Last night, I had dinner at an old friend’s house where I — face it, Pat, you know it’s true — shamelessly invited myself. I could imagine no greater treat than a home-cooked meal with a family. We had a lovely dinner, then gathered in front of the fireplace where we toasted marshmallows for s’mores and then younger brother faced off against older sister and her friend in several rounds of Stratego. (There was also a delightful interlude where everyone — sister, friend, brother — modeled sister’s killer patent leather boots, a bargain unearthed at Goodwill. My friend’s daughter, not quite 13, is almost my height, so the boots were thigh-high on her 6-year-old brother, who did a delightful dance.) I’d happily travel the country every day for a year if I could be guaranteed an evening such as this once a week.
This is, in many ways, more a Memory Project entry than a tour blog entry, because these friends are from the San Antonio phase of my life. I’m bad about keeping in touch with people, but my friend and I agreed that we never have any problem dropping in and picking up where we left off. Why is this, my friend wondered? Is it because we knew each other in our 20s? I think that’s part of it. The San Antonio Light (R.I.P.) was staffed largely by young people and I was rawer than most, a real work-in-progress. (I remain, I think, preternaturally immature, if that’s not an oxymoron, and even if it is.) We were silly together, and silliness is a great glue.
Here’s one of my favorite memories from that time: The women in our group, we walked a lot. We took long walks through a beautiful residential neighborhood known as Monte Vista. Most of us lived on the edges of this place, in duplexes or apartments carved into once-grand homes. We were, in a sense, walking through our future, looking at the seemingly settled lives of people ten-to-twenty years older than ourselves. I can’t speak for the others, but I really did think that some mantle of wisdom would descend and I would have everything figured out. I thought of life as a picnic cloth, one being spread on a windy day: the trick was to get all four corners down. Work was one corner, home another, family/relationships another. I’m not sure I ever defined the fourth one, which is all to the good, as I know now that no one ever really gets all four corners down. On a good day, in fact, I barely have two, and I can only hope they’re the ones opposite one another.
Memories of friends from your 20s? Even if, in fact, you are one of the readers here still in your 20s, or barely out. What do you think you’ll remember, my young friends? What corners of your life are you trying to pin down?
I see I didn’t really finish my thoughts on what this means to see these people. You get to be young again as in that Disney commercial where the parents turn into kids for a while. It’s like hearing that old song that brings back memories or smelling that food from your childhood. You relive happy, or sad times and you feel good about how far you’ve come or your amazed that you came through some times that you thought you would never survive. Mostly it’s like putting on a favorite pair of old scruffy jeans or a tattered sweat shirt. It’s comfortable!
All through high schooI fancied myself an artiste, special, different from everyone else. I’m sure I was insufferable and I thank my classmates for not killing me.
After high school when all my friends headed off to college I took off to Europe to live w/a boyfriend for two years. I was going to be an adventuress. Granted his money we lived off of came from a trust fund but I rationalized I was Henry Miller to his Anais Nin.
After 3 years of fucking around, dead end jobs and much adventure we were living in New Orleans. He was bored and decided we should hitchhike through Mexico.
When I sarcastically reminded him I possessed a vagina, I was not hitchhiking through Mexico we broke up for the millionth time. Calling my mom to say I was returning home she informed me she had sent slides of my art work to various colleges and 4th, possibly 5th tier one in the southern part of my state had offered me a great deal provided I keep my grades up.
No where else to go, no one to do it with, I headed off. I was 3 years older than the incoming freshman and felt like a classic fish out of water. Who were these ”normal” people on my co-ed dorm floor, drinking beer, smoking weed, not knowing of Fassbinder, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Rimbaud?
Once I got the stick out of my ass I made some of the best friends of my life. We ate together, napped like puppies in a pile in one room, laughed, cried. Guys I wouldn’t have deigned worthy of speaking to showed up to walk me home from night classes. Not because they wanted something but because there were a rash of rapes on campus and they were nice and they cared.
I mostly remember sitting in an end lounge, Matt and James working on engineering and aviation homework, me completing what they referred to as my ”play school homework”, a series of drawings I was turning into monoprints.
I remember all of us ingesting mushrooms and heading into Thompson Woods to play Follow The Leader in the middle of the night. I remember getting high, going to the Kroger to get snacks and mutely tiptoeing out amid the laughing cashiers when the bagger asked, ”paper or plastic?” and we thought it was a trick question referring to the state of our psyches. ”Oh my God,” laughed a middle-aged customer that now could be me. ”Those kids are tripping out of their minds!”
I remember pooling change to buy or scrounge up piece meal dinners on Sunday night when the cafeteria was closed. Most of all I remember learning that not knowing about French Symbolists or that the New York Dolls and the Stooges were the forerunners of punk didn’t mean you had no soul.
Thanks for this, Laura. It’s fun remembering these times and I’m giving a few people a call this evening.
