On community and connection
and a window to chance gatherings
Two weeks in a row of tenuous connection to random people is reminding me of how much I like it and how necessary it is in my life.
My spouse Janyce and I are sitting on the couch with our laptops in our dark living room, a steady, high-pitched sound of August insects—crickets and cicadas— are wafting in through the open window.
“Wow, I hope she is okay,” I say, reading my email.
“What’s up?” says Janyce.
“Suleika sent a very brief message to her subscribers saying she misses her community so badly, but she’s not back yet for reasons she’s not quite ready to write about.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” says Janyce.
“I know,” I say.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and we spent the morning on an easy five-mile hike around Ponkapoag Pond at Blue Hills, the first one of our new AMC membership. At 9:10 am we pulled into the parking lot as a small group of people were converging together beside the golf course, all of them middle-aged or older, outfitted in hiking pants and flat packs that clung to their backs neatly between their shoulder blades. They were forming an impromptu circle around the gray-bearded man holding a clipboard. I felt right away that I wasn’t wearing the correct uniform for this event, walking towards them in my purple spandex and not carrying a water bottle. But it didn’t matter because this first hike was really more of a long nature walk.
We talked easily with the others as we ambled the trails, sometimes it was me and Janyce together with another person, other times it was just one of us alone or paired up with someone else, all of us shifting spots organically as we walked as an amorphous group. A cool mugginess hung in the air above the towering Joe Pye weed at the pond’s edge, bushy with hazy mauve tops, a fuzzy background to the bright stalks of lilting goldenrod. Across the pond, the low-lying brush was just starting to turn autumn hues of red and orange. The sixteen of us traversed the gravel and rooted paths at a pace comfortable enough for engaging in insignificant chatter, things like the antics of cats, other hiking trails in neighboring towns, and our collective memories of covid isolation. When it was all over, we exchanged numbers on our cellphones and vowed to meet again at the next one in a week or two.
“Thanks for this,” I said to Janyce, on our way back to the car. “Thanks for signing us up.”
Last weekend, I decided that we should leave our dog behind for a two-night stay at a place I hastily booked on Airbnb at the last minute, to quell the feeling that I wasn’t making the most of the summer. We paid too much money for a shabby room in an old Victorian Inn, with chipped painted windows that looked out onto the street below but also with a view of the sky from the third floor. It was the kind of old-school bed and breakfast where you come downstairs at a prescribed time to eat eggs and baked goods, drink coffee out of small flowered teacups, and make polite conversation with strangers across the table. We spent a beautiful sunny morning lingering at the table with a couple from Germany, making small talk about the summer’s weather, Harley Davidson motorcycles, local accents, and finding the right words to describe something. Basically nothing of importance but yet the kind of warm human connection that reminds you that you belong to other people in significant ways.
Two weeks in a row of tenuous connection to random people is reminding me of how much I like it and how necessary it is in my life. It’s a different experience than being with longtime friends, or family, or work colleagues. In a way, it’s a little like this poem I found by Rachel Sherwood, a poem to me about the tension between perspectives that can define something with significance or not at all. In other words, the power is all in the framing.
Windows by Rachel Sherwood From this height the sunset spans the whole world before me: houses and trees are shadows neon flares between them like sudden fire the freeways run, always strangely vacant with riderless cars empty air the windows up here refract the blue slate and rose light making the hills on the horizon collide with ideas of Sussex, piedmont or the cold clear wind of the Abruzzi but that is never what is out there. At home, the lamp curls its aurora into the corners of the room and out the windows squares, rectangles of light stake out a territory on the ragged lawn. In the center of things between the pressing of the window and air — a small space — there is a meeting that defines nothing, everything.