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My mother's mission, late in life, has been to keep her children in touch with each other and with all our many relatives. She is compensating for the twenty years she lived as a military wife, following my father around the world at the Pentagon's whim, herding offspring the whole while.

The experience inculcated in her – and through her, in her children – an independent-mindedness which none of us probably would have acquired had we, too, grown up in her small hometown. Nevertheless, she always missed the company of her parents and other relations, and maintained lines of communication that sometimes stretched halfway around the world.

I too often yearned for the company of this large and varied lot of people. During our brief homecomings, with little time to make friends, I necessarily depended for playmates upon the family's considerable stock of first and second cousins.

By the time my father retired, I had gone out to make my own way in the world. My parents took a game stab at resettling in her hometown, an experience they afterward described as claustrophobic. "It was just like the old song says," my mother told me. "'How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?'"

In any event, after three years they had uprooted themselves one last time to take their place in a community notable for its high percentage of retired military couples. And, almost before I realised it, fifteen years passed during which I saw virtually nothing of aunts, uncles, and cousins. My mother, who genuinely liked her siblings though she could not bear to live among them, kept me apprised of their children's comings and goings.

I always received the information in the spirit in which she tendered it, but never had a use for it until I decided to spend one of my supposedly significant birthdays, evenly divisible by five, by the nearest great expanse of salt water, the Gulf of Mexico.

I had led an entirely landlocked existence as an adult, but spent my impressionable years near those largish bodies of water, the English Channel and the East China Sea; recently, I'd become conscious of a profound and irresistible longing to reconnect mystically with that other mother, Ocean. Friends of a friend offered me their condominium by the beach on an island not far from Corpus Christi – in the off season, the discount was substantial.

When I informed my mother of my plan, she said, "Be sure to call your cousin Trey when you get there." I hadn't laid eyes on Trey, Walker S. Brown III, since shortly after the onset of puberty. "He and his wife," my mother told me, "live in Corpus Christi."

"What's he doing in Corpus Christi? What is there to do in Corpus Christi?"

"Now don't you be snide. I'm sure it's a very nice place. He's something with the marine museum there." I admitted that I was impressed with that. "Anyway," she went on, "be sure to call him. Corpus is practically next door." She had looked it up on a map. "If you don't call him, you'll hurt your Aunt Dixie's feelings."

"Perish forbid that I should hurt Aunt Dixie's feelings."

"You laugh now, but wait till she cuts you out of her will."

Despite that threat, I forgot all about calling Trey until I had actually installed myself in the condo. When I did call, he sounded surprised, but delighted, to hear from me and invited me to come stay in Corpus.

I had already paid for the weekend, though, and was determined to remain on the island, because I couldn't get my money back. Trey then proposed that he come out the next day: "We can find you on the island easier than you can find us in Corpus anyway. But you will come into the city sometime. You have just got to see Lady Lex while you're here."

His wife Dianne had been listening in. She said, "He means the Lexington." I already liked her too much to point out that I knew about Lady Lex, a permanently moored twentieth-century aircraft carrier, in its day the biggest type of ship afloat. "That's the first thing Trey ever wants to show anybody from out of town."

"I love that old boat. I go there all the time"

"Eric, he makes going there sound like a big deal. It's moored right next to the museum."

"Sounds like fun," I said, rang off, then, familial obligations taken care of, collapsed into bed.

My cousin had put on some height and weight and lost most of his hair over the decades, and it took me a moment to see in his jowls and chins the boy I had once known. He introduced me to Dianne, petite, blonde, quite pretty, who greeted me warmly and revealed without prompting that Trey had been telling her all about me ever since I'd called. "He said when you were little kids you both wanted to grow up to be fossil-hunters or astronauts or something."

"Well, I am something."

I was in good spirits as we followed the path from the condo through the dunes to the beach. I asked about children; Dianne said they had a son, Walker IV, now in college. "We call him Quatro."

We walked for distance in the foam, till we came upon a boy of eleven or twelve, standing crouched by the water's edge, intent on what I first took to be only a large tangle of sea wrack. He looked up at us and grinned. "Come see the big ugly water bug I found."

The thing was about the size of my hand and lay on its back with its jointed limbs splayed brokenly.

"That's certainly a big ugly one," I told the kid.

Trey frowned as he peered down at the thing, nudged it cautiously with his foot, and flipped it onto its belly. He dropped suddenly to one knee and used a forefinger to scrape sand off the lozenge-shaped, segmented body. The seconds dragged out to a full minute.

Finally, I asked, "What is it?"

He didn't answer me immediately, but pointed to another, similar animal a few feet away, then to more just like it. "My God. They're all over the beach. There must be... Di, Eric, do you realise what these things are?"

"It seems familiar, but this is the first time I've been to the seashore since..."

"Eric."

"You're the marine biologist."

"These are trilobites, for crissake!"

"It's gotta be a mistake. Or..." I trained a suspicious eye on the boy. "Or somebody's trying to pull somebody else's leg."