Guest Blogger #7
We had a shaky day yesterday, learning in retrospect that my daughter nearly died from a bad reaction to a prescription medication. Her platelets went wacky, and after suffering from migraines, blurred vision and a rash of unexplained bruises, she went to the doctor and discovered she was just in time. She was forming multiple blood clots. If she'd waited a few more days...well. The good thing, of course, is that she's fine now, if a little groggy, being attended to by friends and at home, and the situation has been arrested. Still. There are parts of parenthood they don't mention in the books.
On the other hand, there are joys that become pleasant surprises. One of these was watching Beth collect friends, and keep them. Having the good fortune (I would say, anyway) of living in the same neighborhood from preschool through high school graduation, she started these friendships in kindergarten and it grew until there were a dozen or more kids, boys and girls, whose names we knew and whose families we were aware of and who, at any given moment, could all show up at our house with their cell phones ringing.
We called them her Scooby gang (or she did, or they did, and we picked it up), a support group for growing up. It was fluid; there could be four or 14, and there was no focal point: It wasn't Beth's group, or Mallory's group or Mitchell's. Most of them were musicians, but not all. And in the midst of this were discrete relationships, a few romantic but mostly not. They did proms together, and occasionally they'd plan a big, elaborate dinner at somebody's house. They'd all dress up and buy food and cook it, laugh and dance and clean up and they always came home. I miss these guys. They weren't a clique; they were just good kids from good families, having a good time together.
And then they graduated. It was a diaspora; they were all smart and they had their dreams, and they traveled far and wide away from Mukilteo, to San Francisco and Boston and Montana and Missouri and New York. And as junior year approaches, some of them are heading abroad for a year. But they have it easier than my generation; they have E-mail and digital cameras, and someday they'll have one hell of a party again.
No wonder so many of them love "The Big Chill," a film made a year or so before they were born. It's a cinematic friendship.
Cindy has been around since near the beginning. I met her when she was 8, in the third grade with Beth, and she's never left. She and Beth were in the same gifted program for three years, and then when they went to their separate middle schools they belonged to the same youth orchestra, so it was a seamless relationship by the time high school came around.
They're different, of course. Beth tends to be more emotional, Cindy more cerebral. Beth is Northern European, red-haided and pale; Cindy is Asian-American (her mother is from Thailand). And of all of Beth's friends, Cindy is the one I want to watch the most. I have absolutely no idea where she'll end up, but I have a feeling it's going to be very interesting.
Cindy attends Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Ivy Leagueville. I asked several of Beth's friends to guest blog, and Cindy's up first. Which is fitting; the Scooby gang will disperse and grow distant, perhaps, but 20 years from now I expect Cindy will still be around here somewhere, probably correcting my grammar, pushing my politics, being smarter than everybody else, and being my daughter's friend. Which is a joy, as I said, and always will be.
Clicking Our Heels
By Cindy Beavon
Beth won’t be coming home this summer. Maybe Chuck told you already.
Our gang from high school gets together when we’re back in Mukilteo from college, and sometimes we get together outside of Mukilteo. Beth came to visit Denny in Boston and me in Providence over her Spring Break
 and Lucas went to visit her recently. Lucas came back from Denton on June 6, my birthday, so he went straight from the airport to dinner with the rest of the gang.
We were all sitting around a table. “So, Lucas, tell us all about your trip –- how is Texas, how is Beth doing?”
He said something about Dallas/Denton being boring because it was too hot to do anything outside and people ate a lot.
Then there was something different in his voice and he said, “Well, you know, Beth is like...she’s grown up a lot and seems really settled. She works a lot and has her boyfriend and is like... a grownup.”
Maybe looks of surprise went around the table, or maybe there was some silence immediately after he spoke as if such news meant that she had betrayed us, that she had gone and grown up behind our backs.
