When I began planning this trip, the first thing I did was to map out where we had friends all across the country.  Reconnecting with old friends, often after decades of separation, has been one of the high points for me (although perhaps farther down on Greta’s list, below eating new foods and seeing cute animals).  What’s been most amazing is how these visits haven’t just been exercises in nostalgia;  these friends have grown up and changed, and I’ve found I like the new versions of them just as much as I did the older, familiar ones.  We’ve had great conversations, usually into the late hours, and I have learned a lot about their lives, the choices they’ve made, and how they’ve made sense of life as they’ve had careers, raised children, dealt with life’s inevitable crises, etc.

We visited friends across the country, but then in the northeast there was such a density that it’s been hard to see all of them (and even harder to blog about it, as we spend all our time talking).  Around Boston there were friends from every phase of my life – high school, college, grad school, New York, Eugene.  Perhaps the most surprising visits were with friends from high school whom I hadn’t seen in 41 years.  After so long you wonder whether you’re going to have anything in common anymore, whether you’ll even recognize each other; but that wasn’t the case at all.

Cos Rappoccio and I spent a lot of time together in high school.  We shared many classes, and he was notable as the quiet one who always did well.  (He pulled out our yearbook, where my note to him then emphasized how he made us look bad in German class, getting good grades while the rest of us were goofing around.)  We weren’t in the same cliques – I was from White Plains, and he hung with his buddies from Port Chester – but one of the best things about our high school was that there was a lot of mixing among all the different groups.  Jocks, preppies, stoners, smart kids, greasers – at some level we all knew each other and got along well, with most of us belonging to a few different groups.  Cos and I did reminisce about those old days, catching each other up on those mutual friends with whom we’d lost contact.

After high school Cos went to Clarkson and then grad school at Johns Hopkins, with degrees in electrical engineering.  He married Mary, a computer scientist, and they settled outside Annapolis, where they raised two children – their son Dave (who lives in Portland), and their daughter Rachel, with whom Greta bonded instantly, when she realized that her dogs were named Merry and Pippin. (Greta has been picking up new friends on this trip – a lot of interesting nerdy girls, who range in age from 8 to 30, and it’s been cool for her to meet other girls with whom she’s felt an instant affinity.)

Cos went to work for Northrop Grummon, and as he puts it, he’s had the same office phone number for 37 years.  He’s been involved in projects I can’t really understand, mainly making really small cool things like sensors, but it was interesting how our discussion on our careers showed many parallels in processes, organizational challenges, and how to carve out an interesting niche within a large organization.

Cos has been a bicycling fanatic for years, making me jealous with his Facebook posts showing long rides through beautiful countrysides.  He’s recently had health issues which have slowed him down physically, but not in any other ways.  We had a great talk into the night, picking it up again in the morning, and he was the same sane, thoughtful guy I remembered.  At this point I should put in a plug for Facebook – Cos and I would never have reconnected without social media over the past decade, and it was great to have the opportunity to reconnect with a friend from so far back.  We decided to not wait another 41 years to get together again.

Ted Sudol was another of the Corpus Christi / Port Chester crowd in our high school.  We too shared a lot of classes, but also had extracurricular interests which put us in contact, perhaps even competition.  I was editor of the newspaper, and Ted was a mainstay of the yearbook, and traditionally these groups carried on a low-level war of pranks and other idiocies throughout the years.  The percentage of conversation among teenage boys that is sheer bantering is astounding, and Ted and I did our share of that.  But Ted was also interested in serious issues, and I remember the depth he brought to such conversations, both in class and out.  We spent many an evening drinking beer (the drinking age was lower then) and solving the world’s problems.

Ted went off to Georgetown and then law school at Temple, and we haven’t seen each other since.  He married his lovely wife Jill, and they somehow decided that her having twins was a sane thing to do while she was in medical school.  They had two more kids after that, and Ted remarked that his children’s accomplishments – an anesthesiologist (like her mom), a creative writing professor, a math-econ-data whiz, and a sports-marketing intern – disprove the concept of regression to the mean, as they all seem to be more accomplished than him.  Not that he has been much of a slouch – having had a career mainly in fundraising and development, working for non-profits and universities (James Madison), and now as managing director of a firm which provides development expertise and consulting services for non-profits.

