(Note: We are heading to New Hampshire this week for the 43rd consecutive summer, minus the Covid year, since we left New England for Houston. It’s inconvenient to post from there for technical reasons, so you won’t hear from me for a couple of weeks. Enjoy this precious summer month. We’ll see you on the other side.)
First, unrelated to the subject of today’s posting, I want to report a random act of kindness. In a time when kindness is at a premium in our dealings with the powers that be, we need to call out and honor any examples we encounter, no matter how small. I was sitting in the lobby of a hospital building waiting for my wife to complete her physical therapy session. We were near an entrance used by both staff and patients. An older Black gentleman with a stentorian voice greeted every arrival with a loud, “Good morning,” or when relevant, “Good morning, young lady.” As mechanical as it might sound, it was an acknowledgement that each entrant was seen. Sadly, that recognition went unacknowledged by most of those arrivers, whose inner eyes seemed to be focused on the work or treatment that lay ahead. Before we left, I engaged in my own small act of kindness. I approached the welcomer and told him that I wished I had worked in a building where the day began with such warm greetings, and I was sad to see how many passed by without any appreciation of the gift he was extending to them, gratis.
Now, down to business. Yesterday, I spent a chunk of the morning composing an awkward letter to someone I knew we would be seeing at a public event on our upcoming visit to New Hampshire but have been out of touch with for many years. There hadn’t been any falling out, but when we planned our dance card of visits with friends every year, she had fallen off the list of people we contact simply for lack of time, now that our visits were shorter than they once were. My note to her was an attempt to forestall any awkwardness between us that might mar the memorial event for the dear friend we had in common.
It got me thinking about friendships which endured, while others didn’t have strong enough legs to withstand distances of time and space or the end of situations where we no longer encountered people who had been part of our daily work or social lives.
If you have stayed close to where you grew up or had the kind of school or summer camp experience that builds strong bonds, you are likely to have a good number of enduring relationships well into your later years. For me, my childhood world has yielded only one friendship that has survived despite our multiple moves around the country and the world. We may see each other only once every six or seven years and correspond every year or two but the original bonds are strong enough to keep us in each other’s orbit.
I’m not a camp kid. I did haveparts of two summers as either a camper or a staff person at two different camps, but nothing remains of connections from those experiences. Both my high school and college wereindustrial-scale institutions that didn’t create many opportunities for relationships. In contrast, my wife went to a small women’s college, and the friendships she built there have endured into their 65th reunion year. Even in graduate school, where groups were smaller and even more intense, there is just one relationship – one that I cherish — that has lasted. That might raise questions about whether it’s my character rather than the circumstances in which I encountered people that accounts for how few friendships lasted, but my later track record belies that.
It’s amazing how many of our current relations have roots in our years in the overheated world of Mississippi in the 60s. This was our first beyond-school experience with “the real world,” although there was nothing unreal about those school years. I was never in the military, but it reminds me of what I’ve heard from others about unbreakable bonds that have grown among people sharing an experience of that intensity.
For us, it’s the number of moves we’ve made after long years of building friendships that have tested the durability of each of those relationships. Friends we socialized with regularly or saw daily at work no longer seemed so central to our lives from a distance. We may still recall them warmly, but somehow the real effort required to keep a friendship from withering was never forthcoming. So, for each stop in our peripatetic life — New Hampshire, Houston, Chicago – there are a few survivors, people we continue to hold dear and work hard to keep in our orbit. I wonder how many of our current Chicago friendships would withstand those tests of time and distance. This question may be moot since there’s a good chance that this will be our last stop. Whether that’s the case or not, we will try our damnedest to hang on to the friendships that remain vital to maintaining our own identities and values. It’s hard to say why that New Hampshire friend I started this note with didn’t survive the test of time, but we’re so grateful for the many who have.
