The Way Back

About a month ago, I went to my 30th college reunion.

The 15th was the first college reunion I'd ever gone to. That year, 1998, I checked with friends, but no one was able to to make it. Yet something I couldn't put my finger on kept compelling me. So at the last minute, without really knowing why, I rented a car and drove up for the day. I spent a lot of time wandering around campus by myself, revisiting the person I used to be—visiting the duck pond; my freshman dorm; the dining center where I trekked daily to retrieve my mail (an important ritual) and hung out with my friends over meals; the buildings where my German classes, my deepest engagement with language, took place. 

At that 15th reunion, I had a long, memorable conversation over dinner with a guy I had only vaguely known in college; he was also gay (out of the closet back then, unlike me, but not particularly happily), and we shared experiences about that: wondering glances across seminar tables, envy and sometimes fear of the outrageously fearless. 

All in all, I had a great time at the 15th and was glad I went. I learned to listen to that inner voice, sometimes more extroverted than I am, that wants me to go to places I'm uncertain about.

The next reunion, the 20th, I made sure well in advance that my friends would be there, so that one was all about being together, reconnecting in a familiar setting. The 25th was similar.

This year, only two of my friends, out of about six or so, were able to make it, so the reunion felt a little less "fun." But it had its moments. For instance, finding the tree, a sweetgum, dedicated to our friend Mark, who died of AIDS 17 years ago, and showing it to J., who went to high school with Mark as well as college but hadn't seen the tree before. I told J. about the last time I saw Mark, when he was very sick and living at his parents' house; after his mother came onto the deck where we were sitting, Mark said simply, "She's a saint." 

When I told J. that story, he teared up; I felt bad, but then I realized it was okay. He and Mark shared a long history together, but they weren't in close touch at the time of Mark's death; J., who was living in California or Texas when Mark died, couldn't make it to the funeral. Maybe I was able to give him a small moment of Mark that he hadn't been privy to.

I also was moved to speak about Mark at a Quaker-meeting-style memorial my class had for fellow '83ers who had died. (This was a first; I guess we're officially in that demographic now!) I said that Mark and our friend K.—through whom I met Mark my freshman year—were my "way into" Haverford. I was miserable my first couple of months of college, and it was their openness, humor, and determination to draw me out that gave me permission to take my place there. I also recalled the last time I saw Mark, on his parents' deck, physically so altered by his illness, and said it was a lesson, as clichéd as it might be, that we are not our physical selves.

The main thing that stood out about my 30th reunion was a nighttime solo walk around campus that I took after saying goodnight to my friends J. and C., who were going on to an event I wasn't interested in. Walking around—seeing all the unfamiliar buildings, the confident and ridiculously young students helping out over reunion weekend—I realized: Haverford is doing just fine without me. 

And I'm doing fine without it.

It wasn't at all a dismissive feeling. Just an acknowledgment that I don't need to keep burrowing back. The path is already there, worn into the ground. And it leads in the other direction as well, back toward home.

How Can I Keep From Singing?

The wife of a college friend passed away at age 51, so last weekend most of my old, small "circle" of a half dozen or so traveled from various points along the Mid-Atlantic to bear witness at her memorial service outside Boston. I'd only met her once, at a college reunion nine years ago (she didn't go to our school; she and her husband met years later), but a better angel of my sometimes reluctant nature prevailed, reminding me that intimate acquaintance with the deceased isn't required and  funerals are for the living.

It was billed as a memorial "salon," at which loved ones could speak, read, sing about whatever inspired them. It went on more than two hours, and there were some lovely moments. The Quaker hymn "My Life Flows on in Endless Song" (which I know as "How Can I Keep From Singing?," by Judy Collins and Enya) and "Dona Nobis Pacem" were among the planned portions of the program, sung by those gathered. Someone read the exquisite, heartbreaking, and right poem "Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon. There were lots of memories of my friend's wife, proof that stories are truly the components of a life, the breathing blocks from which a human can be recalled and invoked, indeed created—from which we're all created, every day. I never knew her, but after the memorial I had a sense of her.

