Natural Habitat

When looking back brings old memories and new insights.

The metaphor:

This past weekend, I visited a childhood friend. We had lunch with her friend, and it had me flashing back to how it felt being a kid with them even as I gathered fresh context. It made me feel very wise and zen, an attitude I got to test out immediately when faced with a bunch of airline delays on the journey home – or as I could say, back to my natural habitat.

The story:

My closest friends from college have a text chain called “Natural Habitat.” It’s a reference to a night in 2005, when we were sophomores and our little group was coalescing. We were doubled over laughing in a wood-panelled hallway, leaning on the walls and wiping away laugh-tears. One of us caught our breath and said, “Guys, I think this is our natural habitat!”

I’m pretty sure it was me, because I know just what I meant. I felt so at home in that moment, so like a starling who had found the other starlings, that if David Attenborough had seen us, he would’ve narrated our murmuration. “Ah!” he’d say to the Planet Earth crew. “Here is a friend group in its natural habitat!” I’m a real junkie for group cohesion. I remember feeling so in sync that it was like we’d fused together, the way the Power Rangers become one big mega-ranger for their biggest battles. It was euphoric.

“Yeah!” My friends were nodding, gasping for breath, when one added, “Whose house is this, though?” Which is a hilarious thing to say about your own natural habitat, especially because I didn’t know either. The laughter came back with a vengeance and we slid down someone else’s walls onto someone else’s floor, feeling totally at home together. We were not sober, but we weren’t wasted. We relived the moment together the next morning at brunch, and laughed so hard we cried all over again.

Debriefing over brunch was a beloved college ritual that functioned like a coda of the night before, bringing it to closure. We reviewed the highlights while seasoning our dining hall fare with ketchup. That was the best dance party! We should do it again next weekend! We filled in friends who weren’t there. After we left your room, we heard music up the hall, so we ended up in 404 – guess who we saw!

Brunch was also a time for closing any gaps in the narrative. On our small, walkable campus, it was common for a night to start in a friend’s room, then head to a friend of that friend’s frat party, then end up at a thrice-removed-friend’s group house up the street without quite knowing where you were – which is what had happened on Natural Habitat night. Brunch was where we figured out that one of our friends was a theater major, and so were the people in the wood-panelled house, which is how we’d wound up there. It felt good to click this fact into place for context, even as it had felt delicious not to know or care the night before.

I think of a hologram in moments like this, where a present conversation evokes the past. I can see the two time periods at once, faintly overlapping. I had that hologram feeling throughout this past weekend, when visiting a childhood friend also felt like visiting my childhood, moments from the weekend linking back to moments from our past.

We went to a history museum, pointing out placards with interesting facts. I loved our discussion but could also hear the echoes of our 16-year-old selves, sitting together in social studies class. We took her four-year-old son on a bus ride, purely because he likes bus rides. When we calculated how fast the opposite bus was approaching, so we could transfer and head back home, part of me was transported back to solving word problems together in high school math. Her son is earnest, sweet, and goofy, like she was as a child, and while I played dinosaurs with him on the rug, I was also reliving the dress-up I played with her in my childhood basement.

The strongest holograms came when we went out to lunch with her dad, and I kept being struck by long-buried memories, suddenly activated by the conversation. That morning, I’d gone with my friend to drop her kids at daycare, newly aware of all the wonder and exhaustion that comes with caring for children. Hours later, I watched her dad put his fork to his plate, and in my mind’s eye, I could see him using that same motion to pour pancake batter in the shape of our initials the morning after a sleepover. Thinking of this way he cared for me as a kid made me realize how many others there probably were that I hadn’t absorbed at the time. Then he made an offhand gesture that I’ve seen my friend make often, and I looked back and forth between them, suddenly realizing how much my dear friend is a composite of her parents.

He asked me about my job, and I asked him how long he’d been retired. The question came readily, in stark contrast to the decade-plus I spent riding in his car and eating at his house without asking him anything. Now, I felt overwhelmed by things I wanted to ask, making up for lost time. Like looking back on a college night out from the bright light of brunch the next morning, I could remember the vivid joy and wonder of childhood moments even as I could see an overlay of all that I’d missed at the time.

I gestured to my friend. “It’s amazing to think that we made a lifelong friendship in fourth grade,” I said to her dad. “Do you think there’s something that helped us find each other? Or did you and my parents do something on your side to set us up?”

“We did some encouraging,” he replied. “We’d have a family event, and say, do you want to see what Gwen is doing? But there was no grand plan.”

I was ready to take credit for being a friend-picking genius, but my friend chimed in skeptically. “For every good friendship I kept from that time, there’s probably another that fizzled out. Same for you, right? There are some that stuck and some that didn’t?” In other words, our relationships came from some effort, some support, and some luck. I nodded and asked my next question.

“We’ve been talking about what a thoughtful grandparent you are. I was curious if anything has changed from when you were raising your own kids? Are you struck by different parenting trends, or maybe just different kid personalities?”

Again, I’d guessed wrong on both counts: he said the biggest difference was him. “I think the experience of raising my own kids has given me perspective, and of course I’m not my grandkids’ parent, so I have a little distance, too. I know how fast the time goes, and it makes me not want to miss a moment. I’ll go to the grocery store with them if I get the chance, because I know how fast they change. But by the same token, I know nothing lasts, so I have a better sense of what’s important and what’s probably fine.”

He paused and smiled at my friend. “When my girls became teenagers, I thought we’d never do anything as a family again. I thought it was over.” I followed his gaze, seeing my friend now – almost forty, a mother of two – and a hologram of her teenage self, pulling away from her parents and towards friends like me. I pictured her closing the door to her father’s house and getting in her blue stick shift car, driving to my parent’s house and picking me up. I felt guilt for all that I didn’t see then and grateful for getting to see it now.

Most of all, I felt grateful for the effort, structure, and luck that’s kept me in touch with these totems from my past. Even now, almost two decades since we lived in the same city, they still conjure up my natural habitat.

The question: Do you have a favorite text thread title?

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