Ted and his family have lived in a number of places, but for the last couple of decades in Harrisonburg, in the Shenandoah Valley.  Their kids are all out of the house, and their sixth grandchild is on the way.  (This is almost inconceivable to someone who is travelling the country with a 14-year-old, and I wonder how they managed to get this all out of the way so quickly.)  True to form, Ted and I talked almost non-stop while we were there;  the conversation didn’t even slow down for his cooking exertions (which included creme brûlée french toast, perhaps the most voluptuous  breakfast we’ve ever had).  It was a quick but intense visit, and we’re trying to convince them to visit us, since they don’t have the kids holding them back.

Bob Ripp showed up during our third year in high school, his family having just moved from Long Island.  Despite the hard time we gave him about being from The ‘gIsland, Bob fit in immediately; he became one of our crowd as if he’d been there from the beginning.  Bob was always at the center of all teenage adventures, always up for a night out and for never turning in.

In the past few weeks, when I was sitting around reminiscing with the other classmates in this post, it was striking how they all said more or less the same thing about Bob – that he was the most genuinely engaging, friendly, outgoing and happy person they knew in high school.  He had a good word for everyone, and I think a lot of people left high school thinking that they were one of Bob’s best friends.  We’ve all known a lot of people who give that impression, but with Bob it’s never been superficial – he really is that positive, he really is a good guy, and you know he really is your friend, for life.

Bob had a large and entertaining family, and it became clear that this warmth and gregariousness flowed out from the whole group.  His mother and grandfather with their southern charm, his older siblings, his impish little sisters – they were all engaging and fun, and they immediately made you one of the family.  Bob’s little brother Michael was a couple of years younger than us, and also became a good friend.  Michael joined us for beers one night in Boston, and it was great to see him after all these years, a serious (somewhat), grown-up family man.  

Bob went off to Holy Cross for college, where he was a member of the rugby team and lived in the notorious rugby house across from the campus entrance.  Rumors reached us of their legendary exploits, and when we visited, the rumors were always proved true.  As in high school, Bob acquired a large set of great friends, and by extension, any time we saw Bob we were accepted into this boisterous crowd and dragged along on their adventures.  After college, Bob and most of his crew moved into Boston, getting jobs in finance and real estate, and the life continued as best it could, despite the inevitable attrition to marriage and families.

Bob has worked for a number of financial firms, having been at Morgan Stanley et al for quite a while now, ensconced in a tower downtown with a nice view of the harbor.  Bob and Beth got married, they settled on the North Shore in a very old town called Boxford, and they raised two girls, Annie and Katherine.  We didn’t get to meet them, as they are now off at college and boarding school, but there were so many pictures of them around the house that I’m pretty convinced that they exist.  We had met Beth once previously, at Linda’s and my wedding (which doesn’t really count as meeting someone since you’re a little preoccupied), where Beth kept getting mistaken for one of Linda’s sisters.  It was great to spend more time with her on this trip, and I enjoyed seeing Beth snap into “mom” mode when she met Greta, something Greta liked too, after being cooped up with just a dad.

Bob and I spent a bunch of time racking around – an amazing tour of the byways of Ipswich, Topsfield, and other beautiful towns, meals and drinks in a variety of locations, and most notably, Bob turning on the charm and talking our way into the Crane mansion when it was closed to the public.  In Oregon, I’m generally regarded as a pretty gregarious, funny and outgoing person (right?), but when I’m with Bob, by comparison I feel introverted and lugubrious.  After all these years, he still exudes warmth and engagement to everyone he’s with, from old friends to random people on the street.  Bob clearly loves the world, and it seems that the world loves him.

