Catching Up

Some Thoughts on Returning to See Old Friends

Eight years passed between myself and Eugene mostly by accident. I left to finish school in Vermont. I did go back to Eugene one of those summers and sort of figured that I’d be able to just pop up every summer that I was back on the West coast. I graduated college in 2017 and decided to stay in Rhode Island for a year with some friends. I thought the summer after I’d be able to go back to Oregon. But no. I returned home in 2018, broke, unable to find a job that paid well enough to get me out of my mom’s house, so I stayed in California another summer and try to save up a bit. That was 2019. 

Eventually I found a job in Berkeley, a great job that paid the bills. I started working with amazing people and finally felt like I was beginning to find some community in the Bay Area that I had lost. But, then, almost exactly a year into this job, and finally having enough to head out to Oregon, covid happened. I moved in with my dad just before that in Fairfax, and there we were, stuck in place, not sure what the fuck was about to happen. So, there was no way to get up to Oregon. 

As the pandemic continued so did my stay in Bay. Once the shots came out I moved to Oakland. Covid was sort of in and out at the time, with surges that had us distancing every now and then. I did start to travel, but not to Oregon. The place was becoming more of a memory at this point, some five years passing and I still hadn’t gone back. I knew I would come back. But friendships had changed, or at least had gone quiet. Time and distance just do that. Nothing new and any of us who have made big moves know that sometimes friendships wane, not out of a lack of care or love, but just because the immediacy of living in the new place, the need of the present, clouds what was so special about the past.

So, once I quit that job in Berkeley, I couldn’t wait to get back up to Oregon, just to see the old homies that helped to shape so much of me. 

At first I wanted to write this as a short little story of my visit to Eugene, catching up with Stephen and Claire and Emma. But so much of that joy is purely for myself, something personal that, while you may enjoy reading, I’m not so sure I need to share it in order to communicate it. I came to Eugene to see them, and I drove up to Portland after three days to see other friends from that same time in my life. And it wasn’t to remember that past, but to check in, to see how much we had changed while also functionally staying the same. I came to say hey and remain in touch in the best way I know how, which is in person. I realized that if I tell this story strictly about my time in Eugene, I’ll have to tell it again about my time in Portland too, about different people, but basically with the same sentiment. 

During my visit, the only thing I noticed was that we all just looked a bit older, but who we were together wasn’t much different. The dynamics, for better or worse, were pretty much the same, just some of us have white or gray hairs, all of us sitting close to the edge of our youth but still no different. Still making odd performances, paintings, community inspired pamphlets and broadsides. The crew was still the crew. And after being away for so long, I wasn’t sure if that would be the case. But it was. 

At a certain point, you kind of can’t help but be the people who we were molded into in our early adult years. Sure, the need for money will change how much time we spend on what we truly care about, or maybe the needs of a partner or young family will shift how we see the world, but essentially, having gone through another decade of our lives we still can’t help but be who we were at twenty. Only now we care less about how we are seen. We are just getting older, more certain of who we are, or at the very least more accepting of it.

And that’s what, most of all, was so amazing to see when going back to Oregon, to Eugene and Portland, that while the places themselves, the needs of all of our lives, while all of that has shifted, we’re still here years later creating our lives from the blueprint of our time when we were so little and uncertain.