Even though I was celebrating my 20th birthday and Robert’s 21st was around the corner, we were continually reassembling ourselves for one reason –- we remembered our friendships from high school. That act of remembering a past so lovely compels us continuously back to each other. The more distance I feel between myself and the summer retreats at Denny’s beach cabin and Mr. Costello’s English class, the more those times seem like impossibly happy fantasies, and so we must reconvene to verify to each other that, not too long ago, we actually were impossibly happy together, that it wasn’t a group hallucination.
When we get together without Beth in Washington, are we remembering for her? Does her willingness to remain in Texas signify her abandonment of memories the rest of us still consider worth rediscovering?
I remember feeling startled by how up front Lucas was expressing his disappointment in Beth’s decision to leave our Neverland, but not at all astonished that Beth, in her new home, would seem old.
The funny thing is, a week later, I’m on the phone with her and I ask:
“How was Lucas’s visit?”
There’s a pause that I sense is her figuring how to articulate something difficult. Either that or she’s distracted by a mirror and is struggling to hold her cell phone while applying mascara and brushing her hair.
“...Lucas seemed so... young. I feel like I needed him here in just this emotional or nostalgic way, and now that that’s over I started thinking that something else was over... like my childhood... but then I thought to myself, who am I? Chuck Sigars? Bah! No.”
Haha. We laughed.
For young people, I think our behavior towards others is dictated by the depth in which we perceive our future. Now stick with me here.
How frequently we talk to our parents, the types of jobs we take, how good we are about keeping up with old friends, our commitment to boyfriends or girlfriends -– it’s all determined by what we see giving us the most utility in the future, and that future, if you’re young, is as varied as it is tenuously understood.
When Lucas went to visit Beth, both had to perform the act of remembering the other in order to make an assessment about how each had changed, if at all. I could speculate that when Beth saw Lucas again, the Beth that remembered him was now a house payment-maker, full time studio instructor, and degree/career-focused Beth. Her perception of her future is as an adult professional, and that’s the paradigm of her life, even when looking retrospectively. And maybe Lucas thought Beth seemed much older because his way of remembering her is not so different from his way a couple years ago, with a longish, academically dynamic future that would always involve outdoor adventures.
But really, I guess I can only speak for myself. How do I remember?
My first winter back from Brown, I avoided seeing my high school friends. I felt that seeing everyone would be like dismissing my accomplishments of overcoming homesickness and making new friends. Now, I think that kind of behavior wasn’t about “moving on,” and instead indicative of a young person having difficulty managing life on both sides of the country with two sets of people.
The benefit of living what feels like an almost double life is how broad a perspective I eventually end up feeling after meeting so many diverse people doing so many meaningful things. Its effect on the way I remember the past as a vehicle to move forward is that (maybe surprisingly to some) I try to understand the sacrifices my parents have made for me, and their parents before them, and so on. This perspective feels very far-reaching in that it’s not about my GPA, the career after my GPA, or even my family after that; it’s about being mindful of all the people who have helped me become who I am. That infinitely regressive series of actions is so good to remember when prioritizing future plans because it encourages me to be considerate and good to the people I love and depend on the most.
When I first went to college, and saw my classmates starting online consultant companies, publishing critiques of James Joyce’s work, and feeding starving children in Africa, I thought frantically to myself, “I must immediately find something to do that will save the world, impress my professors and get me into law school!” But there’s so much to do, there’s so many people that need help and so many books to read that it’s impossible to just go and succeed without knowing where I’m going and why.
Writing, calling, or visiting my friends is, I think, a way to respect them, and it’s the least I can do in thanking them for all they have helped me with to become the person I am now.
And studying intensive Thai language (in Madison, WI, where I am now) in order to spend more time in Thailand with my mom’s family is one of the most rewarding experiences of my life because it reminds me of all my mom has sacrificed for her only child. I feel that I’m doing something to return the compassion so many have shown me, directly or indirectly.
So Beth, Lucas, Mitchell, Robert, Denny, Mallory, Ken, and Shala didn’t seem any older, younger, smarter, kinder, happier, or more focused when I saw them all again last month. To me, they felt more important.
2:26:22 AM 
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