Some of these high school friends have been long-lost, but Bill McGowan and I have stayed  close throughout the past four decades.  Bill was one of the hard core of Croton boys in high school, and a few of us down-county types attached to that core.  After college at Middlebury, Bill pursued varied jobs such as scallop and conch fishing out of Nantucket, turning that experience into his first published article in the New York Times Magazine.  Bill and I moved back to New York at the same time, and we lived together in a tenement on 82nd and Amsterdam while I was in grad school.  Besides being a good friend in that challenging time, Bill was responsible for my having any social life at all, as he actually knew people who weren’t architecture students, and he would drag me along to get me out of the architecture rut for brief periods.  (Bill also claims responsibility for introducing me to all my girlfriends in the early 80s, which is mostly correct.)  After grad school I moved a whole block away, and Bill and I continued to hang out for the rest of the 80s.  Those were the days, when New York neighborhoods hadn’t all been homogenized yet, and we watched the wave of gentrification roll up Columbus Avenue.

I remember Bill having one office job in the past four decades, which he quickly abandoned to pursue the life of a freelance writer and journalist.  He has had a remarkable career in that time, publishing many articles in a wide range of journals, and also publishing three books:  Only Man Is Vile, a first-hand account of the Sri Lankan civil war;  Coloring the News, which documented how political bias distorts much supposed hard news reporting;  and Gray Lady Down, on the decline and fall of the NY Times.  He also has a blog at http://coloringthenews.blogspot.com, where he is not afraid to advance controversial ideas.

As I contemplated Bill’s career, it occurred to me that he’s managed to find the sweet spot of pissing off everyone on the right and everyone on the left.  Liberals find his questioning of accepted pieties and his association with such institutions as the Wall Street Journal to be anathema, while right-wingers are agitated by his unwillingness to toe the line drawn by the plutocrats who fund their think-tanks and magazines.  (Bill may be the only moderately conservative journalist in the country who isn’t living a lifestyle funded by the Kochs.)  Reading through his articles and blog posts, I find that he is willing to attack those of every political persuasion, based upon some pretty clear principles, and is seldom distracted by the current fads and conventional wisdom.  Orwell would have liked him.

When I’d visit New York in recent years, Bill and I would always have an evening where I could pretend I was a bachelor, and we’d go barhopping downtown to all the places where hipsters and supermodels hang out.  This has become a little more problematic on recent trips with Greta in tow, but being with Bill still always conveys a sense of being in the middle of the action in the big city, which our little Oregonian finds very exciting.  On this trip we met by the Bjarke Ingels building and wandered through Hell’s Kitchen to a fine neighborhood Italian place and had the kind of pizza you don’t get in Eugene.  I’ve spent a lot of evenings eating and drinking with this man, and it doesn’t get old.

As I was planning this trip and listing all the old friends we’d be able to visit, I discovered, to my amazement, that Greta was actually interested in meeting more of my college friends. She knew Dan and Mike and Bob, and she found them really entertaining – smart and funny and very offbeat, so she assumed the others would be the same.

I met Isadore Katz because he went to prep school with Bill, one of my freshman roommates. I distinctly remember this very intense person showing up during freshman year, complaining about Rochester and its miserable weather, where he had made the mistake of deciding to go to college. The next year Iz rectified this by transferring to Wesleyan, and he would stop in to visit us when he was back in Boston. He lived with members of our crowd sometimes in summers, and back in 1977 he and I spent a week together hiking the ridgeline around the Pemigewasset Wilderness in the White Mountains.

Isadore moved back to Boston to work as a consultant after college, so we hung out for a couple of years until I moved to New York for grad school. Isadore started at the Sloane School at MIT at the same time, and when I asked him how business school was, he said, You’d be surprised at what passes for a concept around here. He lived with us in NY during a summer internship in 1983.  After school Iz worked in the expanding computer industry, and met his wife Chris, a very cool and laid-back architect who had the good sense to not marry another architect. They moved off to Silicon Valley in the mid-80s, and after I moved to Oregon in 1990, I would see them whenever I went down to the Bay Area. Iz and Chris raised three wild and crazy girls, who have now grown up to be in law school at Berkeley, working in tech in Silicon Valley, and in college at Barnard. (One of the secondary goals of this trip has been to reconnoiter the terrain on how smart and independent girl-children turn out.)

