On Auld Lang Syne

In a strange juxtaposition of events, in the last week figures from both the best and worst moments of my youth have reappeared rather suddenly in my life in some capacity or other. The contrast of what these gentlemen (and I mean that in the truest sense of the word, all of them) have meant to me has been so stark that my head has been spinning a little. I am left a little breathless this Friday afternoon, checking the contents of my closet, and wondering about my psychic housekeeping.

As someone with naturally itchy feet, who has always been seeking, questing after some unknown vision that is always just ahead, I have had both the privilege and the burden of living my life as a series of disconnected short shorts, rather than as contiguous chapters or an easily discernable plot line. I have moved through life, shedding moments and experiences like a snake sheds skin, all the while both wondering and unclear about what all I have left behind.

This week, in sharp relief, what has come to me is the indelible marks left by the people I knew when. I have outgrown many skins in the inter-rim, but we are nevertheless bonded, locked together in life in some way, simply because these are the people with whom I shared singular defining moments and periods in time.

On the one hand, two friends unseen for twenty-plus years, unchanged to me from the boys who live in my minds eye, delicious in the adolescent awkwardness of the best and last true summer of our childhood. A summer that lives for me in pre-fall Milton-esque beauty, abuzz with the combined pleasures of swimming, sunshine and the first taste of gently broken rules. A gang of us so hyper-awake in our bodies, we could have had sexual tension with the elms, and so in love with each other and being alive, it seems now an endless series of hugs, and laughter so big it must surely still be hanging over the branches in Madison, CT. For me, nothing if not out of place in my own hometown, that summer just before high school was a respite, an oasis of acceptance that helped buoy me through what would become a four-year prison of relentless monotony, teenage disaffectedness and angst. And today, the residue remains. Over a shared basket of French Fries somewhere near mid-town, words spoken with a casual gentleness- “You were always a bit like that…”- and the unspoken gift- “and we didn’t care.”

On the other hand, a person from a darker moment all together made electronic contact. This was a person who, just two short years later, injured me in one of those moments so fraught with mutual stupidity and false belief in a maturity we didn’t posses, that it nevertheless precipitated my long fall forward into adulthood. This is a person who hurt me deeply, but from whom I eventually received the most wrenching, eloquent and humble apology to which I am ever likely to bear witness. I can’t say at present that I have a friendship with this person, but we too are bonded by the accidental pipeline of transgression, regret and the true divinity of forgiveness.

With these events, I have thought much this week about what it means to loose and find. With the advent of easy access to networks and communication, my generation is likely the last, at least here in our linked-up, look-at-my-face, instant-friend-request-for-life society, to know what it means to truly loose a person. To go forward into the world, your life moving past you like traffic, not knowing if you’ll ever find your way to reunion or making amends- to question whether your loose ends will ever get tied.

For me, I am grateful for the opportunity to go back after all, and see if any of the old skin still fits.