dear friends

Old friends and the next generation

Once upon a time I had three fabulous, brilliant, entertaining roommates in college.  Let’s call them C, C, and K.  They are still ground zero.  I’ll never forget the year we lived in a quad so small that we had to take out all four desks to un-bunk the beds.  That was the year when I broke my leg, K’s boyfriend broke his arm climbing out of our window to escape fraternity duties, C woke up with a footprint on her tee shirt, and a whole lot of other shenanigans ensued.  After graduation I moved to Boston and met one of the C’s best childhood friend, T.  We spent much of those first post-college years together in Beacon Hill bumbling through early adulthood:  drinking bourbon, singing along to Vertical Horizon, and meeting our now-husbands.
C, T, and I got married within a 10 month span.  C and I were pregnant for the first time together, an experience I still draw on, a bond that remains strong and salient.  Those babies were born less than 3 months apart from each other.
C always lived abroad so we saw each other rarely.  Mostly when she came home to visit her family.  For example, in the summer of 2003, when we each had one baby with fat thighs, a Maclaren stroller, and a cute face that only sort of made up for the early colicky months.

Then we had more children.  T’s first child was born alongside Whit and C’s second, and then C had a third at the same time as T’s second. We met for dinner tonight and I was simply awestruck by the number of children we had created.

All seven of these people came from the three of us?  The three of us, who just yesterday were drinking cheap white wine on the futon in my first apartment?  Spending all day Sunday on that futon, watching made-for-Lifetime movies and eating bagels?  My God, it is SUCH a cliche, but where does it go?  Our firstborn children are now much closer to being 18, and freshmen in college, the age that we were when we met, than we are now.  The sheer mathematical reality of that brings me to my knees.

Now this is not the end.  It is not even the beginning of the end.  But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
(Churchill)

I am intensely grateful that I have such old, steady, sturdy, fabulous friends to walk this path with.  These are the friends with whom I can simply be.  Last night my eyes filled with tears across the table with C as we talked about the contents of our hearts, about the joys and about the disappointments that live therein.  Tonight all three of us sat and sipped wine in the rapidly-cooling spring evening as our children ran in the playground next door.  They remember my children as babies, as I remember theirs.  I am thankful tonight, my heart physically full of the pink spring sky and the promise of the world turning towards summer and the futures of our children, growing faster than I can bear, their cries of happiness ringing through the evening hush.

Also, I am sort of pulling for these two to fall in love.  Just don’t tell them I said so.  Their thighs aren’t pinchable anymore, and our concerns about their nap schedules and potty training and solid food preferences have been replaced by much more complicated worries.  Those yellow and red Maclaren strollers are a distant memory.  But I still think of them as the vanguard.  And I think they’re pretty great.

Song and memory

This weekend was glorious: finally, full sunshine, open windows letting in soft spring air, children biking and running until they were exhausted, and dinner at a restaurant so nearby that Matt and I could walk there through the dusky spring evening.

Saturday I spent five hours in the car scanning unfamiliar radio stations.  I’ve written before about the power that songs have in triggering memory for me; for hours, it was like spinning an old-fashioned rolodex and seeing what was written on the card that it fell open to.  In many cases the words to songs rose up out of some deep reservoir of memory: the words seemed to be carved indelibly on some scroll hidden deep in my consciousness.  I had no idea I knew the words to a song, often, until I was singing along to it.

I’ve realized that my years at camp are full of musical memories.  I wrote about how Like a Prayer will always remind me of being 16 years old and dancing down the dusty dirt aisles of the camp theater, the sheer joy of movement overtaking me.  That song will always, every single time I hear it, remind me of a special, influential friendship and of the fact that I used to love to dance.  One camp tradition that I loved was that each Sunday one unit would perform a song that they’d practiced all week.  These were themed and though I can’t be sure I’m remembering right, I think there were also poems and quotations read aloud.  One year my bunkmates and I sang Landslide, and yesterday, The Logical Song by Supertramp came on and I remembered that that was one too.  Then the Go-Gos came on, and I remembered my Assistant Counselor year, when my 11 peers and I got up during one camp assembly and sang Our Lips Are Sealed.