Isadore has always had another one of those jobs where we can never quite figure out what he does, although in this case it’s not due to the vagueness of the job description, but rather to the complexity of the technology involved. He’s mainly been in the management end of the high tech industry, although after the Crash, he spent a couple of years working as a consultant at the Veterans Administration, essentially reconfiguring their database operation. About a decade ago, back in Massachusetts, he started a company that, as far as I can tell, designs software for chip manufacturers to help them model real, versus theoretical, chip performance, before they put a design into production.Is and Chris live in Harvard, Mass, out in the woods past I-495, a short walk from Fruitlands, the transcendentalist utopian community started by the Alcotts and others.  Staying with them felt like being home – a modern house with lots of windows looking at the trees, a few days eating and drinking, and relentless storytelling and joking with two of the cleverest people I know. Isadore’s brother Seth, another friend from long ago, dropped in from his home in Florida, and we all got to reminisce about crummy apartments in Somerville and life before we became middle-aged.

Bob Beckman was one of my freshman roommates. I walked into our five-person suite, and saw that half of one room was already occupied, by someone who had left an olive-drab, gigantic filing cabinet, with a bar and padlock across the drawers. I immediately decided to take my chances on the other double room. Bob showed up and confirmed my take on him – a serious science nerd from the Philadelphia area, whose career orientation had been jumpstarted by his technocrat father (who had also supplied the government surplus file cabinet). In high school Bob had been a Westinghouse science competition national finalist with his research into sleep patterns, and this direction continued with his advanced standing concentration as a pre-med.

Bob’s seemed to conform to the absent-minded nerd stereotype: incredibly brilliant and relatively incompetent in dealing with the real world (manifested in such incidents as his first attempt to cook a hamburger, when it became clear he had no idea that you had to flip them). But contrary to type, Bob was one of the wittiest and most social people around. After graduating from college early, Bob worked in a lab for a year, and had weekly gatherings at his apartment for his college buddies, featuring endless guitar jams and truly awful spaghetti dinners.   He also began his association with a lab at UW, furthering his research into a mathematically-based approach to understanding cancer. (Yes, Bob has another one of those careers I can’t understand, despite his repeated efforts to explain it to me.) Bob then entered the Harvard-MIT joint MD-PhD program, sharing an apartment with Isadore throughout this period, as his cooking skills marginally improved after determined effort.  Bob moved off to California for his residency, where he met his wife Susan, a medical social worker from Rhode Island, whose good sense, unflappable disposition, and extreme competence have provided the bedrock upon which Bob could continue his stereotypical scientist life.Bob worked as a pediatric oncologist, but finally gave up on the clinical career when the unique American medical insurance situation made it impossible for him to practice medicine in the way he knew it should be practiced. He went to work on the East Coast for a succession of pharmaceutical companies over the next two decades, designing cancer drug trials, and trying to survive the corporate politics, while he and Susan raised two great kids, Daniel (now working for the NPS at Saguaro, whom we plan on visiting next month) and Laura, an artist in New York. Bob was appointed a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he furthered his continued interest in cancer research, while still holding down his day job.

A few years ago Bob mentioned that with the kids grown and retirement money stashed away, he’d like to return to research full time, using the last decade of his career to consolidate his theoretical approach to cancer. I warned him that the institutional nuttiness of academia was different from, but not necessarily any better than that in large corporations, but he didn’t listen. So last fall Bob got an appointment as a professor at Georgetown. He works with some graduate students, but his main job is to secure funding and pursue his unique direction in cancer research. We stayed with Bob and Susan in the little rowhouse they’re renting in Georgetown, where they are thrilled with the possibilities of urban life, after a few decades in suburbia in the northeast.

Norman Rave was another resident of our freshman dorm of misfits and savants. He arrived as a relatively conservative graduate of a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati, and along with us other lapsed Catholics, left the trapping of that life behind fairly quickly. Going off to college allows you to reinvent yourself, and Norman took advantage of this in the best possible way, combining his academic interest in biochemistry with his other strong predilections for literature and philosophy. Long rambling conversations with Norman about the meaning of life were some of the highpoints of college for me.

