Thanksgiving: we are made of each other

I have just spent the past few days dwelling in the past, sorting and cleaning out my belongings from my parents' basement. They had everything down there, from my earliest toys to all of my school papers (preschool to high school! you can tell I'm an only child). It has felt good to go through it all and to let go of most of it. It has also felt good to stumble upon the unexpected treasures that will continue along the next part of my living with me.

I have found many photographs that I took of my friends in elementary and middle school and have had the chance to look through all of my parents' belongings and photo albums....a comprehensive family and personal history in artifacts and photographs.

Spending time with my parents in their home also gives me the chance to notice so clearly how much I am made of them...their patterns of speech, their facial expressions, their gestures. I wonder how far back those go? Is my mother's goofiness really that of my 13th great grandmother's? My father's linguistic precision, did that come from Adam?

We all grow out of one another in such concrete yet mysterious ways....and it isn't just our parents and our families that we are made of.

In the photographs I took as a child of eleven, I found there was one little boy in particular that I had a number of photographs of, by himself. I guess he was a favored photographic subject of mine. I don't recall having a crush on him, he was a lot shorter than me. Yet, there are all these photographs, more of him than of anyone else. Why? What did he mean to me then? I can't remember what it was like to be 11 or 12. Was it so much different than now, in my early 30s?

I found some old letters written between me and friends when I was 12 or 13, and to be frank, it doesn't seem that different now. Some of these letters were so much more insightful than I understood at the time. I think people totally underestimate children and adolescents, perhaps adolescents especially. I've grown, but the brilliant sentience that I am, that they were, (that we all really are) hasn't changed at all. If I have improved it has been because I have found ways to be what I always was without being worried about it.

He was a beautiful little blonde boy, a good friend of mine. Such a heartbreakingly beautiful boy, smiling in this photo, pensive in the next. I notice as I look at them that he didn't mug for the camera the way the other kids did. He was capable of being seen, it seems. He could look the camera in the eye, and be present. I am blown away by the strength and power of his 11 year old presence. I remember him in impressions...a fragment of his voice, the way he laughed, the way he sounded when he was upset about something. What kind of man did he become?

When I was in my early to mid twenties, my parents moved back to the town I lived in when I went to school with this boy, and I tracked down his parents' phone number. I called his mom and introduced myself and asked about him. She remembered me and told me he was in school for engineering at a state university, that he was doing well. I must have left my contact information (I don't remember doing it, but I must have) and he didn't get back to me.

Maybe he'll show up on facebook one of these days. A number of the people that we were friends with in the early days are there, and I have reconnected with them since I found these photos. It's strange to me that they remember me--I moved away in 7th grade! I see pictures of all of them as teenagers and even as adults together--going to each other's weddings and stuff.

I have lived in a lot of different places and have had a lot of friends and lovers, and I am always flattered (and surprised) when the people whose lives I floated through on my childhood and adolescent travels remember me and are glad to hear from me again.

Those people...all those people in all those places! I loved them all so much. I still do. I am made of them....I am made of you.

Thank you all so much for the time we have spent together, and if you're reading this, thanks for spending your time checking in with me now. It has been my privilege and my pleasure to know you--you have let me be what I am and you have made me what I am. Know that I carry you with me everywhere I go...it is such a sublime fullness.

thank you thank you thank you