You People, my people

I don't tend to think of myself as the kind of person who travels in a pack. I've never been on a sports team, I wouldn't dream of joining a sorority, I'm not even in any clubs or organizations where I might be tempted to sport a button proclaiming 'I heart something,' whatever that something (alpacas, Shakespeare, bungee jumping) might be.

But there is one pack that I somehow have managed to join. We don't have matching sweatshirts or secret handshakes, we've never charged ourselves dues and we wouldn't dream of anything so crass as a membership card, and yet our bond to one another is as tightly wound as any society of women might hope to be. I'm talking about my girls, otherwise known as You People, the Wickeds, the Old Ladies (and their Babies). Together, we're six women who were English majors at the College of Wooster in Ohio in the late nineties. And together we were, for all of last weekend, for the first time since my wedding in 2005.

Ask each one of us how the six of us became the six of us and you are likely to get six different answers. I can say that it didn't happen until the senior year of five of us (junior year for the baby in our group) and that it was some combination of coming back from semesters abroad in Britain, three of us in one dorm and three of us in another, working on the staff of the student newspaper, and studying English literature. But the only thing on that list shared by all six of us is the final item. But somehow, that was enough, and without ever setting out to make it so, we were a group, sharing everything from meals to heartaches to late night walks through a slumbering campus.

It would be tempting to stay stuck there, remembering how we were when we lived lives incredibly similar. For roughly nine months, we were never further than a mile from one another, attending the same classes, writing papers on the same topics, surrounded by the same 1,600 people, seeing the leaves on the same trees turn from green to gold to brown to green. It could have ended there, a precious college memory that springs to mind now and then, punctuated by the thought of 'whatever happened to?' I've certainly had other female friendships that faded once time and place moved on, women I've continued to care for in an abstract way, without any of the tangibles that make a friendship a living, breathing part of your daily life.

But You People hasn't faded. I won't claim we're as tight as we were in our college bubble, but thanks to the Internet, to email, to phone calls, to gatherings, to tenacity, we've managed to continue to make each other's existence a real, solid thing in each of our lives. Within months of graduation, we had scattered across the entire country, a perpetual motion that, 12 years on, has continued to bounce us closer and further apart geographically as we chase after our degrees and jobs and lovers. We form cliques within our cliques, drawing close to the friend or friends who lives nearest, or understands the current pain of graduate school, or is least likely to judge us when a love turns sour, or golden.

Collectively, we keep tabs on each other, sending out flurries of group emails every few weeks or months. Some times, the messages are deeply personal, revealing a struggle or an illness or a frustration that propels the rest of us into comfort mode, offering responses laden with advice and support. We'll also write of what books we're reading, or politicians we're following, or vacations we're taking. Better still, we'll write of the more mundane details, the silly thing someone said at work that morning or the soap our dog decided was a doggy treat or our disbelief that a favorite television show's final episode last night was such crap.

When we're lucky, when we're really, really lucky, we find a way to see one another in person. It happens in groups of two or threes probably a few times a year. A gathering of all six of us is something to be planned months in advance, circled in red three times on the calendar, and guarded with ferocity against the many obstacles in its way. We've had four weddings, and I think three separate weekends together, counting last week at a home in Pittsburgh. And one of those, a trip to Mammoth Caves in Kentucky when we were still in our early 20s, is generally regarded as a near disaster, although we can still all belly laugh when we recall the quote list we kept of our comments that weekend.

Our lives keep changing, and so our friendship will keep changing. We may be a group, but we aren't carbon copies of one another. We are lesbian and straight, married and single, mothers and sworn never-mothers. Despite our identical undergraduate degrees, we've gone on to very different careers. We range from deep Christian faith to atheist, and tend to be liberal, although we embrace a broad spectrum of ideas of what being a liberal means. We get angry with each other, hurt by one another, laugh at and with one another. But most of all -- and this is why we've survived so many incarnations of ourselves -- we love each other.

Love. It's an easy word to bat around yet an incredibly difficult emotion to truly experience. Love is not a word I use lightly. There may be five other answers as to why we are all still friends, but I'll take this one. The girls might call me sappy for coming to this conclusion, but then, long ago, they dubbed me 'Little Happy One', so they probably won't be that surprised. It's love for them that makes me want to know what's happening in their lives, to care whether they are travelling to Africa or quitting their job or trying for a baby or hoping to get a date. It's love from them that has helped me to survive family squabbles, loneliness 4,000 miles away and my own fears of becoming a mother. They may not have always been at my side to squeeze my hand or give me that hug I so desperately needed, but sometimes, knowing that they would if they could is actually enough. I won't ever wear a button that proclaims 'I heart You People', but I do wear an imaginary one, secretly, pinned somewhere inside, close to my real heart.

