This slippery season started late this summer, when I read Dave Eggers' latest novel, Contrapposto. It's the tender story of an unlikely artist's life. As you move from childhood through the years with him, his identity as an artist and one friendship in particular anchor and shape the person he becomes.
The novel's epigraph is from Georgia O'Keefe: to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
The ending is beautiful, but I really started crying after I read the acknowledgments. I can't quote it exactly here, because I loaned the book to Beatrice and it's deep in her messy room somewhere. But he lovingly thanks the friends he has had for decades.
Decades! Really? But Mr. Eggers, you and I are roughly the same age! Then I realized I too have had friends for decades. We're kind of old now.
To have a friend takes time. Maybe it's not just that you can't become friends overnight. Maybe to have a friend takes months, years, decades - at least to know the full, vast treasure of friendship.
Since reading the novel, in the weeks leading up to Gabriel's college drop off, a lot happened on the friends-for-decades front. I ran into a friend from high school whom I rarely see at the grocery store. I was waiting in line, and felt a gentle hand on my back. I started. Who touches me with that kind of tenderness out here in the world?
Someone I knew when I was fourteen years old! I thought that was you, he said, smiling. How are you?
Nothing really seemed to matter beyond the fact that we knew each other as children and wished the best for one another. No weird comparisons, judgement, social debts to pay. Just - it sure is nice to see you.
I reconnected with a friend I first met at camp this summer, and met his darling new baby. Being together, a similar emotional softness and simplicity permeated the space around us: it's you! You are here, you're good, I love you. It happened again, over an email exchange in August, with another friend from college whom I haven't seen in many years. It's you! I love you! All the rough edges and doubts of being young have fallen away. What a deep down joy.
When I took Gabriel to school, I was saying goodbye to him, and to this chapter of our family life. And I was taking him to college without his papa, who would have been tickled and stirred down to his toes to drop his boy off at Swarthmore College. Sitting alone amongst all the other parents in the amphitheater, the acute wrongness of his absence hurt. But there's more! I seemed to also be awash in memories from my own first semester on that campus. Before Mike. The past kept tugging on my sleeves.
I was seventeen. I met my best friend. I met my boyfriend. I struggled to pass bio and adored my religion and literature class. I started running and returned to dance. I ate purple blueberry bagels and lucky charms cereal out of clear plastic dining hall cups. I felt weird, alienated, deeply uncool, lacking in sophistication, inspired, excited, independent. My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer that November and I fell into a confusing darkness, never sure where I should be. Neither home nor school was right; my heart was in tatters.
At drop off, Gabriel met another boy whose mother was in my class. After a few moments, we remembered each other with big smiles on our faces - as we were that first semester. Another friend with whom I am rarely in touch texted to tell me about discovering someone else from our class has a daughter at Swarthmore.
The first memory that came up of that particular parent? Mike and I began our love affair when he was visiting campus during my senior year. We had been spending time together, tentatively, unsure what was happening, and walked in the Crum woods before my afternoon class and his train back to New York. We ended our walk at a stone wall where we lingered, and kissed. I said goodbye, my heart doing it's thing, about to beat right out of my chest, and ran into a classroom that was slowly filling up with familiar faces. I stood in the middle of the room, unsure what I could possibly do with myself in that moment.
I just kissed Mike Brogan!! I breathlessly announced to any who would hear.
My eyes rested on this man who is now a fellow middle aged parent of a member of the class of 2030. He smiled back. Okay, he said.
That was it. I sat down in a desk. But I remember.
Tomorrow night I'm signed up to take a 'lifelong learning' class over zoom with the same professor, now retired, who taught that class. I've never done anything like it before, but it was an opportunity to reread some of my favorite novels with an amazing teacher; that compelled me to sign up earlier this summer.
But what was I thinking? More of this time-tangle?! My body can barely contain all the times and places layered throughout my muscles, organs, and bones that light up at the slightest provocation. The girl I was, unformed, passionate, afraid, lovestruck. She visits often these days, and I am full of compassion for her and her extraordinary friends. Precious then, even moreso now.
It's so hard and marvelous to be young; it's so hard and marvelous to have children who grow up beautifully, and remind you.
And yet, to have our wise and hilarious friends with us in it all is an immeasurable comfort!
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