Our lives have been A Tale of Three Cities. I will confess that one of them is more a region than a city, but I can’t resist the literary frame Mr. Dickens has gifted me with for today’s musings. I’ve been thinking about this three-headed Medusa ever since we returned from a long weekend visit to Houston where we lived for 13 years. The other two are New Hampshire which captures in its wide sweep chunks of New England and even Boston. That covers eleven years in small towns plus 4 or 5 student years in Boston/Cambridge/Brookline. And, finally, we will be celebrating this summer 30 years in Chicago, a number so large that it outdoes my 21 growing up years in Brooklyn.
We’ve lived in other places as well – San Francisco for a year, three married years in Brooklyn, following three eventful years in Mississippi, but none of these stops was long enough to weave a fabric of friendship-building that creates the bonds I want to address today. Mississippi almost makes the cut, but most of the relationships that grew there left the state along with us and took root elsewhere.
Let’s look at this recent trip to Houston, our first in six years because of the enormous disruptions caused by the pandemic where long absences and silences doomed a lot of relationships. The preparations involved a complex process of constructing what we’ve come to call our dance card, a mapping process that’s intended to maximize the number of people we could see in a total of about three days. Who’s free when? How much traveling is involved between visits. It’s the same process we go through before our annual visits to New Hampshire, but that dance card is two weeks longer, making the process both more difficult and easier at the same time. People we encounter in visits like these often ask us why we’re there, assuming that the visit must involve some business. We explain that we’re there to do exactly what we’re doing with them right now — seeing friends and refreshing the relationships that continue to have meaning for us.
The times between our visits, whether it’s a year or six years, is not a vacuum. In addition to the zooming, emailing and texting with some of the people on our dance card, we are reading — online or in print — about the political and social events that provide some context for what our friends are dealing with. For example, almost everyone in Houston made reference to the highly unpopular takeover of the city schools by the state, overseen by an authoritarian Superintendent, whose edicts have driven many teachers and administrators into retirement. In New Hampshire, it might be the renovation and reopening of the town library, whose design did not meet universal approval or the proposed closing of some of the schools in the eight town school district.
Against this backdrop, personal dramas are playing out — illnesses, accidents, deaths, proud accomplishments of grandchildren, trips taken or anticipated. In Chicago, there’s an unbroken stream of events and reactions, but in our time in Houston and in New Hampshire there’s this strange sensation of being completely immersed in the life of theplace, followed by an abrupt break when we leave. We try to keep up from a distance, but it’s never the same. We love the people who are a continuing part of our lives in the places we’ve left, but these are no longer our places. We no longer own the right to pretend to be fully invested in their lives, even though we know enough about the life there to fake the engagement of a resident. A beloved mentor called people in our position “inside outsiders and outside insiders.”
One of the important lessons from our returns to past places is that friendship is hard work. If it’s not nurtured and fertilized, it withers. That’s no less true of our Chicago friendships. If I neglect that list of friends we need to contact that’s always scrolling in the background of my brain, there’s a price to pay. I value my friendships second only to my family, so I’ll continue to do the hard work of maintaining them, whether they’re near or far.
Footnote: In one of those remarkable, unaccountable coincidences, while we were in Houston, I received an email from the current director of a program called Writers in the Schools (WITS), which a colleague and I started more than forty years ago with an organizational meeting in our living room. I had never spoken to him before. He was contacting me about some missing information on a contribution I made. When we were back in Chicago, I called him. Our conversation was, unexpectedly, a truly touching experience. As he was describing the current state of the program, which is thriving, I could hear the fulfillment of the seeds we had planted all those years ago. We had left a small impression in our one-time city that somehow validated my sense that our link to Houston was still alive. Thank you, WITS.
