My cousin, Matthew, 17, is here on a visit from Georgia. He spent the weekend at a baseball camp and is now ours for Christmas. He’s a highly intelligent self-admitted jock who insists he can’t make it three more days without a certain football video game he wants to try and rent. Forget that he has never been to California and has three days to explore it; he MUST HAVE FOOTBALL! We will accommodate as much as possible, because it turns out, keeping a 17-year-old entertained is not as easy as I thought it would be. You know how people talk about how toddlers have all this energy and you can’t keep up and stuff? Yeeeeah, um, a toddler has nothing on this kid. He is on some kind of teenage energy-crack they call Youth. I love it.

A teenage boy has a certain musk. It’s not BO or sweat, and it isn’t good or bad. It reminds me of high school. This particular boy talks quite a lot. He talks to himself as he moves around the house or sits in the car. He talks to the TV in a constant commentary on what is happening in his video game: “Come on, bring it.” “You!” “This one’s goin’ out of the park.” He explained to me that he does this self-talking because he is an only child and keeps himself company. I also happen to know that he is 50 percent Edgar, and there is a talking gene in that half of my family that some people inherit. It makes holidays with that clan so lively, and it’s nice, for me, to have a piece of that represented here. I’m enjoying our conversations … and his.

Matthew’s interests include his friends (esp. the female ones), SPORTS, his own teenage experience, school (a little bit), and people in general. He is quite perceptive and interested in how people work. He seems ambivalent about our cats. He likes Rock Band and Guitar Hero and Wii Sports. He can’t get over our having two Starbucks within three blocks of No. 6. He wants to play baseball in college, and that’s his main goal. As for what he will major in, he’s not sure—maybe biology or sociology. He likes UGA but is also looking at smaller schools where he could have a better time of getting onto the baseball team. We’re going to check out UCLA just to see it; at this stage in his college visitation, he’s mostly in need of simply seeing different campuses to get the feel, for comparison’s sake.

So far, Matt says he likes California. But he does not like to fly (this was his first flight). Here are two other things I can tell you about him so far on this visit:

[1] He brought home a duffel bag full of stinky, wet clothes from baseball camp. They are wet because at the end of the camp, he jumped in the hotel pool with his baseball stuff on.

[2] He left his letterman’s jacket at the hotel.

I mean, this is the quintessential teenage guy here. But he’s also not. Yesterday we were talking about his parents, and he said, “Oh, I know how lucky I am to have those two.” Lucky, indeed. I appreciate the lend, Aunt Janet and Uncle Vince. We’ll make sure he has a smiley Christmas, even if it means I have to get a Blockbuster video rental card.