This next week I’ll be coming back to dear old “Balmer” for my Mom’s 92nd birthday. I’ve made plans to see two of my best freinds who I’ve not spent much time with but keep in touch by phone and email. I met Cathy back in the 70′s when we worked together. I had the baby shower for her twins who are now mid 20′s and we’ve held each other up through divorces and other of life’s curveballs. We know each others secrets and blemishes. Debbie and I got close when both of our husbands played in the same band for over 20 years, but I’ve known her family since I was in Kindergarten. Her brother was my first “crush”. When I get together with her family, we go over all the vacations we shared and all the crazy (and I mean crazy) things we did. I’m so excited to see them as they are family to me and I never get to spend much time with them in person. There will be lots of memories chewed over next week and I can’t wait!
My college roomate and I are still good friends. We got assigned to each other as freshmen and stayed together the whole 4 years. We don’t keep in close touch but I usually see her when I’m back in MI visiting family. If I were to stay at her house I could find everything I needed in her kitchen on the first try. The length of our friendship became really clear one day when we were indulging in some illicit behavior and we realized that we’d gone from hiding it from the parents to hiding it from the kids! We laughed so hard we could hardly inhale.
Lots of memories from my 20s — when I was 22, I moved to a new city and state. Took up with a bunch of jugglers I found during my grad school tenure, and somewhere along the way decided that I wanted to keep these people as friends for the rest of my life. Twenty-six years later, I’m still happy with that decision.
Prior to that, there was a lot of running away from things and running through things. Dropped out of high school after three years (mostly to avoid family), blitzed through college (so I could avoid financial dependence), and my first job (which I loathed). Having never lived in one house for more than 18 months as a child may have had some effect there, too.
There’s still one friend I’ve kept track of since junior high school, and a few others from high school years that I can find plus spouse #2 (who I’ve known since then). There are a modest number of folks from early years I would happily take the opportunity to visit with again (Hi Laura!), but I don’t miss those days.
One of those happy opportunities happened Saturday when Laura visited Uncle Edgar’s in Minneapolis. She’d probably forgotten about a story of hers published in tenth grade; I now have it signed. Plus it was a chance to hear about mutual friends and acquaintances from high school that I’ve long since lost track of. (I’ve not been back to visit Maryland/Baltimore/D.C./Columbia since 1989.) Laura was very gracious, and signed an HS yearbook too (its first signature).
With luck, both she and Uncle Edgar’s proprietor will forgive me.
Robert
P.S.: While slumming last night with spouse #2, I found the local B&N (Roseville, MN) has gone from two Lippman titles (last Sunday) to eleven (yesterday).
Two photographs of me in the yearbook and I’m laughing like a hyena in both. Go figure!
I took a 4 month leave of absence in my 20s from a gov’t job(oh, the expense! oh, the lost wages!said my family and co-workers and some friends-) to back pack in India, Nepal, Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand for 4 months. That trip made a huge difference in my life- although you might not know it to see me now- at 54, in a (good paying but unexciting) gov’t job, married for 25 years with children in their 20s. My inside looks different than my outside.
Oh, Kim, you are the best and funniest!
Around age 19-20 I became best friends in college with someone whose father used to play with my mother and aunt as children. We, too, used to walk all the time, mostly to the Dairy Queen and then to Burger King for a fried apple pie. We talked all the time, never, ever running out of stuff to talk about. Even when we went to the library to study, we ended up most of the time walking somewhere, talking.
When I told Niki I had a crush on this mysterious guy who came into the Atlanta University library most evenings, she came to observe. She nicknamed him “camel coat” because he wore this magnificent camel-haired coat. While I was most happy with my fantasy of him, she decided it was time to move things along. So one day she stopped him, asked his name and told him she had a friend that had a crush on him. I was mortified! However, it was just the reality check I needed because when I finally got to talk to him, I saw that while the coat was genuine, he wasn’t. He had yellow teeth (which explained why he never smiled) and the reason no one ever saw him on campus was because he was married! Then a few years later, I ran into him again and learned that he was friends with my boyfriend-at-the-time and was not only flakey, but a bit dimwitted. Niki and I still laugh about this all the time. We have been friends now for 37 years.
I too have no trouble picking up the thread with old friends even when we haven’t seen each other for years. Antoine de Saint Exupery said that friends with whom we’ve lost touch are like buried treasure. I’ve got friends, not just from my 20s but all along who’ve stuck with me.
Often, though, the ones who stay close aren’t the ones I’d have predicted. For example, there’s one group of friends from my 20s whom I met through traditional dancing (contra dancing, English Country dancing, morris dancing, etc.). I never thought we’d become close or, if we did, that we’d stay friends over the years. After all, I was a welfare mother with two kids, and they were mostly unmarried students or recent grads of places like Harvard & Wellesley. If I’d known we’d still be such good friends 30 years later, I’d have behaved better back then. Not that it seems to matter now.