Talking to Old Friends
None of us ever do a good enough job of staying in touch with old friends. Some try harder than others, but for the most part we all accept that life moves on and some people just drift away and disappear from your screen. We all segment our lives to some degree, but I suspect I do it more than most since I grew up as part of my mother’s traveling caravan that traipsed all over Latin America, the Continental Unites States and Europe for the first seventeen years of my life. When you pull up stakes and move on into the night every two or three years, you learn how to compartmentalize your experiences and you selectively stay in touch with some parts of your past and disconnect with others. It is a survival tactic since the next life segment demands a great deal of attention to integrate and the old section just has to make do until you have time to reconnect.
I always wonder what life would be like for someone who grows up and stays put for their first seventeen years. I got a glimpse of that this past weekend at my son Tom’s wedding where both the bride and groom had fully eight bridesmaids and groomsmen. While I know both Tom and Jenna grew up and stayed put through high school, I know Tom’s friendship path better, so I will focus on his for a moment. He lived in what I will call the Central Village of Manhattan’s lower portion. Some would call it the Gramercy area, but it was closer to the village since his building was between 14th and 15th Streets. That is the part of Manhattan that topographically has fewer tall buildings versus midtown and downtown. I used to think that was an economic distinction having to do with the commercial desire to go vertical with buildings down on Wall Street and then again in midtown, but when working on the infamous New York Wheel project a few years ago, I had occasion to speak to many geotechnical specialists about load-bearing construction issues. What I learned is that you can map the solidity of the bedrock of Manhattan and lay that against the skyline and see that taller buildings are mostly absent where the soil conditions do not permit them due to very deep versus surface-located bedrock.
Tom went to nursery school in the Gramercy area around Irving Place (named after the early Nineteenth Century author of note, Washington Irving) and then attended The Little Red School in the West Village. His friends were mostly the children of middle class professional and/or artistic residents who preferred the downtown vibe. A few moved away to the suburbs eventually, but many stayed downtown and grew up along side Tom for all of those years. Cameron, Mickey, and Yanni lived in the same building. Liam, Liam, and David lived nearby and went to Little Red with him. Teddy was a nursery school pal who moved off to Westchester and reconnected when they were both accepted to Cornell. He and Tom roomed together for four years there. Rene was a family friend who lived nearby. Those were his relatively large gang of growing-up friends, supplemented here and there by the children of somewhat famous downtowners like Gabriel Day Lewis (There Will Be Blood), Atlas Wegman (think Weimaraners) and Harry Whitford (Aerosmith). Dan was a pal from summer camp in the Berkshires (Camp Emerson) and then nearby Ithaca College during those years. When Tom went to Cornell, beyond Teddy, his circle was defined by his a cappella singing group, who attended his wedding in force with (besides Teddy) James, Laert, Peter and others. Tom has, by any measure, lots of friends and he does an admirable job of staying close to most of them.
By contrast, I have no retained friends in my coterie from before high school. From a small class of 54 in the distant and transient city of Rome, I have kept two, Bob and Tom, who both went to school with me, but mostly both rode motorcycles with me. From college, I have many fraternity friends (Cliff, Gary, Bob, Marc, Peter, Dave, Debbie/Dale/Margie/Linda (honorary frat girls) and Rob and Paul [rest their souls] to name the closest) and one freshman floor pal, Mike, who shared interests in skiing and golf with me. Post college, my working life resembled my early rolling-stone-gathers-no-moss days. I moved around a lot and plucked out a few friends along the way like Steve, Tad, Jim, Josh, Steven, Rajan and Michael. My issue was that I was a young outperformer and most of these guys worked for me at one point and that made friendships a bit trickier, but doable, especially in the rear view mirror. My peer group of Peter, Joe and others are mostly ten to fifteen years ahead of me in age and so either gone or on the exit ramp now. Then I have my partners from my venture capital days like Frank (mentor), Bruce (partner), Terry (partner), James (employee) and Greg (investee). I don’t sense that I stay as close to my friends as my son Tom does and he does a much better job of integrating them all, but I have a decent sized holiday card list that I try to keep culled for those whom I genuinely stay in touch. I think rolling stones like me tend to communicate and connect less regularly, but to some degree every once in awhile. I notice that when we do connect, none of the warmth of the relationship is gone, but the topics of mutual interest still only range so far as we each have our day-to-day lives that we lead and people with whom we regularly break bread, who are generally those living closest to us at this point in life.
I’m not sure any of that makes me so very different than anyone, but just as Tom and I have different ways that we roll in our friendship universes, everyone’s array is configured differently for different reasons. For instance, I have a motorcycle group that I formed 28 years ago. Those in that core team are as close to me as any friends I have even though we have only seen each other several times a year over many years. They are Arthur, Andy, Frank, Barbara, Steve, Maggie, Mark, Jeanne, Chris, Ann, Rob, Urch, Kevin, Karen, Bruce, Roger, Edwina, Bob, Willo, Deb, Melissa, and Mardie. Now that I have gotten into the business of listing all of my friends, I realize that perhaps I am not so very different from my son Tom after all. I haven’t had to think about groomsmen as he has and I have had forty years more time to accumulate these friends, but he and I do seem to share a sense of value for friendships and are both driving forces in staying connected with our friends.
Today I got and made calls to two old friends on my list. First there was Tom from my high school days, technically one of my two oldest friends. Tom led a global life growing up like I did, but then lived most of his adulthood here in the States. He is now moving to his birthplace of Australia. He has determined that life in Brisbane is much more to his liking than life here (he has most recently lived in Santa Fe). He likes the politics, the economics, the medical system, the mindset and especially the sense of social responsibility far more there than here. We spoke at length about the good and bad in our country and society. He made compelling arguments, but I told him I am unlikely to leave the good old U.S.A. despite the risks of it teetering on the edge of totalitarianism. His parents left communist Eastern Europe when he was a child, so he was more inclined to think getting while the getting was good was the best strategy. Talking about such life-defining and heady geopolitical issues was interesting but confusing.
The other call was with Greg, the ex-CEO of a company I chaired and in which I invested. He is now approaching sixty years old and figuring out his end-game strategies. Right now he is split between the New Jersey Shore and southern Florida. What I found so interesting about our talk was that he is catching up to me in life and facing the same career, lifestyle and time utilization issues. He is married to a woman whose family fled pre-handover Hong Kong in the 90’s. Their perspective on where to live is equally but differently determined by their histories. Talking to old friends can be soothing and confusing all at once.