Some Things Never Change

Some Things Never Change

          Last night Kim and I had dinner with friends Cliff and Linda. Cliff was on my freshman floor at college.  We were both engineering students with him thinking he wanted to be pre-med and me thinking I had no idea what I wanted to be.  He came to college with a high school girlfriend in tow, who was attending college in nearby Cortland.  I came to college with an army jacket and duffle bag of dirty clothes, and pork chop sideburns that should have scared off anything female.  Cliff and I stumbled our way through the engineering program that year, learning about life from our floor mates and the breadth of experiences that a large University like Cornell affords.  There was nothing particularly unique about our early 1970’s experience, it was going on the same at colleges all around the United States.  I like to think of the era as the hangover from the party of the 60’s.  There were still hippies and anti-war protestors, and there were still ROTC guys and frat boys parading in their figurative and literal jock straps.  But this was generally giving way to more pragmatic thoughts about where Baby-Boomer life was taking us all, while Richard Nixon was still in command, but George McGovern was on the rise.

          Cliff and I went on to join the same fraternity and eventually in our senior year, to sharing an apartment with a few other brothers.  So, it is safe to say that we were close all during college.  Since college, he and I have stayed in regular touch with some patches when we each were more engaged with our daily routines or focus and other times when we saw each other more regularly.  The consistent similarity between us was that we are each more inclined to reach out and stay in touch with our college friends than most. He and I showed this tendency during school as I reflect on it.  I was engaged with and involved in the fraternity’s workings (including running the house during several summers since living overseas precluded returning home easily), and Cliff was President of the fraternity during junior year.  Some people engage in such social groups very lightly and others (like Cliff and me) get more tightly involved and become part of the glue that keeps it all together.  Everyone has different priorities during college, but Cliff and I seemed to share a tendency to treat those years as part of the journey and not a waystation to graduate school, which was a prevalent trend among many of our peers.

          During those years, Linda was ever-present.  The distance to Cortland from Ithaca was a trivial twenty miles, so Cliff and Linda saw a lot of each other.  While I am certain that a couple that have been together for fifty years have a strong and deep connection to one another, there was a casualness to that relationship that seemed uncommonly natural to most of us.  They were just always together and there seemed from the outside to be very little drama or question about it at any time during those years (or since to my knowledge). I can honestly say that I have rarely thought of Cliff, but always thought of Cliff & Linda.

          Linda is as easy-going as any person I have ever known.  She came from a large family and expression “water off a duck’s back” was invented to describe how she approaches everything in life.  She studied at college, but it did not overwhelm her life.  She was social, but she did not party hard the way many in college do.  Cliff was a bit more intense, initially by virtue of the competitive environment of the pre-med cohort at Cornell (a palpably hard-core group of driven folks) and eventually based on the rigor of the engineering discipline at Cornell (a top Engineering Program).  That left Linda more at loose ends when she visited often.  She was simply around more like a fellow roommate or fraternity member.  She and I shared a passion for television (I was still drinking from that firehose of All in the Family and other shows after years of abstinence overseas), so we spent hours just watching TV.

          I see some of my college friends more than others.  I work and have worked with some.  I see others only at reunions.  Cliff and I make a point of staying in touch somewhere in between those two extremes.  Unlike most relationships, which tend to be maintained by one or the other, he and I both keep in touch with one another and update each other on those from our crowd that are less regularly connected with the group.  He and I tend to be the ones who organize gatherings.  It’s no different than it was forty-five years ago.  There are organizers and there are joiners, and, unfortunately, there are those that consciously stay away.  Those tend to be people less happy with their situations, who choose not to share that lack of happiness with their old friends either out of embarrassment or sense of tediousness about hearing of everyone else’s good feelings.

          When we review our old friendships, I am struck by the fact that people have not changed all that much.  Those who were kind are still kind.  Those that were snarky are still snarky.  Those that talked incessantly are still doing the same. Those that were shadows in school are either still shadowy or altogether absent, which feels consistent.  The only exception I see is that those who have disconnected were all very different in those days.  I relate this to a loss of hope.  In college we are all filled with hope to slightly differing degrees.  Life tends to either reinforce and renew hope (no matter how the specifics of hope manifest themselves) or it erodes it.

          Of the three people who have chosen to absent themselves from our college gang, I suspect one has done so for medical reasons, one for marital/financial reasons and one for aspirational reasons.  There but for the grace of God go any of us I suppose, but I’m not so sure that those who have chosen to stay connected haven’t suffered each of those maladies to some degree and at some time over life.  The difference is that we have not lost hope and have thus found a path to some form of recovery.  The good news is that hope can always be recaptured.  There is a limitless supply in the universe. 

          Cliff and Linda, I told Kim after our dinner, have not changed a bit in forty-five years.  My guess is that they said something similar about me after dinner.  The truth is that we all change, but with the existence of hope, we look more like we did in our youth than not.  Given my simple-mindedness, I’m thinking I might look even younger now…at least better without the pork chop sideburns.