The Discomfort of Impermanence

Exeter River 

I recently decided to not attend my high school reunion, despite a barrage of emails from old friends and pressure from my family, who wanted to hear about Helga and the Dragon and other people they remember. 

That event was definitely a Last Waltz event, the last reunion we will have, until the funerals begin, and those have happened for 10% of our class already.

Guys You suffered With

Some of the people at the reunion were people I had known between ages 9 and 18, but most were friends for only 3 years.  Even the kids I had gone to elementary school with were not really the same people by the time we had progressed through the grades. Good buddies from 5th grade went down different paths when we got to junior and then senior high school. Even those relationship were impermanent.  I can count on one hand the people with whom I maintained a significant relationship from elementary through the end of high school, and even those faded eventually.

One was The Dragon (a sound play on her last name), the prettiest girl in my 4th grade class and one of the smartest.  I was infatuated with her for two years (4th and 5th) , and still liked her through junior and senior high school, but her star dimmed as other girls shone more brightly. But at age 16 and we still spent hours talking, on dates which were cerebral, not  physical, although they were romantic in some sense. We went to the senior prom, kept in touch through college but then she married, divorced, rocketed through a stellar career as counsel for Lucas films and other glamorous West Coast companies and she retired a very rich lady, with a second husband and two kids. I was not at all surprised by her ascent, although the faculty of our high school missed her talent completely, which says nothing about her but loads about their cluelessness.

The other was Terry Rodgers. We had spent much time wandering through the forests around our homes age 10-11 and we were on the wrestling team throughout high school and in most of the same classes. One summer, two older girls decided we would make good boy toys and we spent a lot of time in their cars and at their homes as a foursome. During the school year, we'd spend hours on the phone every day, mostly Terry talking about what he saw in whatever we were reading in class, Billy Budd, the Heart of Darkness.  It turned out, I am told, there was some darkness in his heart I never knew about. I had not known him as well as I thought. He went to Amherst and became a painter and found great success in Europe where his dark, malignant images of young aristocrats at orgies found homes on, I imagine, stark white walls of childless German couples who always dress in black and are reed thin and drink dry white wine.  His Wikipedia profile and his website give little clue to the boy he once was. 

They Tore It Down: And Well Deserved Destruction

When I moved back to Bethesda, I rarely saw anyone I had known in high school, which surprised me. I had expected to be playing football on weekends with old friends, having old classmates over for dinner, but though some still lived in the Metro area, they were geographically distant and wrapped up in the lives of their kids and there was little or no ongoing contact with people from those years. People who had sworn we would be friends forever, guys I had suffered through three seasons on the wrestling team, girls who cried copiously when we parted the summer before college, simply no longer heard that bell ring.

Dragon  did come to dinner once or twice. The first time, she was in from San Francisco and she arrived on time at our house, but I was late at the office. My wife phoned,  seething. "She's here in a pair of very tight designer jeans, a Chanel scarf, looking like a young Natalie Wood,  just in from Hollywood and she's looking at our kids like they are pets who have not been house trained.  I want you home NOW! I feel fat just being in the same room with her, and very frumpy."

A very different conversation when Terry arrived early for dinner, some months later. I was late again, tied up at the office, and I phoned home to apologize, but my wife was chirpy and not at all irritated I was delayed. "Oh, we're having wine. Take your time. You'll get here when you get here. You know where we live.  We have lots of wine.  You never told me the man is drop dead gorgeous."

He was quite the heart throb age 18, and he looked pretty much the same at age 38. A lot of 38 year old women showed up at the 20th reunion looking for Terry.

But Dragon flew back to San Francisco and Terry disappeared off to Europe and neither made it to another reunion after that. 

You can pick your friends, but not your family. In a way, you feel more intensely about your friends because the experiences you had with them are so different than the obligatory experiences you have with your family.  

We hold on to friends, and maybe to family, for the sense of continuity they give our lives, but that is largely an illusion. Our friendships are transitory; we cling to things looking for a sense of permanence, looking for anchors in moving waters.  Your family may remain close. That can be a major source of happiness, unless the family was not a happy one, but it's not a source of permanence. People change.  And they die. 

The Field House, Unique but Gone Now

As the wise man said, you dip your foot in the same moving stream and it is never the same water, only the stream is the same, and over the years, it is not even the same foot.

Leaving home, going to college, more friends, but the end was always near and you cleaved to girlfriends as an anchor in a world of shifting tides, but then you had to move on, from college to graduate school to a new town for a new job and at every stage you lost people.

Army brats, who were uprooted every 3 years and moved to a new post had some sense of continuity because they kept meeting friends from prior postings. The changed postings allowed them to reinvent themselves, to leave past mistakes behind, but even Army brats were unsettled by that impermanence, at some level.

Impermanence  became the theme of Madmen as it hurdled toward its conclusion. Don Draper shifted from one  identity (Dick Whitman) to Don Draper and as Don Draper he has never become fixed in place, going through women and identities relentlessly.  Sterling tells Peggy theirs is a world where you get hired, you get fired, even if your name is on the door, so don't become too attached to anything. That has got to be a neat summary of their world, and maybe of ours, much as we resist it. We can tether to one world while exploring others. 

Here in New Hampshire, I have friends who still live within 30 miles of where they grew up and they have lifelong friends who serve as touchstones. But I sense in them some dissatisfaction. Even lifelong friends are not permanent because they change, often in ways we are sorry to see. 

My guess is it is best to embrace the new, and not cling too hard to what came before.  If we could relive our lives and benefit from the first living, the way Ursula does in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, then we really could embrace impermanence and change because it would offer the opportunity to profit from the past. 

As Lincoln noted, impermanence can be a relief--"This too, shall past." 

What would be ideal would be to be able to hold on to the good and keep seeking the new good, while releasing the bad. 

I'm not sure that novel has yet been written.