Last summer my brother, Steve, did a really extraordinary and wonderful thing. He rented a small resort in the Adirondacks and invited his closest friends and their families to spend a week there. He invited friends from high school up through the life he’s living now, as general counsel for a company in California.
I thought a lot about that generosity and also about how funny he was when he told me about it: “if you tell people far enough ahead of time and it’s free, then they’ll come, otherwise everyone is too busy all the time.”
And he’s right. Everyone is too busy all the time. It sounded like they had a really great time there and there was a nice little small world moment on the last day, apparently, when the person who owns the neighboring camp paddled over to thank them for having been quiet and respectful. It turned out that that person knew me from a time when we lived in the same town in Vermont.
I thought a lot about that wise decision on Steve’s part, to use his resources that way. Especially leading up to my fortieth high school reunion. I’m not in the same economic landscape that Steve is, but I knew I could (and should) do something similar to bring people I care about together, especially given that we’re all creeping up on sixty and there’s just no knowing what’s going to happen.
I knew that I didn’t want to attend the actual party for our high school reunion. I’ve been to a few of them and they kind of feel like more of the same: it’s hard to recognize people; our graduating class was huge, something like 550 people, and I don’t really have much to say to people now that I didn’t know all that well then. I’ve mostly stayed connected with the people I care about. Plus there’s a lot of drinking, which gets really old really quickly.
So I rented a house in Saratoga and asked my friend Ben to work his culinary magic and a bunch of us got together for dinner. It was a really nice, quiet kind of night. We caught up, talked a lot about our kids, our travels, our joint replacement surgeries and I did what I intended to do in planning the night: I told them that, though many of us aren’t connected on a regular basis, I treasure the memories of the time we spent together growing up in Saratoga. We had a ton of fun in that town in the 80s, when the drinking age was 18, Skidmore was right there, we danced a lot. It was a great time and place to grow up. And there is something about that time in life, those experiences get kind of baked-in and stay with you through the decades.
I realized that I didn’t want to be sitting at someone’s memorial service wishing I had told them how much they meant to me. So I drew us together so I could say that.
The strange and amazing thing about the timing is that for many years when I was growing up I went to Kentucky to spend summers with the Jones family in Midway. I met them because they rented a house in our neighborhood for the racing season which, back then, was the month of August. Their daughter, Lucy, is Steve’s age, so we connected through kids. And I started going there to help with childcare. And they treated me like family. It was a huge part of my growing years. Libby and Brerry Jones were two of the greatest humans I had the privilege to learn from. And this past week Brerry died, he was 84. So today, the day after our high school reunion dinner, in my old hometown, I’m heading to Kentucky, like I did so many times all those years ago, to be at Brerry’s funeral, tomorrow, in Midway.
I don’t know all there is to know about the celestial energies and forces that guard and move our lives, but I do know that there are many amazing influences and confluences. When left to our own devices we often screw things up royally, but when we loosen the reigns of life, it becomes very elegant and captivating.
I am in love with this life and the people in it. Please, if you will, be sure they convey that clearly at my memorial service when that day comes. And I highly recommend that you take some time soon to tell the people you care about how much they matter to you.
xomo
Look at all these happy and smiling faces. They brighten the world, and if they have walked on, they are giving that light to the next world as well as smiling back upon us. They do reach us one way or another. One of my dear friends walked on two weeks ago, and his niece reached out to me and told me how much I meant to her uncle. He told her all kinds of news about me and my books and butterflies. Keep the light shining.