visited, with humidity too thick in the summer to make quick movements lest you be drenched from head to toe in a swamp of your own sweat. So when my cousin disembarked from that airplane into the California sunshine, I’m certain he realized that for the first summer of his life, his armpits were dry.

When you’re a kid, people tell you things, and you don’t really consider them or worry about them too much. We were told our cousin Mike was coming, no explanation, none needed. And until the day we had to straighten our shared bedroom for his visit, I had honestly forgotten he was coming. For me, summer had just begun, which meant long, languishing days outside, bike rides, visits to the community pool, and glorious boredom, which propelled my creative mind. My sister was an indoor sort of girl who loved to read books, draw pictures, and hide away in her room playing records. At that age, she would have no part of me, and was both exasperated by me and completely horrified that I was related to her. Our two-year age difference and personality polarity were a wide cavern that we could not cross until many years later, when I was in college.

So that is how I came to be sitting alone on the front step after my cousin’s awkward arrival and introductions, feeling anxious that another person, just a year between my sister and me in age, had entered our house—someone who might potentially regard me the same way my sister did: as a nobody. I was lonely for a sibling since my own did not like what I liked, and we could not find any common ground to make us playmates. Understandably, my cousin was overwhelmed upon arrival and had immediately set to unpacking his things and looking devastatingly homesick. I did not know what to say to him, so I went outside to sit on the step where I often came to warm up in the sun after reaching a sub-freezing internal temperature in our air-conditioned icebox of a house. I let the warm sunlight defrost my feet and fingers while petting our outdoor cats Kinkytail and Windy as they rubbed their faces against my legs, or watched the ants march in traffic formations around a crumb or bug carcass. Even today, I feel lucky that my childhood had these hours of nothingness, because it allowed my child mind to wander and my imagination to bloom.

I was sitting there in my sun coma when my cousin Mike came outside to join me on the front step. He was holding a red, plastic tape player like a mini-boom box out of which was screeching the loudest, hard rock music I had heard, being subjected up to that point to music which consisted of mostly disco, like Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, Earth Wind and Fire, and Sister Sledge, or my dad’s old Elvis records. 

“You drive us wild, we'll drive you crazy

You keep on shoutin', you keep on shoutin'

I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day…”

I listened in silence until my cousin pressed the STOP button and snapped off the tape. We just sat there for a minute, and then I asked him who it was. “Kiss,” he said incredulously. “Don’t you know who they are?”

I did not. But with that first sentence, the proverbial ice had been broken, and my cousin and I soon found our mutual love for comic books, Legos, toy cars, and drawing. We became joined at the hip, where he was less a relative come to visit and more my second half, and we became a force that summer, invariably tormenting my sister, holding fart contests, and playing make believe. We would spend many hours that summer at the public pool playing dolphins or watching people lose their swimsuits on the high dive from the vantage point of the underwater windows, and eating Sweet Tarts and Red Vines from the snack shop. My sister did not like to be splashed, and our one- and two-year age difference only widened with her disdain for our shenanigans, turning us into her twin nemeses while under my father’s gaze as he sat grading summer school papers by the pool. 

I don’t remember when the idea first came to us, but Mike and I loved to doodle. When there was nothing else to do or no Disney special on Sunday night, we would grab paper and draw. Caricatures, scenes, comic strips, anything and everything. Sometimes my dad would join in and draw his humorous portraits, giving them silly names like Gurno Parievski or Benevenito Benevidazaum. One day, Mike and I started drawing tiny, two-sided paper people.

It became an obsession that summer, and we would draw them front and back, then cut them out of the paper, keeping them in a small box, an entire world population made of people in hats, funny clothes, fat and thin, young and old. We drew and drew, and sometimes colored them in, and held them as treasure, the pinnacle of our accomplishment in cousinhood. It wasn’t just the drawing of them that I remember most; it was the long conversations about life, friends, feeling alone, being different, our love of science fiction, and places we wanted to go that made that summer stand out in my memory. The paper people embodied every aspect of our personalities—the silly, the serious, the big and small moments of our lives—and by the end of summer, we had amassed a copious number of them. We would often open the box and sift through our favorites, which usually inspired more. It was the first time in my life I truly felt seen, like I had a twin brother, like-minded and singularly driven to draw every potential personality our imagination could spurn. 

At the end of summer, to cap off my cousin’s three-month visit and looming return, we to school and he to Detroit to the realities and hardships of his life that I would only come to know later in my life, my family took our annual vacation trip to Carmel by the Sea. This was my favorite place growing up, walking among the foggy canopy of Monterey pines and cypresses on the main street, dipping into the bakeries and toy shops, or sitting on the white sand beaches wrapped in blankets. This trip, my cousin and I had the shared feeling of impending doom, that our special summer would soon be over, and real life would return. Our timeless friendship forged over many dreams and disappointments shared was overcast by the unknowable future and uncertain occasion of seeing each other again.

The last day in Carmel was sunny enough to play in the water, so we hiked to a quiet, secluded beach where a long strand of white sand seemed to stretch to the sky. My parents set up a picnic blanket and we snacked on our pastries, my sister reading her book, before Mike and I ran out into the surf to slide up and down the beach with the tide, our swimsuits filling with sand. 

“Let’s set them free,” my cousin said as we dug holes in the sand. 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The paper people. Let’s set them free, out to sea, so they can continue their adventures,” Mike said.

“Yeah, and maybe someday they’ll come back or we’ll find them again together,” I agreed.

As the shadows grew long and my mother packed up our things to return to town, to our hotel, then home, Mike and I took our precious box of one-inch paper people and walked to the edge of the surf. We scooped them out, and with great pomp and circumstance, flung them free, one by one, then all, and watched the thick ocean current sweep them out and away as we called after them.

“Goodbye! Goodbye, paper people!”

I don’t remember taking my cousin to the airport or those last moments when he left for Detroit. I know my heart broke a little bit, and a piece of me left with him. Adolescence would soon be upon us both, and many heartbreaks and personal struggles with it. It would be many years until I saw my cousin again, and we remained close, although life and age have built up around us, and we don’t talk as much anymore. The last time I saw Mike was when his mother, my Aunt, died. I flew to see him as soon as I could get there, but too late to say goodbye to her. I remember sitting on the front porch of her small house in Detroit, in the Michigan heat, just talking about old times. That childhood summer had been one of the best summers of my life, and his, too. It was bittersweet to see how much time had passed and how hard life had become for both of us. But in my cousin’s big marble, blue eyes I still saw my friend, the co-conspirator of my summer of mischief, and I felt lucky that I had that summer which is as crisp and real and tangible to me 49 years to the day since I stood on that beach and flung the paper people into an unknowable destiny.

I wish I still had those paper people. Sometimes I still draw them, front and back, their silly cartoon faces unlimited in variety, to remind myself that the person I am and the many potential expressions of me are still unlimited. As long as I have one more paper person to draw, there still exists any number of dreams in me to fulfill. 

You never know. I live by a beach now, and one day, walking along the sand, my toe could one day fish a tiny piece of paper from the sea, home at last from its long journey.