There are few better ways to nourish your soul as good as spending an evening with close and dear friends who have moved away.
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Wisdom from an old friend
Brian David-Marshall and I have known each other for twenty years. He played a small but pivotal role in me starting the podcast that led to me working for Wizards. And I just loved this post from him for how true it is.
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Old friends and togetherness
When Katie and I moved to Seattle, on our drive, we had planned to meet up with a highschool who was now living in Washington. It was the last day of our drive and I was over it, and as much as I wanted to reconnect with Jessica, I was also VERY eager to get to our place and be done with the roadtrip. So, we skipped meeting up and booked it for Seattle.
Jessica was a high school classmate of mine. She is a brilliant woman. She works with "Black Owned Social Services" a Co-op dedicated to growing businesses for POC in the renewable and solar industry. From BOSS's about page:
BOSS is the largest community of African American professionals working in the solar photovoltaic (PV) space. We are entrepreneurs, financiers, veterans, attorneys, engineers, contractors, developers and other peer partners. We possess deep knowledge, experience and strategic access to the multi-trillion dollar, emerging solar and clean energy technology marketplace that is fast reshaping sustainability, infrastructure resilience and livelihoods in our country and across the globe. We have established roots and relationships in all communities, and particularly those disproportionately impacted by climate change —in the United States and abroad. Our collective efforts are making communities more resilient, sustainable and economically powerful.
The mission of BOSS is to combine and leverage our collective power to lead actionable solutions for sustained access to equitable opportunities in clean energy production, distribution and storage for Black-owned businesses. BOSS was launched in the Fall of 2020 after an inaugural Solar Equity Summit (SES) on September 29, 2020. A common theme throughout the SES was the importance of policy in shaping markets to enable accessibility for Black-owned businesses to thrive in the clean energy sector. Energy equity is a key policy enabler to manifesting the mission of BOSS and plays a critical role in our endeavor to highlight unfair practices and provide recommendations for common actions to address them.
Our trip to Washington was nearly twelve years ago (!) and while we have chatted countless times online during that span, we haven't managed to actually see each other. She lives in Vancouver, Washington, with her husband which is basically Portland's other side across the river which is the state border, but that is only a few hours away - a very doable drive.
Well, a few weeks ago, Jessica messages me asking about hotel recommendations around Burien, another Seattle suburb. Turns out she was going to be in the area for a work event. Katie and I immediately invited her to stay with us.
So, Friday, she arrived and we spent a lovely evening together. Catching up, reminiscing, and just enjoying the connection of old friends. I smoked ribs for us, and Katie made a delicious cake which uses angel food cake, pineapple, strawberries, pudding, and cool whip.
After she left Saturday morning, we had already been planning to make our way down and see the event she was working. But also we realized we hadn't taken any photos together. So, when we did meet up with her at the event, we made sure to commemorate the gathering with a "ussie."
While there, we also got to run into her brother, another old school friend, James. James is a fellow D&D fan, and we stood there talking about stuff for probably close to thirty minutes. He also lives in the state. And Jessica grabbed this ussie.
Great times. It truly was like no time had passed and we just enjoyed the togetherness. We're not going to wait fourteen more years to see each other again. And it's probably our turn to travel south.
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"The Six Forces That Fuel Friendship"
After over 100 interviews with pairs of friends, Julie Bell has six things she feels drive all lasting friendships:
Accumulation
The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people spend a lot of their time anyway: work, school, church, extracurricular activities.
Attention
Paying attention goes a long way when forging these unexpected friendships—noticing when you click with someone, being open to chance encounters. It helps to step out of our habits and into the moment. Because as much as we may feel like our social networks are set and settled, it's never too late to meet someone who will be important to you for the rest of your life.
Intention
Attention only gets you so far without action. When opportunity arises, you have to put yourself out there, and that requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to let things be awkward.