The only person in my circle who was moved to speak was one who recited, from memory, "The Owl and the Pussycat." I asked if she'd planned to do that and she said, "NO!"

Afterward my group and some others went to our friend's house, the home he'd shared with his wife until her death, and drank beer and wine and listened to a story she had written herself. I had to leave before most of the others because my sister and brother-in-law, who live in the Boston area and with whom I was staying, were taking me out to dinner. (We had also been through a lot recently, and I wanted to honor that.) I felt rushed and inept as I said goodbye to my college friend and his teenage daughter, and then to all my old friends who I don't see often and who had traveled to be there as I had. 

Just before the memorial, I'd squeezed in a brief, half-hour visit with yet another friend (from a different time in my life, grad school) who lives in the area. We'll catch up a bit more this summer in Provincetown, where it turns out she and her family will overlap with D. and me for a day or two. She walked me to the church where the memorial was, and as we said goodbye, I heard myself say "I love you." I sign my letters to close friends "love" and "xo," but I don't think I've ever said "I love you" to a platonic friend in my life (which might come as a surprise to the friend I said it to, but it's true). The words just tumbled out. I meant them, but they were also on the surface that day looking for someone to receive them. It was that kind of day.

Acceptance

Vladimir: "I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever."

Estragon: "Me too." -- Waiting for Godot

Today D. finally e-mailed me this photo he took of us last May in London as we waited to see a production of Waiting for Godot starring Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. It's one of my favorite pictures of the two of us (I'm on the right).

I show it for no other reason than I need an anchor for my mind, which tonight refuses to alight on any single idea -- as it has refused for the last couple of weeks.

I just frittered away a couple of hours -- a fire burning and then dying in the fireplace, my dog sleeping and then waking beside me (breath in, breath out) -- trying to gain entry into coherent thoughts about friends falling away, relationships shifting, once-common interests diverging. Without planning to, I found myself Googling names and images, here and there coming across someone's familiar but drastically changed (or not at all drastically changed) appearance -- and, when I did, feeling little more than mild surprise or amusement, tempered by a curious sort of spongy distance from whichever potential This Is Your Life panelist it happened to be.

It is this detachment, among other things, that has kept me from joining Facebook: I believe that it's a rare, rare case where an old, lost friendship can be revived beyond the superficial level. What's more, my antipathy toward small talk is such that I'm reluctant to invite more of it into my life.

My long-held attitude toward organized reunions (i.e., that you should attend any and all that you have the chance to) is even changing, much to my surprise. My high school had an all-class reunion last spring that I was planning to attend, until I lost interest as the date approached. I haven't even considered going to this year's edition.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about a friend of almost 30 years with whom I currently seem to be on pause. We've had no contact for the last six months (possibly the longest we've ever gone) -- this after a perfectly pleasant evening with her and her husband and two little girls in which nothing untoward happened other than the fact that it became starkly apparent to me (and, I'm convinced, to her) that we were, figuratively, gazing in almost completely non-intersecting directions.

This is the friend who introduced me to Joni Mitchell's album Blue, the two of us sitting on a cold linoleum dorm-room floor, listening to it over and over again: I remember that time that you told me, you said love is touching souls . . .

Tonight I don't even quite know where I am. I feel a bit reclusive, a bit wistful yet non-sentimental, a bit at a loss for words.

D. leaves for a few days in LA tomorrow, a trip to see friends. I'm going to the theater on Thursday to see a new play with a friend of my own. He's a more recent friend than those I was Googling tonight. Someone who has helped see me through -- helped see me -- these last several years of change and reorientation.

So there you have it -- my bookends for this directionless and confused musing: nights at the theater. A curtain parting, a curtain closing, ideas to contemplate as I make my way back home.