dear friends – Page 2 – A Design So Vast

Unseen things that do not die

May 30, 2016May 30, 2016

I went back this past weekend, to Princeton, to hazy, hot, and humid, to the embrace of my dearest friends, to the magnolia-strewn space that holds some of my most vivid and most important memories.

It was a weekend crammed to the gills with joy. It was the best reunion yet, and I have been to all four of our major reunions (as has Matt!). My friends – whose greatness I’ve written about at length – are just getting better and better with age. People seem ever more comfortable in their own skin. Something was in the air this weekend at Princeton, and everyone I encountered seemed charged with happiness and positivity. Maybe it was the heat and humidity. Maybe it was the beer. I don’t know, but something special suffused these past several days.

On Labor Day Monday, 1991, my father and I drove from his parents’ house on Long Island to visit Princeton a last-minute whim. I had already written my early application to another college, but my father’s twin encouraged me to look at Princeton. So we did. And it on the steps of this arch you see here, Blair Arch, where I turned to my father and said that this was where I wanted to go to school. I recall that moment with crystalline detail, and as I told Grace, Whit, and Matt about it, my eyes filled with tears. There’s something about Princeton that makes this happen often. The place, and the people I met there, are lodged so close to my heart. My years there were certainly not without difficulty, but they remain the most sun-dappled of my life and are without question where I became who I am.

On Saturday I participated in a panel called “Books That Changed My Life” alongside several distinguished alums. I was certainly the weak link among the panelists, but I loved hearing what they all had to say. I could talk about books all day long. One person said of at a certain point in his life that when he read he “was after awe.” That phrase struck with me because I don’t think I went into Princeton – either in 1992 or this past weekend – specifically looking for awe, but that’s what I found both times.

Awe. Wonder. Joy. Grace.

Four of our daughters before the P-Rade. Grace is the tall one!

The best part of the weekend was seeing Grace and Whit with the children of my dearest friends. I am glad for Grace and Whit to see me with the women who are my most important group of friends. I love the example that friendships can endure and anchor us. I met most of these women when I was 18, and and that’s only 5 and 7 years away for Grace and Whit (Oh.My.God). It is one of my most devout hopes that they have friends like this in their lives. I remain amazed that such extraordinary women are my friends, but, also, slightly more certain that they are. For life. There was something unconditionally supportive about this weekend that I can’t put into words, and it was remarkable.

On Friday night I spent about an hour and a half dancing to 80s songs with one of my roommates and my daughter and her friend. All over the place, over and over again this weekend, memories swamped me, and time did that telescoping thing when now and then collapse into a single, swollen moment, but maybe never more profoundly than on that dance floor. C has been one of my very best friends for 24 years now, and as she and Grace danced together my chest felt tight in the best possible way.

We walked, we danced, we talked, we laughed, and I cried a couple of times. The P-Rade moved me as it always does, a boisterously joyful celebration of all things orange and black. The Old Guard made me cry (and the whole weekend made me miss my grandfather) and then I was struck, as I always am, by how the procession is nothing less than a panoramic overview of the human experience. The Old Guard, some walking slowly, some in golf carts, and then people in their 60s and 70s, then younger, and younger. We went before the masses of strollers and babies this year, but I know they followed us. And at the end of the parade are the rowdy young alums and, finally, the seniors. I’ll never forget our senior year P-Rade, when we ran onto Poe Field, sunburned and happy and drunk on the headiness of the moment much more than on the free-flowing beer.

We waited together for our turn to fall into line (into the grand stream of life itself, no longer the young ones, not yet the older ones, smack in the middle, in the thick, hot heart of life’s grand pageant) and cheered, giving a locomotive to every passing class (Hip! Hip! … Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! 62! 62! 62!). Our children sat at the curb at our feet, and in a couple of moments I felt lightheaded with the intensity of the moment. I will never forget that moment. Our class then fell into the procession, accompanied by our class float, a tribute to Ferris Bueller, with classmates singing and dancing in dirndls atop it.

