The Best Friends Are the Ones We Can Laugh and Sing With

And talk with. Talking is good, too.

Rafael and I have not gone on many vacations in recent years — even before covid. Why are we so vacation-challenged? Time and money haven’t always lined up at the right times. We’ve spent time visiting Rafael’s elderly mother and his brother Danny, who had Down Syndrome and needed extra tending to. Mostly, we haven’t given ourselves permission to take time off.

That made my recent ten days with old friends in upstate New York and Canada all the more special. Ten days isn’t much, but it was so soul-nourishing that it felt like a much longer stretch.

Some vacations involve seeing lots of sights. This one was more about hanging out, something most of us don’t do enough as adults.

I did get in a few sights and events, like Niagara Falls, which I’d never seen, and the Seneca Nation’s annual Powwow, a festival of mesmerizing dance and music that I wish I could have seen more of.

It was an unexpected treat to pop over to Niagara Falls from an old family friend’s cottage on Lake Erie. Though I probably should have seen it before I saw Iguazu.

It was wonderful to experience both of these. Still, connecting with old friends was satisfying on a deep level that no sights or events can match.

These included a close group of high school friends from Urbana, Illinois — one of whom I’ve known since I was six. Knowing how rare these kinds of connections are makes our time together all the more precious. The fact that we still all get along so well says something about our ability to pick friends at a young age.

It may also say something about the fact that we share a unique background, one that combines Midwestern straightforwardness with the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of a university town — which comes with its benefits and drawbacks. None of us are what you’d call mainstream; if we’re not nerds, we’re certainly nerd-adjacent, and a couple of us have been accused of being hippies (not a bad thing to be).

Like us, the environment we grew up in was not mainstream. We had access to all kinds of books, movies, concerts, ideas. It was a rich environment with a wonderful built-in community. And it could make you feel less than adequate. A few years ago, Rafael and I met up with an elementary school classmate of my sister’s who now lives in LA; he told me that it wasn’t till he moved away from Urbana that he realized he wasn’t actually dumb. It was even easier to feel that way at my alternative high school, a public but exclusive “lab school” owned by the university that boasted a champion chess team and students who got 800s on both parts of the SATs (I was not one of those!).

Some of my Urbana friends are professors, teaching subjects like biology and music theory. Out of the seven who meet up regularly, only two of us don’t have PhDs.

Yet it’s the most comfortable, down-to-earth group of people you could hope to encounter — at least, that’s how it feels to us. As one friend said after this latest visit, “I always feel really at home with this group.” Maybe that’s natural when you’ve been friends for so long. Maybe it has to do with growing up together in a somewhat unusual town — although the friends’ spouses didn’t, yet they all fit in perfectly too. Maybe we’re just lucky.

I can’t say exactly what the secret sauce is, but we do seem to have similar senses of humor, judging by how much we laughed on this trip. After ten days of seeing so many people, many of the details of the visit escape me — but I know that it’s been a while since I laughed so much for so many days.

What was so funny? Who can remember!

I’ve shared many laughs with other friends too, of course, and I often judge gatherings by how much laughter there is. Add some guitar playing and singing, especially if it’s Beatles songs, and I’ve basically attained a nirvana that only hiking and dancing can compete with.

How lucky, then, that many of my friends are musical. In fact, they’re much more musical than I am, but I get to enjoy the benefits. Check out a friend playing a Beatles song while another shouts out the chords he should play — yes, he’s a musical whiz:

Although the main course of this trip was the visit with my high school friends, the appetizer and dessert featured two other outstanding friend connections.

The first, also from Illinois, was a colleague of my father’s and a family friend whom I hadn’t seen since the late 1970s but have been in touch with over Facebook and email. She has exactly the down-to-earth quality combined with intellectual curiosity that would make her fit right in with the high school group, and although I hadn’t seen her for so long I immediately felt very comfortable with her. That visit was a delight and a lovely way to start the trip, which ended with a rural sojourn with a dear California friend and his wife who now own 10 wooded acres in upstate New York. Sadly, I got sick after a day with them (so far, it looks like it’s not covid!), but that meant we had more hanging out and talking time — a marvelous way to reconnect in person with an old friend. Have I mentioned that we don’t do enough hanging out in our modern adult lives?

That final visit included a dinner in a co-housing community my friends had lived in for a while — as if the trip didn’t already have me thinking about community even more than I usually do. If you’ve been reading Flower Child, you know that’s a theme of mine.

In the co-housing community garden with plenty of solar panels in the background.

While I don’t think co-housing is quite for me, Rafael and I have dreamed for years about creating something along those lines. If the Bay Area weren’t so expensive, our friends could buy houses on the same block — which some people I know did when it was still affordable. Now, it would take winning a large lottery.

So, what do we do? I don’t have the answer for how to create the kind of community I want, but this trip provided an inspiring reminder of what it could feel like. What I do know, for now, is that I want more of that. So if I invite you to a super-casual hangout, please consider coming over. The R&R Spa awaits. And if you have any ideas for how to create more community and hanging-out time, let me know in the comments!