Enduring Friends

My older sister, Linda, sat in the San Francisco Airport, reminiscing about her visit and waiting for her flight home to Austria, where this fifth-generation Northern Californian has lived for some 40 years. Yet she annually finds her way home to the San Francisco Bay Area where we grew up together, two sets of twins and my older sister, who always said she didn’t need a twin. She also finds a sense of home in Carmel, where we grew up going to visit Grandma, in her yellow Murphy-built cottage just blocks from the sea—a house that, somehow, has moved among three generations and now belongs to us.

On this visit, Linda visited friends in Los Angeles and then came to Carmel for a week of sister time—of wandering and shopping and sipping wine while counting sheep in the coastal lagoon, and talking. . .about anything and nothing, all of which is something—and escorting her handsome Austrian husband and his camera along the Seventeen-Mile Drive and on down the coast to Big Sur.

After a week by the sea, Linda went inland to spend time with my twin sister, and then a younger brother who later joined her in Jackson Hole and Bozeman for time with his twin brother.

My older sister works hard to schedule a trip that includes some measure of time with each of her siblings, working around our schedules to spend even a moment listening until we feel heard, looking into our eyes, and holding the gaze until we feel seen.

This time, her annual trip culminated with her high-school class reunion. A gathering of close friends and acquaintances and people she never met or can’t remember, 50 years after they all tossed their mortarboards into the sky. Among the classmates who didn’t show up from whatever distance, conflict, or level of disinterest kept them away, 28 classmates never will again. Linda said she studied the photo montage of those who have died, an assembly of senior portraits, making it seem as if all had died young, thus generating a sense of sadness and some level of disbelief. What 18-year-old ever imagined they’d make the poster before age 30, 40, 50, 60?

My older sister said people had changed, but mostly in appearance. Hair had gone silver, platinum, white or, actually, had gone. Some shoulders were rounded, paunches protruded—even the cheerleaders, except for that one, who looked like graduation was last Wednesday. Linda reintroduced two men who had been buddies in high school but looked at each other with a gaze of unfamiliarity as if they hadn’t heard her. She later learned, they hadn’t.

Voices were similar, some softer, some louder. As the evening wore on, and a pairing of wine and reminiscences rewove connections, time slipped away, and guests felt themselves classmates once again.

My sister, older by only two years, never ages in my eyes. I’ve seen her slip on glasses to read the fine print, but that’s the only hint. Her sky-blue eyes remain bright, her skin, soft and unlined. Her platinum blonde hair is swept into sophistication. She stands into her stature, the carriage of the world-famous opera singer she is. You can hear it in the strength and timbre of her voice.

Linda’s like that one cheerleader and the PE teacher who dropped in, women who may have aged but never got old.

During high school reunions, all that has transpired between then and now makes us interesting to one another, but it isn’t what connects us. While we start the conversation with “How have you been?” our chats typically focus more on the distant past and the immediate present than on what transpired in between, which led us all to now. We reminisce, reforging bonds, feeling ourselves part of something formative that spanned just four years so long ago, a coming-of-age experience, which created a special kind of tie that binds us, no matter how many years have slipped by and what happened along the way.