The Perfect Blendship

It’s friendship, friendship
Just a perfect blendship
When other friendships have been forgot
Ours will still be hot

Let’s forgive Johnny Mercer for challenging the English language to come up with a rhyme for friendship. He makes up for it with some of the cleverest lyrics on record:

If they ever black your eyes, put me wise
If they ever cook your goose, turn me loose
And if they ever put a bullet through your brain, I’ll complain
If you ever lose your mind, I’ll be kind
And if you ever lose your shirt, I’ll be hurt
If you’re ever in a mill and get sawed in half, I won’t laugh

Look it up on YouTube. You’ll find that it was covered beautifully by some of the greats – Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, for example.

The song, insofar as I could remember the lyrics, has been rattling around in my brain for two reasons. First, granddaughter Dalia is back at Camp Louise in Maryland for her eighth go around. My own summer camp experience was so limited and discontinuous that I have no friendships that were born there among the bunks. However, I know how much Dalia looks forward to reigniting those relationships each summer. Her fellow campers live all over the state, so she only gets to see them on special occasions the rest of the year, but if she’s like us, the memories of those friendships are playing in the background on a continuous loop all year long.

One of the enduring traditions of summer camp life is mail call. Dalia’s mom Elana sends an appeal to all friends and family at the beginning of each season, encouraging us to send letters regularly to ensure that Dalia doesn’t walk away from mail call empty-handed. In one of my first letters this year, I talked about the importance of friendship and about the parallels between her recurring summer friendships and ours, which brings me to the second reason those Johnny Mercer lyrics are playing in the background for me.

As many of you know, we left Brooklyn for New Hampshire 53 years ago. It was our home for 11 wonderful years. Our daughters spent important growing up years there, and they were fruitful work years for me and Rosellen. They were wonderful friend-making years as well – communal meals in an area thin on restaurant options, shared outdoor projects, and bonding among the members of the area’s tiny Jewish population.

It’s now been 42 years since we left New Hampshire for Houston and, later, Chicago. We have returned every summer, with the exception of the Covid year when pretty much all of us were grounded. In the early years, when I had my full teacher’s summer off, our stays often lasted six weeks and were a combination of focused work days topped by social evenings. For a long time now, the visits have dwindled to 2-3 weeks. Work now takes a back seat to our social calendar.

Weeks before we arrive, we begin corresponding with our long list of friends, some of whom are further afield in the Boston area, and what we have come to call our “dance card” begins to fill up. This year’s calendar has a wonderfully comic quality to it. There’s not a single box without a lunch, dinner or coffee date. When we tell our Chicago friends that we’ll be heading to New Hampshire soon, I’m sure their heads fill with pictures of clear blue lakes, dense green stands of woods and clear starry nights. All of that is true, but our time away has increasingly fallen under a heading that we might call “social vacations.” We’re there more for the people than the setting.

Maintaining friendships requires effort. In the absence of that investment, friendships atrophy, especially if the friends are more than a casual car ride away. After a long life in which we’ve lived and traveled to many places, our friends are scattered across the continent. Sometimes, I’m aware of a list that is constantly scrolling in my head. “We haven’t talked to J. in Portland for too long. Let’s suggest a Zoom visit” or “I miss M. in New York. Why don’t you (Rosellen) drop her a note?”

For our New Hampshire friends, it means being sure that we see them during our two week stay, preferably multiple times. As I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, many of the friends with whom we share 50-60 year relations are now declining, either physically or cognitively, so the burden is on us to initiate these contacts. A few even tell us that they only catch up with each other when we’re there to reconnect them. I’m not going to report on the checklist of dear friends and offer a report on their condition – in some cases on their amazing accomplishments over the past year. Each year now carries the additional worry about whether either we or they would still be standing for another summer. That colors each encounter with what I call a kind of anticipatory nostalgia. The most powerful representation of that concept comes in this haiku by Basho:

Even in Kyoto –

Hearing the cuckoo’s cry –

I long for Kyoto.

No one will ever love Dalia the way her parents and grandparents do, but I want to reinforce a feeling that is already strongly rooted in her, that friends enrich your life in unimaginable ways. The names on that friendship list may vary at different stages in her life, although a few will endure, but those gardens of friendship require constant watering. That’s how we spent our “social vacation.”