music: Nickel Creek- Nickel Creek
Real friendship is a remarkable thing. This weekend was a celebration of friendship of the highest order. Reuben and Mara were married this weekend; they have been best friends since ninth grade. Theirs is a friendship that has held strong across distance and time, has transcended the various phases of life through which each has passed, and has culminated in them becoming family. Gathered this weekend were their family, as well as friends from present and past (we friends being a family of sorts in our own right), to celebrate this remarkable friendship that has become a marriage.
A union between two people from the same place in the world and with so much common history is a special thing for the community to which they belong. The world seems a little more welcome and full, a little more familiar and comfortable. The fact that the wedding was held in Milwaukee was an important piece of the picture, and I was glad to come back here and reconnect with that part of me which grew here alongside Reuben, Mara, and the others with whom I shared my childhood. It would not really be held anywhere else, of cousre, but the city in which we grew up together provided that context appropriate to us gathering and celebrating something that started right here so many years back. There is a sense of deep history in this place for a lot of us who were gathered this weekend. Milwaukee itself lended meaning to the celebration through the ties that we all have to this place. It is easy to forget where one comes from if one no longer lives there and is not surrounded with people from there. It is easy to lose track of my own history and to have a chance to come back to Milwaukee this weekend and reunite with so many friends and celebrate the next chapter in this community was a necessary.
One of the perks of having one of your oldest friends get married to his high school sweetheart is that our group of friends would reunite in order to celebrate the occasion. As time has gone on and we have spread out around the country, we have had less and less opportunity to see each other. Sometimes we would meet up in smaller numbers, more frequently we would continue the back-and-forth that started in high school electronically. Rare is the occasion that we all find ourselves in the same place at the same time, and thanks to an occasion such as the one this weekend, we all had an opportunity to spend some good time with each other and celebrate our own friendships which are still very much alive, even after significant time spent apart. I feel especially blessed to know these people and be a part of such a wonderful group of friends, which has expanded over the years to include people I have only met through my friends from grade school and high school. There were Reuben’s friends from camp (Mara being one of them, now that I think about it) that did not go to high school with me, but still have become my friends. There are friends that Reuben made in college that have become my friends. And, of course, there are the friends I made in grade school and high school that I don’t have the opportunity to see all that often. That we all could come together this weekend to celebrate one of our friends’ most potent and wonderful rites of passage was a special thing, something I cherish.
There is something to be said for my relationship with these people here that is fundamentally different from the relationships with people I’ve met and value as friends since moving from Milwaukee. While my friends here are just as valued as my friends elsewhere, I feel a certain affinity for people with whom I grew up, whose families I know, with whom I have shared a much more deep sampling of my life. I spent some quality time talking with some people this weekend that I haven’t seen since high school, and haven’t talked to in even longer, but nevertheless found a certian level of comfort and familiarity that can only come from growing up together. Coupled with that was the task of bridging the past several years, realizing where we have been respectively since then, and relating on how we’ve grown and changed. And that there is still much of that same person that I knew and who knew me when we were kids. In this sense, the wedding was a re-union with many aspects of many of our shared past that have morphed and developed into something that is completely viable here and now, in the present.
This last point might be the centerpiece of Reuben and Mara’s marriage. As we grew up with them, they grew up with each other, and as such have a deep and strong history. I know that the roots they they share will serve as the foundation for a strong and lasting union and the basis from which they will spend the rest of their lives together, perpetuating this community of friendship and love well into the future.
This weekend of connection and re-union with so many good people from long-neglected corners of my life is a shift from my recent life’s practices and activities. I have been living somewhat of a monastic life in Boston as of late, occupied with the intellectual and the institutional. It is supremely ironic that I will be researching and writing a paper on solitude for that world for the rest of the week.
Posted by davidtaus at December 22, 2003 11:43 PM