The transcendence of friendship
Few things in life feed our souls like friendship.
In late August of 1991, a 27-year-old architect moved from Boston to LA to attend graduate school. Just as in undergrad, she met people there who would open her mind to places and ideas that she'd never encountered before, and it changed her understanding of the world and her life.
If you haven't been there, you won't realize that the UCLA campus is just a few inches short of paradise. Set in LA's temperate Westside adjacent to Bel Air, it is a lush, green arboretum on a south-facing hillside with buildings defining courtyard after courtyard. In a slightly-less-picturesque corner of campus was Perloff Hall, at that time home to the Architecture and Planning programs. Within Perloff, floating above its tall top second floor, was a small tray mezzanine that held the second professional Masters design studios, with just about a dozen people. It may have been there, or outside where we all spent so much time in the sunshine, that a woman came up to the transplant and said, "You look familiar. Did you ever shop at Barsamian's?"
For the transplant to hear the name of her small family grocery in Cambridge, Massachusetts invoked from 3000 miles away was a shock. "Yes, all the time" was her response. She and friends liked to joke in those days that everyone in Cambridge shopped at Barsamian's; now it is a nostalgic memory.
"Yes, I've seen you there," said the questioner. And a fast friendship was formed.
Vera, the questioner (and also a transplant), was in the Design program; I, the transplant, was in the Urban Design program. We had both arrived from Cambridge, no small coincidence. I quickly learned that Vera was and is an enoromously creative and exacting architect and thinker.
Not long after we met, Vera introduced me to Emily, a set design major from the Drama department; Emily was and is an artist, performer and writer, and embodies the word "creative". The three of us shared an Architectural Theory class, and became a trio for the next year and a half. We were at UCLA at the best time - the height of deconstructivism, perhaps the most creative style and period of architectural design, and it happened to originate from and be centered in LA. "Decon" was all about dynamic and poetic expressions of structures, spaces and light in buildings, freed from traditional orders - an apt metaphor. We had access to the theory, the built examples, and the people who fueled the movement. It was so rich and new, and it drew students and faculty from around the world who wanted to immerse themselves in it. The three of us, bringing together divergent backgrounds and resonant perspectives, shared endless conversations over a rice bowl from the lunch wagon or a coffee after class. Together, we went to lecture series on campus and made trips to the library. We talked late into the night in the tray, sharing progress on design projects or questions on homeworks, often lapsing into general philosphical discussions that taught me so much.
One of the more memorable things we did together while at UCLA was to attend a Bergmann film festival in a Santa Monica art-house theater. Every Saturday morning at 9:30, early hours for a grad student who may have been up late in studio, we loaded into Vera's tank of a Peugeot and rumbled slowly west through the wealthy, emerald, tree-canopied boulevards of Brentwood, towards the coast. There were only a few options for music, Vera's favorites (Queen or Annie Lennox or Sheryl Crow or the soundtrack from the Crying Game), and the breeze from open windows cooled our skin because there was no AC. We went from the bright morning sunshine into the dark, cool theater at 10 am, only to emerge before noon from dark, snowy, depressed Sweden back into the Santa Monica sunshine, complete with rollerskaters and palm trees. Inevitably, we were too stunned by both the film and the shocking transition to say much, and we relied on the sunshine, coffee and trusted company to warm us again, week after week.
I saw Emily for the first time in decades a few months ago, as I travelled through her town for a few days; we scheduled a time to meet for sushi. The last time I'd seen her, she was living in Germany and I was travelling through; we shared walks along the Isar and gluhwein in the Christmas markets, talking about art and creativity and boyfriends and future prospects. Meeting up more than 20 years later, despite the many, many events in the interim, it was clear not a thing had changed between us. She spoke of art and earning a living and family and her future, seemingly without filter. The visit was too brief, and seeing Emily reminded me to reach out to Vera, to complete our trio.
When I saw Vera last week near New York City for the first time in over 20 years, 31 years since we graduated, we immediately, as if without any lapse, resumed the deep and true levels of discussion on any topic, design-related or personal. We took great joy in wandering Manhattan, seeing museums, old and new architecture and open spaces, and eating good food, while the conversations went on and on. She noted how short our time at UCLA was, how intensive, how life-changing, how immersed in the present we’d been each day. Vera reminded me that she'd completed the program early. I'd been not far behind her; as poor grad students, we needed to get back to work. Afterwards, she and her husband were bound for Miami where he'd been offered a teaching position, and I would find out a couple months after leaving LA that I was returning to Boston. We were close enough that I visited them twice in Miami, and we spent time together when she came to Boston. Over time, we lost touch, for about twenty years.
During the visit, Vera and my conversations dove into our parts, our futures, our evolution as people, and what it all meant to us. As with Emily, there is something about a shared history that removes the need for polite superficiality; we got right into it from the moment we met again, as if we were still on campus. We talked about the midlife and how our circumstances and perspectives were rapidly changing. Knowing we were missing a piece, we Zoomed with Emily. The energy and content of the conversation brought us instantly back to our time together under the jacaranda trees on campus. It felt so very good to reoccupy a corner of a grad student persona again, complete with deep curiosity and hunger for ideas and exchange, so much so that the three of us have reconstituted a regular time for a virtual salon.
In hindsight, I'm learning that, in our long lives, we go through different stages. In those stages, if we are lucky, we meet people who change us, move us, teach us, see us, understand us in a rare way, share a common outlook and interests, share values, feel the way we feel - and we may lose them. We may lose them to geography, to a focus on career or family or both, to diverging interests, or all of the above. We may lose them for short times counted in single-digit years, or longer times counted in decades, or sometimes forever. If we are really, really fortunate, they are around for the duration or sometimes we get those we lost back. It seems to be a trend in this time of midlife, to regain friends that had been lost to climbing the ladder or childraising or parental care or whatever distraction, either mine or theirs or both. Midlife is a time when loss grows across a larger portion of the landscape, too - deaths of elder loved ones and even peers, along with the gradual decline of our health or joints or mobility and hopefully not the loss of our minds. Loss can be a focusing mechanism, I'm finding, allowing us to recherish those that mean so much to us.
Few things in life feed our souls like friendship. Few people understand us as well as our friends. Few people touch my soul and thirst for knowledge like Vera and Emily, or exemplify strength and courage in my mind as deeply, and yet I am also blessed to have so many friends that do - from college, from high school, from work, from other shared experiences like trips or retreats. Connection is a basic human need, and my connection to them is precious and one I will invest in. The chance encounters with a random human that, over time, lead to profound understanding is nothing short of a miracle, especially if it lasts into midlife and beyond.
Reconnecting with friends is an everyday transcendence.
