All The Cousins Were Brilliant

By Joseph R. Miller, MD

My mind flew back to my youth again this morning. I was small again, a child in Ohio, and all the cousins were brilliant.

That's the word the aunts and uncles used with all of us. It wasn't earned, just cast upon us. We wanted to be kids. We wanted our own labels. Young as we were, we knew that brilliant didn't fit. Certainly it didn't fit cousin Harvey who had trouble pouring peas out of a poke, or cousin Blaine who couldn't tie his shoes or cousin Betty Stew who could outrun all the boys but couldn't spell a lick. But brilliant was the word that all the aunts and uncles used and we were stuck with it. Even my sister Jane, the one who taught diesel mechanics at the Vo-Tech and raised Pit Bulls, was said to be brilliant. I can hear my Aunt Polly on the tape of treasured memory, saying those very words.

"She's brilliant, you know," she'd say, and nod her head as if that made it so. "I really think she is," my mother'd say, nodding her affirmation in time to the words she said. "Your David is too," she'd add, and they'd nod in time together, looking so alike, same-dressed sisters, heads held up and smiling at each other, bodies still like birds on a wire.

I was the first grandson, which was neither my fault nor my success, but did bring my mother a hundred dollar check from my grandfather. That was the bounty on first grandsons. I've often wondered how that made my sister feel. She was oldest and didn't earn a cent. I was second and worth a hundred dollars because I was a boy. That explains a lot of later competition.

My cousin Dave first earned the brilliant mantle by being toilet trained before I was. Six weeks younger and a couple of months drier, and they said that he was brilliant. It wasn't brilliant. He didn't have a choice. Toilet training left nothing up to chance in Aunt Polly's house. Even after we were big boys, training continued. I remember the day I came to his house an hour earlier than usual. Uncle George was off doing whatever lawyers did those days, and Aunt Polly was busy in the kitchen. David was sitting on the toilet in the single bathroom at the top of the stairs. He wasn't doing anything else. He sat and smiled and said he couldn't play until he'd, in his words and Aunt Polly's, "done his business." I asked him when that would be. He didn't know. I asked if he could hurry. He told me no, straining wasn't allowed. It had to be a natural act and he had to sit there quietly every morning and not go out and play until it happened.

I understood then that David wasn't brilliant, just determined. Rather, Aunt Polly was determined and David acquiescent. But he earned the title, "brilliant" because he was the first to move out of diapers into big-boy underpants. I've been suspicious of the way the word is thrown about with abandon ever since that morning in Ohio, chatting with my cousin David and waiting for natural elimination so we could go out and play.

A year or two ago, I saw a picture of toddlers in a Chinese orphanage, a row of little boys and girls all tied to the communal toilet until they'd done their business. I shook my head and frowned, then remembered David and laughed out loud. He was tied to that toilet seat by Aunt Polly's insistence just as surely as those Chinese children were physically bound to theirs. And they called my cousin brilliant. He didn't have sense enough to just flush the empty toilet so his mother'd hear the noise and think he'd done what he was supposed to do.

But brilliant was the word they used for all of us. I heard it bandied every time the family got together. Harvey had done this and Rusty that, and Jane had waved bye-bye to her wee-wee when she accidently turned the potty over. Brilliant. All of us were brilliant.

My oldest granddaughter is a big girl of five. Her teacher called her mother the other day and said that she was really smart, that she wished the family would help her read ahead of her grade. I can do that. It’s a proper job for Papa. I’ll put her in a chair next to mine at the desk in back of the computer. I’ll help her sound out words. It won’t be hard. She needs the stimulation. She’s a brilliant girl, you see.

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