Ritual
One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. I personally find that the effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) is the biggest barrier to seeing my friends. It's much easier when something is baked into my schedule, and all I have to do is show up. For instance, while working from home during the pandemic, I've gotten lunch every Friday with my friend who lives around the corner (when it's been safe to do so).
Imagination
Society has a place for friendships, and it's on the sidelines. They're supposed to play a supporting role to work, family, and romance. It takes imagination not to default to this norm, and to design your life so that friendship plays the role you really want it to.
Grace
I'm not religious, but I do love the concept of grace, of a gift so profound that it could never be earned or deserved. And so when I cite grace here as the final and most important force in friendships, I mean it in two ways. One is the forgiveness that we offer each other when we fall short. The other is the space that creates for connections—and reconnections—that feel nothing short of miraculous.
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I wish I had saved it, because I can't find it now, but there was a post on Twitter which highlighted that the simple act of relying on friends is a small way to push back the forces of capitalism. Being willing to ask for help with tasks rather than simply paying someone reclaims an element of our livelihood from what has often become an act of capitalism to pay someone else to do it.
This evening I was able to act on this. Rather than pay an electrician to fix a mounting box which failed in our entryway light, I put out a call for a friend to help me in what I knew was ultimately a simple task but which required getting in the attic and is not something I was able to do easily given my size.
Thanks to him, it took us less than an hour to replace the container. And so for maybe the cost of dinner and hanging out with him and his wife, we did what an electrician would have charged me at least a few hundred dollars for.
I call that a good evening. Now I just need to finish re-hanging our light fixture.
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Had a very eventful day between onboarding a new coworker which kept me incredibly busy at work and then getting to see an old friend and spend the evening with her playing boardgames. Life is good sometimes.
Never underestimate the wonderful truth of catching up and laughing with an old friend.
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How Relationships Refine Our Truths: Adrienne Rich on the Dignity of Love
What a beautiful sentiment:
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Day of Remembrance
This is my friend Mike. Mike and I were a tandem duo when we started at Wizards. He was the editor and I was the content manager / wrangler.
This photo was taken 7 years ago and I am so incredibly thankful my friend Aideen took it. I don't have many photos of Mike and I, he was very camera shy, almost always opting to be in the background when given the choice.
Mike died a few years ago. He was due back to work but never showed up. This was a notable event such that on the drive home, while carpooling with another friend, I swung by his house to see if he was there. When he wasn't, I knew something had gone wrong but had no idea what and I never thought he was actually gone.
After dropping my carpool buddy off at his house, I was actually heading back to the office. I was going to go out to dinner with my new boss, but on my drive there Mike's ex-wife called me and asked me to pull over. She let me know Mike had died in a car crash. I was broken. I called my wife and she told me to call our friend who I had just dropped off rather than try to drive home. He and his wife picked me up and drove my car back to the house. We ended up with a dozen people coming over and sharing a bit of a wake and working through our feelings. I remember it all very vividly.
Remembering it, and my times with Mike, are extremely important to me. In fact, remembering the lives and relationships of all the people close to me who have died is important to me. And, as I get older, as is the nature of this thing we call life, it gets harder and harder.
I've long thought that I need a day, a defined day of the year, that I treat as my own day of remembrance. For Mike. For my parents. For my grandparents. For my brothers-in-law. For my childhood friend.
I know of some cultural holidays which are similar, but I don't want to just take them as my own. They aren't mine or my culture. Maybe it's also that, honestly, I want to own what this day is. I don't want to work in the confines or framing of an existing cultural holiday, but this is a day for me and my memories.
I've had this idea for a while but have never been able to settle on a date for it. I don't know what day is the right day. I could pick the day someone close to me died and use that as an anchor, but then it feels to me like it's too much about that person. And if I pick a day that is just a random one on the calendar, it feels like it doesn't have enough meaning.
As I write this though, I realize that today makes a good choice for a day. It isn't the day of Mike's passing. It's a day remembering him because of a hike I, he, and some of our friends, took.
Today will be my annual Day of Remembrance. A day for me to take time, and sit back, and remember the good times I had with so many.
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