This weekend was the best of life. I felt aware in a visceral way of my great good fortune in having spent four years at Princeton. The place, and the people I met there, left their mark on me in ways I’m still uncovering. To be with the friends who knew me then is a great gift, a massive exhale, a profound coming home. To watch my children with the children of those women who shared those seminal four years with me defies complete description.

Then we watched fireworks from the football stadium and, finally, spent, walked back to our dorm. On Sunday we came home and all day I was both exhausted and full to the brim of love and friendship and learning and 20 years ago and today, of those unseen things that are referred to over the door of McCosh 50 (where I took many classes, and which I showed Grace and Whit one day). Princeton gave me many unseen gifts, and they do not die. I know that now. What an extravagant blessing that is.

The friends who knew you when

May 25, 2016

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The P-Rade, Saturday afternoon of reunions, 1996

Tomorrow, I will go to my 20th college reunion. Of course I feel the expected shock that it’s been 20 years, and time feels especially slippery right now: weren’t we just there, as students, in a fog of sunshine and beer and magnolia petals and senior theses and orange? So much orange. Yes we were just there, but it’s also been 20 years.

I’ve written a lot about the friends I met at Princeton. They are the largest group of native speakers in my life, ground zero, the knot of truest friends I know. I have called them the women who hold my stories, described the way we are sailing together, reflected on when the future felt like a bright ribbon unfurling in front of us, noted that friendship is made of attention. I tried to capture those weeks of senior spring in words, a moment of my life that was as high-pitched and glorious as any I can recall since.

This is what I wrote, many years so, and it’s all still true today. Things are different, yes: our children are older, we are older, and we have more wrinkles and more disappointment and, I think, more joy. One thing will never change: you will always be the friends who were with me when I was really becoming who I am now. There aren’t many friends who know the name of the first boy I kissed in college and the title of my thesis and when my grandmother died and the job I really wanted that I didn’t get and what I was wearing (not much) in the Nude Olympics. As I wrote this post, a group text went around, and one friend on it threatened that “I have nude photos of most of you, just remember that.” Touche.

There’s a reason college is called the most formative time of our life: that may not be true for everyone, but it certainly was for me. The friends I knew in college shaped who I am today, and those marks are forever. I can’t wait to see you all.

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We all knew each other when we were becoming who we are now. Knew each other before we were mothers and wives and partners at McKinsey. Before we had real responsibilities, a smattering of wrinkles, and the occasional designer purse. We’ve shared a lot in the 14 years since we graduated: marriages, divorces, the perfect macaroni and cheese recipe, births, deaths, book recommendations, surprises both joyful and heartbreaking. We’ve visited each others’ brand new babies in the hospital and we have stood next to each other when we buried parents. We were and are each others’ bridesmaids and the godmothers of each other’s children.

We hold each others’ stories, and that is a unique and privileged position.

I’m still struck dumb, honestly, by the fact that women as fantastic as these would hold me dear. These are strong and intelligent and compassionate and beautiful and gentle and deeply human women, every single one of them. I respect the choices they’ve made, whether they are similar to mine or different, and I know I can trust them to be gentle with my decisions. With these women, I am as comfortable as I am anywhere else in the world. In their light, I am brave, not shy.

I think, again, of the powerful Adrienne Rich (of whow these women remind me, because I wrote my college thesis on her) and of the line “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.” We sit down together, we weep, we laugh, and we are all warriors. All in our own way. But we are safe together.

One of our favorite things to do is to sit around and look at old pictures. Pathetic, maybe. Entertaining, absolutely. For one of our annual weekends, I scanned hundreds of pictures and brought a slideshow. I’m sure there will be hundreds of pictures from this weekend to add to the pile. I can’t wait.

Happier Hour

March 7, 2016March 7, 2016

Many years ago, my friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley mentioned that she had an idea. It was to start a salon series of sorts, focused on bringing together smart, thoughtful women and featuring and supporting writers. I loved the idea, and I still do. Her Happier Hours have become a phenomenon, and I’ve been fortunate to attend several.

