On finding your people

The curative powers of staying put

I moved around a lot as a child. I learned to be the perpetual new kid, making new friends, telling my story over and over again. I did not have the word for it then, but I felt rootless. I did not have a cell phone with which to stay in touch. Letters, sure, but little kids don’t write letters, do they?

I am lucky that I had a loving family. I had the basics that too many people around this globe lack: a home, food, running water, safety. And starting over in so many places gave me some super powers, made me unafraid of exploring new places.

But it also took away what my son is now receiving like a secret gift he will unwrap later: a block of friends, a cohort in school, people he’ll know his whole life.

In high school, I got to stay in one place. One school. A suburb of San Francisco in the 1980s.

Because we stayed, I met the people I still know today. I met the science nerds and theater geeks and poetry writers. Because we stayed, we had time for Dungeons and Dragons. For sleepovers. Scavenger hunts with teams in cars, taunting each other over CB radios, because geeks had those. Fighting and flirting. Hours on the phone, with second lines and call waiting. Watching The Princess Bride one million times. Sipping mochas at Café Italiano on Main Street. Listening to REM, The Cure, The Smiths, Depêche Mode, Prince, New Order, and, one of us, Madonna, whom we mocked without mercy because she was so mainstream. Because we stayed, I spent weekends with girlfriends hunting for vintage dresses on Haight Street in San Francisco and flipping through records on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley—Women’s Railroad Blues, Sarah Vaughan: the Columbia Years, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. Because we stayed, we had time to roam the open space outside of town, with hills that looked like unfurled bolts of yellow velvet from far away. Up close it was slippery straw, dried up by summer, shaded by valley oak trees. The Dead Poets Society enchanted us so much that we found a cave in that open space where we lit candles and read poetry to each other, taking ourselves seriously one moment, cracking each other up the next.

Thirty years later we would find this cave on an outing before a high school reunion. Inside, we would crouch and remember how big it felt. We would talk about our lives and our kids. I would remember myself with long, straight blond hair, ready for the world and how big it felt, the cool of the cave floor on my bare legs, the glow of candle light, unaware of the mix of darkness and light that lay ahead. The darkness and light we would walk each other through.