We were reading together on the lanai one afternoon when I drifted off to a random thought. I asked Judy, “Have you ever thought about all of the people we have known in our lives? Like, whatever happened to that fellow with whom I spent all night in the stairwell of the Seven Seas talking about that Alan Watts book about Zen? And that’s about the only thing I remember about him from that whole semester’s trip!”
I think the thought popped into my head because we had just finished opening several Christmas cards, some from people we have not actually seen in nearly fifty years.
People of a Certain Age, can you relate? Has there been a host of people in your lives that connected with you ever so briefly, not to be seen again, or only to be heard from at the holidays? Then there are those people who, at one time or another, helped to form your social life for a spell, perhaps in another city in which you lived or at a place where you worked?
I refer to actual face-to-face contact. Facebook allows faux-friending. Tweets on Twitter seem more trivial. Engaging with another person for a night in the stairwell or tossing around a football at Thanksgiving for several years in a row conveys something more than these 21st century “encounters.”
What impact on your life might any of that host have had? My staircase conversation, at age 18, with my Zen friend was my first experience of listening to someone whose beliefs were different from mine explaining how he came to believe those beliefs. Perhaps my tolerance for others’ beliefs was stoked in those early morning hours.
In a recent essay in The Week, Jeanne Marie Laskas shared a line she had heard from her friend, Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers to the rest of us. “I think the greatest thing about things is they remind you of people.” I know what he meant.
I can’t see a turbaned man without remembering the Sikh graduate student at the University of Washington who Dad brought home on Christmas to provide him companionship during the holidays while his dorm sat vacant. Surely, that exposure as a seven or eight-year old boy had some impact on my understanding that there were good, nice, respectful people who lived in other parts of the world and wore things like turbans.
A tweed sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows reminds me of the man who sat down at our table on the Plaza in San Jose, Costa Rica and cadged a cup of coffee from us while he told stories about his vagabond life. He has given Judy and me a shared memory—whether the stories were true of not—and kindled our sense of the wonders awaiting travelers.
Pasta al limone recalls the woman with whom we had dinner in Florence decades ago, whose husband had taken ill on our American Express tour, requiring him to be hospitalized and her to remain there on her own in a foreign city. Our itinerary after the tour took us back through Florence where we called on her. She responded as though we were long-lost friends, reminding us that “being there” can be a kindness of immeasurable quality, even if you barely knew each other on the tour. We stayed in touch with her for several Christmases, and Judy makes fettucini al limone from time to time.
“Things” have reminded us of people who have helped to populate our lives.
Why does our basket have cards from people unseen in our lives for so long? Did we have some mutual impact on one another such that maintaining even the briefest of annual contact is important in some way or another or are the cards just something we do?
A particular card focused on the children and grandchildren of someone who was newly married when we knew her. We are happy for her, though we had no relationship at all with the subjects of her news.
Maybe therein lies a beginning to understanding the significance of the people who have come and gone, remembered perhaps because of some thing, like a book or a jacket or a turban but otherwise seemingly unconnected to our lives.
It is difficult to imagine a life without such random encounters. We might never see again 95% of the people whose paths have crossed ours. But they touched our lives, and life just might be the accumulation of all of those touches.
It is also our good fortune, and I hope yours, to have others with whom we have shared experiences over decades. The impact of these people, family, friends of long-standing, co-workers, is more obvious. With these we have traveled, shared joys and sorrows, grown old together. It is also hard to imagine a life where none of those people were a part.
Mr. Rogers was happy to be reminded of people. He made “I want to be your friend” popular. His focus was on whomever was facing him there and then.
As a result, his life was populated with friends who found a friend in him, for however long.
How great is that?
Dan White
February 3, 2020