I just cannot wait for Grace to experience camp, and I hope that the place is as important to her as it was to me, magical and grounding at the same time.

The Soup Dragons came on, singing I’m Free, and I thought about another time when dancing was important to me.  Senior year at Exeter I participated in the dance concert instead of doing a sport.  My dear friend C, a rare real, substantive friend in those years, and I did it together.  We choreographed several pieces, one of which was to I’m Free. In the annals of embarassing photographs, here’s one from another piece (for I’m Free we wore cut-offs and tie-dyed shirts, and I do not have a picture of it).

And then a couple of songs sent me back to college, specifically to my little quad in the sky.  The Freshman, by Verve Pipe, Lightning Crashes, by Live, and Whenever I Call You Friend, by Kenny Loggins, each carried specific and visceral memories.  Whenever I Call You Friend, in particular, reminds me of when I had a broken leg and my wonderful roommates took it upon themselves to dance and sing to entertain me.  In the photograph below they are serenading me, and I remember leaning over to grab my camera, and taking the picture, remember how I was laughing so hard that I could barely hold the camera straight.

And then REM’s Night Swimming brought me back to a spring evening, not altogether unlike this one in Boston, when I walked from my freshman dorm to meet a boy for a first date.  The air was thick with the smell of magnolias, the sky perfect, hydrangea blue; we were in the weeks when Princeton is at its most beguiling.  I walked through the junior and senior dorms, gothic facades on either side of me, feeling vaguely intimidated to even be in these spaces that were still foreign to me.  As I approached the room where I was going, the lead-paned windows were all open and REM’s Night Swimming wafted out into the early evening.  I felt anticipation and nerves, was somehow aware, deep in my consciousness, that I was about to step into a relationship that would be one of the most important of my early adulthood and most formative of my life.  I’ve never heard that song since that night without thinking of that walk, and that sense of promise, the tangible presence of the future right in front of me.

And then, as I neared home, poetically, Southern Cross came on.  I’ve always loved CSN(Y), and this song is one of my favorites.  I thought instantly of the summer of 1998, when Matt and I spent 6 weeks in Africa.  We had known each other only a month or two when we planned the trip; I think my parents probably thought I was coming home in a bag.  We climbed Kilimanjaro and on night before the summit ascent it was crystal clear and gorgeous (not so the night we summitted – white-out blizzard conditions).  We could see both the Southern Cross and the Big Dipper in the sky which, our guide told us in his lilting, accented voice, was very rare.  Only possible right near the Equator.  We both looked up, spellbound at the enormous sky above us, at how far we were from everything we knew.  And yet, at that moment, I’m certain we both felt at home.  “For the first time you understand … why you came this way.”  And we did.

What songs trigger important memories for you?

Love within a family

There’s no vocabulary for love within a family
Love that’s lived in, but not looked at
Love within the light of which all else is seen,
The love within which all other love finds speech,
This love is silent.

-T.S. Eliot

I’m in New Hampshire (on the Lost island, I joke, for the complete lack of cell service for miles and miles around) with my extended family.  Eight children, six adults, skiing, white wine, casseroles, sledding, and lots and lots of laughter.  These women are my anchor and my wings; their lives throb alongside mine with a reassuring regularity and their families are interwoven with mine.  They are the other two legs of the stool and for that I will be eternally grateful.

Back tomorrow.

No distance at all

I’ve written about Jessica before.  She is one of my oldest and very best friends.  If I have a soul sister she is it.  We met at Cape Cod Sea Camps in the summer of 1988 and after a few days we were inseparable.  After an interval where we fought about something that neither of us remember, CCSC worked its magic yet again and put us as co-counselors in a cabin together in the summer of 1993.  From that moment on our lives have remained twined together, despite the fact that Jess lives in North Carolina.  As Carly Simon says, we’re so close that in our separation there’s no distance at all.