Norman always wore a weirdly wide range of eclectic tee-shirts, which I at first took to be the expression of an extremely ironic viewpoint, but it turned out that he just shopped at a store in Cincinnati which sold remaindered and misprinted shirts really cheaply.  When this sartorial approach combined with Norman’s decision to stop cutting his hair or his beard, his appearance became the quintessence of the mid-70s college student, and he was known as Troll thereafter.
Norman got into grad school at Berkeley, so the summer after college, he and Dan Rabin and I drove across the country together, packed into an old Datsun B210 with all of Norman’s possessions. The person riding in the backseat was unable to move at all, and our overall appearance was such that we were shocked at the laxity of US law enforcement in that no one ever pulled us over. This was the first cross-country drive for any of us (I am in the middle of my 11th right now), but it just started a trend for Norman. He decided he didn’t like grad school, so he drove back to the east, and then back and forth a few times as he tried to figure out what to do with his life.

At some point he stumbled upon a position working in a lab at Princeton, which was of little long-term professional import, but where he met Ginny, a post doc in the lab, who would later become his wife.  (I didn’t get  a good photo of Norman and Ginny, but they still look remarkably like they did 35 years ago, except for the hair length.)  They lived in Boston and then DC, as Norman decided he was more interested in the policy side of environmental issues, and he attended Georgetown Law School. Norman eventually ended up at the DOJ, while he and Ginny raised three kids in Rockville. Ginny spent years as a full-time mom, but began teaching high school science about ten years ago, and recently led a group of students on a field trip to the Amazon (she is nothing like any of the science teachers I ever had.)

We got to meet Kate, who is living at home while considering grad school (maybe in Oregon), and Will, who attends George Washington University. (Greta realized she had picked up yet another member for her cool nerdy posse when Kate opened the front door wearing her Welcome to Nightvale tee shirt.) Helen is off at Harvard Law, where she has actually studied environmental law cases that were argued by her father. Greta and I had a great time hanging around with all of them; most of my friends are now empty-nesters, and eating family dinners and spending time with a crowd was a nice change on our trip. And Norman and I got to sit around drinking bourbon and yacking, which we hadn’t done in 20 years.

At one point I asked Greta what she thought about all these friends she’d now met. She said it was fun, but strange. Little kids largely grow up in the world their parents construct for them, listening to the stories their parents tell. Greta had heard stories about these people throughout her life – Bob Stories are an especially iconic category among my people – and long ago they had assumed almost mythical status in her cosmology.  So while it was nice to meet the real people, the legends were somewhat diminished now.  Greta enjoyed getting to know Norman, but she’ll never have the same innocent fascination with Troll that she had before.

Traveling to the Northeast not only meant catching up with many old friends, but also seeing the family, in New York and Pennsylvania.  We didn’t get to see everyone, and we couldn’t stay as long as we wanted (as we could sense the change in weather closing in on us), but we shall return soon.

We stayed with my brother Jerry in Westchester, to which he has returned after a long hiatus in New Jersey.  Jerry is eight years older than me, but from the earliest age, we’ve always been pretty close.  

And as is probably typical with most siblings, there are ways we are polar opposites (politics, musical taste), and ways in which we are pretty similar (sailing, traveling, dark sense of humor).  As we’ve been traveling down to the south in recent weeks, I realized we were going places that I first visited when Jerry was a teenager and took his little brother along on a road trip – the Shenandoah Valley, Charleston, etc.  Those were the first trips I made without a parent, and I think they planted the idea that one could just get in a car and go see the world.  In the past decade we’ve gotten together every summer, as jerry flies out to Whidbey Island, and we sail and hang out.
After a career in insurance and banking, Jerry retired two years ago, about 15 seconds after he was eligible, and retirement seems to suit him very well.  (For the last three years of his working life, his screensaver was a photo of his sailboat with a count-down calendar on it.)  His good friends Pam and Steve sold their house and bought a two-family house in Mamaroneck, and after a year of renovation, they live in the downstairs unit and Jerry lives upstairs.  They are three miles away from the boat club where they all spend much of their time, and one mile from the train station into the City.  It seems like a very good model for retirement.