Imagine my delight, then, at hosting my own Happier Hour in honor of Aidan herself. It’s not a secret that I love her new book, The Ramblers. I was absolutely thrilled to gather a group of women to meet and talk with Aidan, about novels, about love, about creativity, about practice, about life itself.

It was particularly special to have my thirteen year old daughter join us, sitting on the floor by me (you can see her in the photograph above), listening to Aidan raptly, even asking a question. Later on, the conversation turned to topic of writing about ourselves and others and about walking the line between disclosure and privacy. Someone asked me how I handle this, and I looked straight at Grace, and answered truthfully that I wonder about it all the time, that I write about my children less and less, and that there’s not one thing I’ve shared on this blog I’d be uncomfortable with either child reading (and they have, much of it).

I learned some new things about The Ramblers on Wednesday night, but more than anything I watched the faces of people I know and those I don’t (I was happy that some people who know Aidan from the ether came to the event, not knowing anyone before they did) as they listened to my friend talk.

One thing I love about Aidan’s Happier Hours is her very explicit goal of supporting writers by buying books. I was happy that we sold many books at my house (and thank you to Porter Square Books, my favorite independent bookseller, for helping in that effort). I am a devout library fan, but I also buy books, I assure you. I preorder books I’m really excited about (most recently, Annie Dillard’s The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New) and hope you do too.

Aidan and our mutual, adored agent Brettne Bloom both slept over at our house. The late night sitting around the kitchen, laughing about videos, talking about politics, and catching up on matters huge and tiny was one of my favorite parts of the event. Aidan and I share a deep interest in and commitment to the topic of female friendship in adulthood (most recently we discussed the fascinating piece in the New York Times What Women Find in Friends That They May Not Get From Love). Having Aidan and Brettne at my house, in my kitchen, was like watching a subject that means a tremendous amount to me come to life. I’ve written a lot about the friends I love most, whom I cherish beyond words (and one of them was in attendance on Wednesday night) – the native speakers to whom Ann Patchett refers in Truth & Beauty– and I’m fortunate to count both Brettne and Aidan in that group.

As I said on Wednesday night last week, Aidan’s beautiful book, The Ramblers, calls to mind over and over again one of my favorite quotes, by Tolkien: not all those who wander are lost. Having Aidan and Brettne here was a reminder both that wandering can be a rich and interesting way through life and that one of our most important decisions is who we amble beside.

The Ramblers

February 1, 2016

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I was thrilled to read an advance copy of my friend Aidan Donnelley Rowley’s The Ramblers, and I’m even more delighted to jump on the table in support of this book.

It. Is. So. Wonderful.

I read The Ramblers in one delicious gulp last fall and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about (or texting Aidan about) the characters since. The three protagonists, Clio an ornithologist who carries deep scars from growing up with a mentally ill mother, her best friend from Yale, Smith, who comes from one of New York’s “perfect” and hugely wealthy families and is recovering from the sudden end of the engagement that she thought would begin her own happily ever after, and Tate, a college classmates of theirs who has returned to New York in the wake of his marriage ending and his company’s highly lucrative sale.

Clio, Smith, and Tate tell their stories in interwoven chapters and their lives are both absolutely their own and inextricably connected. Each chapter opens with an epigraph, a practice I love in books. The first voice we hear is Clio’s, and the use of Charles Darwin’s words, “if we expect to suffer, we are anxious,” sets the stage for a book that is by turns about anxiety and fear, discomfort and adaptation, where we come from and where we’re going.

We learn early on that Clio’s mother was bipolar. This fact is at the complicated knot at the center of Clio’s life, and her relationships with her boyfriend and her father both exist in its shadow. Her work studying the adaptation of birds, her discomfort really letting her older boyfriend know her, and her passionate attachment to the Ramble, a section of Central Park from which the book takes its name, are all important threads that run throughthe book.

Smith, so structured and fond of order that she runs her own company which helps people declutter and organize their lives, has recently faced the most disorienting disruption she could have imagined. Her fiance, with whom she had planned and envisioned her future, walked away suddenly. In the wake of this loss Smith is working to determine to find her footing in a life that looks nothing like she imagined.

