The friends who knew you when

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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

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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.

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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.

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The Ramblers

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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

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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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A weekend in numbers

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A traditional weekend in numbers:

1 – number of full-blown housing structures erected and underway being built

14 – number of children in the (childrens’) Olde Tyme photograph (theme: Steampunk/Pirates/Civil War soldiers)

10 – number of adults in the (adult) Olde Tyme photograph (theme: Sister Wives/trappers/Puritans)

10 – number of children who started the night in tents Sunday night

9 – number of children who woke up in tents on Monday morning

1 – the times in my life I’ve gone to a hardware store and asked for a roll of roof felt, earth worms (night nightcrawlers), and a pound each of number 10 and 12 nails

1 – number of bottles of tequila killed

2 – number of birthday cakes consumed (large sheet cakes, one vanilla, one chocolate)

3 – number of people celebrating birthdays

8 (ish) – number of times I heard songs by Little Feet and Jack Johnson and the Grateful Dead and Lyle Lovett

2 – number of my goddaughters who were present (of a total of 2)

100s – number of photographs taken

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It’s impossible to quantify or even fully capture in words the love I have for the people I spent the weekend with.  It’s a tradition I love fiercely, this Memorial Day together in the woods of New Hampshire, swatting away blackflies and making sticky smores and dressing up in costumes for an Olde Tyme photograph.  I hope it never ends, even as I watch our children growing taller and moving towards the young adult phase of their lives.  I’m grateful to have known these women before these now-lanky adolescents were even born, and I fiercely hope I know them until long after they’ve grown into full adulthood.

I’ve described the way I feel about them before as a complicated equation of gratitude, and that’s still true.  They’ve taught me more things than I can possibly describe, but one of them is to trust that true friendship can morph and change shape as we grow while still remaining sturdy, solid, and there.

As we drove up to this house that our friends have so immensely generously shared with us more times than I can count, I kept thinking of Wallace Stegner’s lovely lines from the beginning of Crossing to Safety (which I read one, sitting in a bedroom in this very house, and found myself unable to keep reading because I was crying).

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Friendship’s home and happiness’ headquarters.  Yes.  What outrageous good fortune that I was able to be there last weekend.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  A million times over.

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