After a day in New York, Greta and I both caught a cold, and spent two days hunkered down at Jerry’s, where we caught up on all the 1960s sitcoms that I hadn’t watched since the 1960s.  (My brother has an encyclopedic knowledge of the classic shows of the past 60 years, but it was good to see that he has expanded his repertoire to include more recent television.)

While we were killing time, my nephew Sean (upper left in the top photo taken last Christmas) showed up with pizza and soup, and to entertain us for the day.  Sean grew up nearby in Larchmont, and now lives in Connecticut.  He is Greta’s first cousin – although 34 years older than her – so she really thinks of his three fantastic kids (Connor, Eleanor and and Alexandra) as being more her cousins.  Sean was always athletic, and in college he started the crew team at SUNY Oswego;  in recent years he has kept up this rowing, while also adding marathon running to his portfolio.  (He has also generously shared his rowing insights with Greta, suggesting “more forward body angle at the catch” when she was eight.)

Sean has one of those  jobs that I don’t really understand what it is he does (it is interesting how many more of those jobs I run into every year as I get older and more clueless).  I at least can tell that it involves advertising and the internet.  Somehow between the job in the City and athletic endeavors he still manages to be a great dad, and arguably the funniest person in the family.

My sister Pat is the oldest of us five, seen here in the first known picture of us together.  I was clearly the practice child for her raising four kids, including Sean.

Once her kids reached a certain age, Pat went to work as a pre-school teacher, for a couple of good reasons:  she enjoyed the company of little kids, and she really enjoyed having summers off to sit in the back yard and read non-stop; over her lifetime, Pat has probably been one of the steadiest supporters of the Strand bookstore, frequently hauling shopping bags full back to Larchmont on the train.  I sometimes have students ask me how I acquired the wide range of random facts that I seem to know, but I am nothing compared to my sister. (She also talks faster than I do.)    She not only retains facts, but she somehow always stays abreast of what everyone is doing, and what they are interested in.  Over the years, I’ve often been surprised by some gift from Pat that tied in perfectly with an interest of mine that I didn’t know she was aware of. This year’s Christmas present was no exception.  Pat retired a few years ago, and so she too was able to come by Jerry’s and spend the afternoon entertaining us when we were sick.  This trip has been rather intense for me and Greta – it seems that every day is dense with new experiences, usually of new places and things that are not that familiar to us.  But this one afternoon spent with Jerry, Pat and Sean was definitely the most dense with talking, joking and reminiscing, and we were really grateful to them all for dropping everything to do it.

Leaving New York, we headed to the Philadelphia Main Line to stay with my nephew Justin and his family.  Justin was a remarkably cute kid, but also a scarily smart one, memorably besting me in an argument when he was three.  He was always precocious, seeming much more mature than his age.

With that background, and his current career managing a mutual fund company, it is hard to believe that in an intermediate incarnation he spent some time following the Grateful Dead and supporting the trip by selling peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

In recent years, Justin has also turned into a serious weekend warrior athlete – marathons, triathlons, mountain biking, etc.  But like Sean and all his other cousins, Justin has become this super family guy.  His wife Joanie is perhaps the most energetic person I’ve ever known – raising two kids while working as a kindergarten teacher with an expertise in special education – and somehow fitting me and Greta into her agenda, making us feel right at home and then sending us on our way with enough food to snack on for a week.  Their daughter Abby is a charming high school senior, but being a high school senior she’s completely over-committed, charging around with her friends, but managing to join us for dinner one night.

Although Tyler is a only year older than Greta, living on opposite coasts they’ve only met each other a few times in their lives.  But getting together over the past couple of years, they’ve realized they have a lot in common – they’re both kind of quirky, willing to follow their own inclinations rather than the crowd, and they share a wide range of nerdy, fan-boy interests.  Tyler immediately roped Greta into multiple rounds of backgammon, and we spent a really fun day with him, at the Mercer Museum and then the new James Bond movie, as he guided us through the intricacies of Main Line geography.
We’ve gotten a little homesick from time to time on this extended trip, and it was really good to stop in places where we were at home, with family who love us and welcomed us in.