And then there are our girls.  Julia was born in August 2002, 12 weeks before Grace.  The picture above is from the summer of 2002, when, shocked, delighted, and more than a little awestruck, we celebrated that we each had a baby on the way.  That they were both girls was a special joy.

That they’ve become friends is a fact that makes my head explode with happiness.  And this summer, in July, Julia and Grace will be cabinmates at CCSC.  I honestly cannot believe it, and at the same time it feels as though my whole life has been unfurling to this moment. The picture above was taken in August 2010, on the front lawn at camp, the very place I first met this woman who has become so essential to my life.  Our girls are with us.

It’s impossible to overstate how much CCSC means to me.  First and foremost, it brought me Jessica.  But it was also the still point of my childhood. I left every single school early or arrived late, but at camp I was just regular.  I wasn’t different.  I was a long-timer, and there aren’t many places on earth I can remember being so comfortable.

Camp brought me many gifts, some slow to open but now fully revealed. It was fun, of course, but more importantly it was in many ways the ballast that kept my wildly heeling life from capsizing.

I cannot wait for Grace and Julia to experience camp.  I recently reconnected with another close friend from my CCSC days, with whom I’d totally lost touch.  I’m thrilled that her daughter, too, will be there with Julia and Grace.  I feel immensely moved as I watch the light of the past shine through the present and the present fold into the past.  There’s no distance at all, either, in between me and those cabins on the shore of Cape Cod.  My adult life circles back to a place and a person who fundamentally informed who I am today.  The last photograph is of Julia, Grace, and Whit on the beach at CCSC at low tide this past summer.  Lydia was still too small to join them, but she will.

Long may they run on those tidal flats.

What matters is how well we have loved

Like many of us, I was deeply touched by Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday at the Tucson memorial service.  The lines that spoke to me most are these:

“We’re shaken from our routines, and forced to look inward. We reflect on the past. Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder. Did we express our gratitude for all the sacrifices they made for us? Did we tell a spouse just how desperately we loved them, not just once in awhile but every single day?

So sudden loss causes us to look backward – but it also forces us to look forward, to reflect on the present and the future, on the manner in which we live our lives and nurture our relationships with those who are still with us. We may ask ourselves if we’ve shown enough kindness and generosity and compassion to the people in our lives. Perhaps we question whether we are doing right by our children, or our community, and whether our priorities are in order.

We recognize our own mortality, and are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame – but rather, how well we have loved, and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others.”

Obama’s sentiments reminded me of one of the few things I know to be true: we don’t, ever, adequately express our gratitude and love for those closest to us.  We just don’t.  Interestingly, I had written an email to a friend on the 11th, an old friend with whom I’ve lost touch, and of whom I was thinking.  I wrote to her of how much she meant to me and of how much I cherished her despite our lack of contact.  The next morning I heard back from her, and she said, “So often, we all think things about other people but fail to tell them.  I’m touched you thought enough to send your nice thoughts.”

Her words, and Obama’s, both remind me of how tragic the paucity of our gratitude towards those we love most can be.  I wrote these words years ago, but they feel right again today.

I believe that those we hold dearest can never be told enough how much we care about them. I think often of Peggy Noonan’s wonderful editorial after 9/11 about the last phone calls made and messages left by those who perished in the attacks.  Her line that I love is this:

“We’re all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won’t make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.”

I believe this deeply: expressing how we feel frequently doesn’t cheapen the words, but allows them to sink into the object of our affection’s very marrow.  Our grateful words are all spoken in the shadow of the fact that we can’t know when that day will come, that day when we can no longer say “thank you, you mean a lot to me.” It is tragic to hear of people rushing to a deathbed to share how they feel, or, worse, to hear about regret at not having been able to express those feelings in time. It seems obvious that we ought to work harder to thank people, to let those who we love know it, as we go along.

As we travel the arc of our lives, whose shape – graceful and long or abrupt and short – we cannot know, it would behoove us to be grateful, thoughtful, and communicative. Easier said than done, of course. Like cleaning up as you go along while cooking dinner, this is instinctive for some, learned for others, and impossible for a few.

How about we all take two minutes to share our gratitude for someone who is important to us today?