beginning anew

After considerable wrangling with my parents and enough calls to New York's COVID-19 hotline to stress-test their surge capacity, I managed to host a small group of friends in upstate NY for the holidays. Multiple tests, long quarantine periods, etc. - while you are owed no proof of safety, no evidence of risk mitigation, I provide it nonetheless. The visit offered lovely escape, a respite from a year where nothing at all has felt normal (except for the violently mundane integration of the term 'new normal' into our daily lexicon) and intimacy has been deemed - often by governmental decree - forbidden.

As I have found is so often the case when spending time with people with whom you have nothing new left to discuss, I learned much over these past days. I learned about the linguistic skills of British explorers of yesteryear from Henry's remarkably dense tome, how satisfying the sharp crack of rock plunging through ice can be from Carlo's mirth at doing just that, and from so-patient M, how internal change can leave you feeling alienated from those who, in the past, you turned to for reprieve from lonely isolation. And I reaffirmed old lessons, grateful for reminders that hiking in the dark is to hike without pretension or burden and that a formerly potent hot sauce never fully forgets who it once was.

Most of all, however, I learned that during drives to the train station - whether as passenger or driver - one would do well to be truly present (not faux present, where your iPhone is pocketed but your attention intertwined in the passing trees, but present in a more honest, expansive sense) for the last ten minutes of the journey. The last ten minutes are where truths and sentiments that have stayed buttoned up over the past weeks, loosened by roaring fire, coaxed to the edge by freely shared substance, are finally allowed release. I'm not sure what does it. Maybe I and my self-selected group of friends have a deep affinity for public transit that weakens our inhibitions and heightens our (already quite high) capacity for vulnerability as we draw near. Perhaps the holiday season simply elicits an emotional spontaneity that, by coincidence, manifested with a statistically shocking regularity at the tail end of the Kingston-Rhinecliffe bridge. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that it was a mix of the open-concept floor plan in my parents' home - which, almost by design, renders one-on-one conversations nearly impossible in a group setting - and the looming harbinger of departure, announced in ever-monotonous urgency by the human-but-not-human voice trapped within Apple Maps, that did it.

What prompts the slackening of social contours, the tumbling of walls upon which relationships and friendships and memory have been built and foundationally rest? There's a rich vein there but I'm not particularly interested in its indulgence right now. I'm more intrigued by the secondary, in what comes once a crack has been poked through solidity and thoughts kept inside suddenly flow forth into the vast expanse of a 2004 Volvo XC-70 on its last legs. Beyond what you would expect - petty complaints about our other co-habitants, opinions just a smidge too controversial for the wider group, complaints about the food that, not unlike the plum wine that seemed so delectable in the store, simply could not be swallowed - emerged something rich and temporary, a fragile comfort with the self that felt distinctly, immediately fleeting.

Letting a thought sit inside you for a long while before releasing it renders it more personal. It's a whole process: you turn it over in your head multiple times, assigning new and sometimes different meaning each cycle, all the while gently cajoling yourself to the precipice of its transformation into words, the transformation that will strip you of total ownership by plunging it into a harsh world where it can be countered, critiqued, undermined, seized by someone else as their own etc. To keep it in yourself is to attach it to yourself. A casual thought - say, a spontaneous mid-film assessment that "hey, Wedding Crashers still holds up" - is a very different concept than that thought had but held, calcified and used as an internal tool for self-examination ('what does it say about me that I still find Wedding Crashers charming?') before its eventual and inevitable release as a statement much more personal than it originated ('has your taste in film evolved over the past decade? Mine certainly hasn't.') I could tell that most of what was shared during the last few minutes of these drives were thoughts that had been through the mental equivalent of a washer machine, turned over and over and over until they were clean enough to be worn out of the house.

My friends told me of spaces that used to feel safe that no longer do, of reasons for leaving that were not what they had told the others, of growth they felt uniquely and suddenly capable of and how frustrated they were to find themselves alone when what they needed most was solidarity. The train station is on the other side of the Hudson River from my house, a side that lends itself much more readily to agricultural pursuits, so there was a correspondence here; just as dense woodland gave way to rolling hills and open fields, entirely lacking in pretense, so too emerged crammed-away complaints and close-held truths, lifted into air. There were topics discussed between men during these final drives that men of my age struggle to share - dietary restrictions lamented, bodily insecurities revealed. There were conversations that preceded farewells that felt positively joyful (a rare thing in a farewell); others, in contrast, manifested in goodbyes without affection and offers to wait at the platform, together, not extended. But the outcome of honesty, at its purest, can only be more honesty. I tried to return my friends the same plainness they delivered unto me.

After my friends had all gone, it was my turn to be passenger. The roles flipped, I sat in my parents' Volvo (much newer, with all those state-of-the-art perks like functional brakes) as my mother drove me to the train that would bring me home to Washington. I was much more aware, without the steering wheel between my hands, of distance traveled and distance left to go. It was she who spoke, mixing old truths with new ones, asking more of me, asking me (without actually asking) whether I could ask more from myself and what the cost of doing so would be. These are conversations I've had before, back-and-forths where I could play both parts. But there is something about those final ten minutes of a drive to a train station that lends itself to things heard many times being heard for the first time.

You should write more, she said. To not would be a waste.

Those last ten minutes of a drive to the train station are not unlike a wintry pond coated with the thinnest veneer of ice or an extra beverage dispensed from a vending machine - they possess, in themselves, a small sanctity. In response, one can be secular or observant; in a rare turn from my agnostic leanings, I choose observance. Here, for as long as I can stomach it, I'll try not to waste.