The Difficulty of Correspondence (Why I Don't Blog)

Funny: We will drive across a city for hours and gallons of gas to hang out with the people that we want to hang out with. We will call the old gang and ask them what they're doing and try to make complicated plans that involve people we used to live near or go to school with or work with but now live far. But we hardly know the people next door or across the street. The nearest church is populated by people who drive a half hour to get there but not by people like us in walking distance. The people we see every day are never encountered outside their context of work or the gym or the store.

We regularly spend that time, gas, and money to be with the people we prefer so long as they are in town. As soon as they are out of proximity or out of the metropolitan area, the relationship depends on phone calls and emails and the almost extinct written correspondence. Then only the strongest friendships survive with great effort towards their maintenance. The good friendships lie dormant, waiting to resume as soon as the person bounds into our life again. The difficult friendships slowly wither.

Even with friends in town, you start to know the buddy down the block far better than the best friend who lives a city and a rush hour away. You can try to triangulate and centralize, keep all your friends and relations within commuting distance, but sometimes a job or a house or a spouse or new friends land you in a strange and distant land. States or continents away, or no farther than a highway, you have to start over with new friends and even new family.

Distance is more than geography. Things can separate you from friends and family that have nothing to do with where you are located or who is nearby. Not all of these things are bad. Sometimes getting a job, getting married, or having children can change who you see and talk to everyday. Sometimes the distance of circumstance divides people without changing anything else. Growing closer to new neighbors, new coworkers, a new spouse (and the requisite in-laws), or a child or children might mean letting a few old relationships rest or sag.

So when you can't keep in touch with everyone, you chose who and when to reach and love. I am terrible at email. I am terrible at writing letters. I rarely take advantage of free long distance calling even though it's one of my cell phone's selling points. I don't diary or journal - never been that consistent at interacting with myself. Newsgroups, blogs, wikis, the new wave of organizing and distributing information, same old habits. Correspondence, electronic or otherwise, gets done when it has to and with whom it has to. My family at the top, my old friends at a slight distance next alongside my new friends nearby.

All my people across town, across the world, or at a far away enough stage of life, hear from me rarely and when they do, they hear about my affection and my regret for not being there more. If they are normal human beings with the same balance between proximity and correspondence, they understand that delay and scarcity of communication doesn't measure my esteem for them. I may love them more than my friends, but no more than my family, and I would never trade my spot of intimacy, my attention to a wife and a baby.

So everybody's waiting for Heaven, that great Holiday Reunion in the Sky, when everyone we wished could be near is restored to us and we all sit down at one big table and eat and smile and laugh at all the stories we haven't gotten to tell yet.

With that assurance, we don't have to wait until then. Although nothing could compare, down here in the mud, we do get glimpses. Besides the happy surprises, the family get-togethers, the 50th birthday parties and silver or gold wedding anniversaries, the school reunions and old friend barbecues: Besides those, we can promote and harbor these collisions of good people. We can defy the distance of space and time and even the bizarre removal that life circumstances cause. In some small, partial way, we can anticipate the kind of feast where everyone has a chair at the table.

That's what Flannery Amalgamated is all about.