Tate, a photographer with a soulful love of poetry, recently sold an app that he founded with a friend for $40 million dollars. His wife also decided that their marriage was over. He has returned to New York after this abrupt turn of events and is, in many ways like Smith, trying to determine what he truly wants to do now.

Clio is the central character of The Ramblers. All three central protagonists are compelling, but for me it was Clio’s themes that formed the book’s animating core. Her mother haunts the narrative, and we hear her voice in the form of a letter towards the end. In their own ways, though, all three characters struggle to define themselves apart from strong family legacies. Clio’s mother’s bipolar is the clearest example of this, but both Smith and Tate also wrestle with where they’re from.

This is the way it works. No one emerges from childhood totally unscathed. You do the best you can. And, if you are lucky, you find someone to do the best you can with.

All three of the main characters are, we see clearly, ramblers. Towards the end of the book, in a Clio’s notes on a walk in the Ramble, she muses “Maybe that is the point after all? To be lost?” Clio, Smith, and Tate are all in their thirties, true adults, and all three reckon with this reality. It’s time to make personal and professional decisions, and the questions that Clio, Smith, and Tate face beat through the book like a pulse.

Who am I? Who do I love? What do I want to do with my life? Who do I want to do it with?

I can’t recommend The Ramblers more highly: the book is gorgeously written, deeply moving, and stays with you long after you finish it.

An annual tradition

September 28, 2015September 28, 2015

I was with 15 of my college friends this weekend. This was our sixth annual weekend together, and women travelled from as far away as London and San Francisco to meet on the east coast. It was, as I knew it would be, magical. I’ve written about this group of women and this weekend in particular several times before:

Friendship, attention, and history
You are with me and I am with you
Lifetime friendships in numbers
The women who hold my stories.

These women are my safe place, my native speakers, the friends who have known me since I was becoming who I am. They were my bridesmaids and are the godmothers of my children, they have known my husband basically as long as I have, they know the title of my senior thesis, the embarrassing crush I had freshman year, and the lyrics to lots of Indigo Girls and Toad the Wet Sprocket songs. They possess the only known photograph taken of me smoking a cigarette and (maybe hazy) memories of experiences like eating club bicker, the Nude Olympics, and lots of robo-pound games.

We are all mothers, which is something that makes me deeply happy and extraordinarily grateful. Together the 16 of us have 34 children, ranging in age from 13 to 2 months. There’s no question that rain has fallen into many of our lives. And more and more, our visits together feel like brief pools of golden light, oases of love in lives full of obligations and joys. Increasingly I find myself able to surrender to these moments, to the fact that while life doesn’t stop, it can wait. Friendship is made of attention, as I mused last year, and this weekend we were the focus of each others’. These women, and the long years of history and loyalty we have to one another, are in many ways a mystery that I will never comprehend. We cannot understand the heart of another, no matter how we try. I know this now, and I’m no longer trying to. Instead I’m releasing myself to the unknown, letting it hold me up, bowing in gratitude for what is essential to my life even as I recognize how little I understand it.

The words of an online friend ran through my mind all weekend. I read Rudri Patel’s gloriously beautiful post, Recognizing the Vastness, before I went last week. I was deeply moved by her acknowledgement of the power of our attention, of the active choice that is celebrating what is instead of languishing in what is not, and of the decision to let the mystery be unknown. Rudri talks about how the sky has “become a compass and each time when I look up there is a new kind of welcome, a serenade of the twists of what I recognize and what is wholly uncertain. The accompanying feeling is one that I don’t understand entirely, but recognize as an epiphany of some kind. I am not meant to comprehend the mystery, but sink into appreciation, instead of understanding the details.”

It strikes me that this mystery lives equally in the sky and in the faces of my friends, in their familiar handwriting and the familiar stories we laugh over together, in the blue eyes of my brand-new goddaughter (the daughter of Whit’s godmother) and in the ease with which we fall back into each other’s company. Big and small, people and nature, laughter and tears. All of it.

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