Have a nice day, you guys

As Wil and I have made the rounds of American stores, shopping for everything from toilet paper to sandals, I’ve been struck by how often store employees greet us. Everyone wants to know how we’re doing, are we okay, having a good day, liking the weather? “Hey, you guys” they say casually, our buddies, our friends.

The same thing happens in restaurants. The waitresses and waiters all introduce themselves: “Hi, I’m Cassie, and I’ll be your server tonight.” They all seem eager to please, plying us with refills of coffee and soft drinks, often without asking. A waiter at a Don Pablos, a Mexican-style chain, seemed personally deflated when Wil declined to order a second plate of burritos, despite the fact that it was all-you-can-eat night. Or, at a grill restaurant, the waitress sadly tut-tutted when I refused the offer of a doggy bag to take home the remainder of what had been a gigantic sandwich.

Do they really care or are they just going through the motions? I can’t say for sure. With sales clerks, I think some of it is just simply a defense against boredom. Quite often they’ve been assigned to stand next to a display of sweaters near the entrance. If you had only a pile of pastel colored sweaters – two for $30! -- to keep you company all day, you’d probably be eagerly greeting any human who happened to pass within 10 feet of you. My own experience as a waitress at a Big Boy, back in college (“Hi, I’m Susan …”), involved a lot of friendly banter with strangers, and for the most part, I enjoyed it. It helped to make my shift pass more quickly.

After three years in England, where sales clerks and wait staff tended to operate clandestinely, it’s throwing me to have so many strangers so concerned again with my welfare. If I were jaded, I’d say it’s just a marketing technique – engage me in conversation and I’m less likely to walk out without buying something, or I’ll tip you more. And I’m sure that is part of it. But some of it is just simply what we Americans – at least us Midwesterners – are trained to do. We make eye contact with strangers. We say excuse me constantly. We say yes please, no thank you, and have a nice day with reckless abandon. We aren’t annoyed to find a new friend in every doorway, someone who wants us ‘guys’ to have ourselves a nice day. And thusly encouraged, we just might.

Home, or something like it

Almost three years to the day that I left Ohio, I returned. Older? Yes. Wiser? That remains to be seen.

First, a little background. I'm an Ohioan. It's the state where I was born, educated and employed. With the exception of six months spent in Scotland on a study abroad program when I was 20, I'd spent my entire life in the Buckeye State. It's not that I necessarily planned it that way, but as most of you can probably understand, life has a way of just happening. What eventually happened to me, at the age of 30, was marriage, followed within the month by a phone call informing us that my new husband's first posting with the Air Force would be at RAF Mildenhall in England. We greeted the news as any sober, mature couple would: by jumping up and down and screaming as soon as the phone had been safely cradled on its receiver.

Wil and I enjoyed our lives in Columbus, but living abroad held an irresistible appeal. The chance to travel, to try on a new lifestyle, to both listen to and produce funny accents. And for three years, we did just that. From April 19, 2006 to April 18, 2009, we lived in bonny old England. We even managed to find a house, and eventually a job for me, in the uber-English city of Cambridge. I could blather on here about how wonderful it was, but I've done quite a bit of that in my previous blog - cambridged.blogspot.com - so I'll just be succinct here and say it was a good experience.

Which brings us, loosely, up to now. To our great and enduring surprise, when Wil received the phone call telling him where his next assignment would be, the voice on the other end of the line informed him we were heading to Wright-Patterson, in Dayton, Ohio. While we had expected that sooner or later our paths might well take us back to my home state (Wil's a West Virginia boy, although he's spent his entire adult life in Ohio), it was about the last place we expected the Air Force to send us.

And so, here I am, in Dayton, Ohio. Home, but not quite. We're in southwest Ohio, more than an hour from Columbus and three hours away from my hometown in northeast Ohio. I'm still a bit dazed. I spent Palm Sunday in Belfast and Easter in Prague and now, just a few short weeks later, I'm sitting in a Caribou Coffee in a mall designed to look like a real town, located within the actual town of Beavercreek, Ohio. I went from living in a fully-furnished home, with a full-time job, walking almost everywhere I needed to go... to living in an empty apartment (until our furniture finishes its voyage across the Atlantic, we're making do with an air mattress and a card table and four chairs) to unemployment and owning, with Wil, two vehicles that are pretty much required for any journey. It's a bit of an adjustment, to say the least.

The good news? I no longer have the funny accent, but oddly, after three years of hearing English accents almost exclusively, everyone around me sounds a bit strange. And that's just the start of what's strange, even as everything feels so very familiar. If you're English and reading this, the familiar things I plan to write about in the coming months will probably end up sounding quite strange, just as my American readers will probably find the strange things I describe sounding quite familiar. Confused? Don't worry. So am I.