A wonderful reflection on all this! I have been writing about what a home away from home means for a nomad and the presence of acquaintances, and better yet friends, is definitely part of it for me.
I'm forever defending "the acquaintance." People will use an expression like, "we're just acquaintances" like it's a bad thing. 1. It's a great place to start if you're looking for deeper connections. 2. But also, it's okay to keep it as is. Acquaintances round out our lives, add richness to our every day worlds. They're who missed so much during Covid. We spoke to our close friends or texted or zoomed. We didn't FaceTime our acquaintances, and life was dryer for it.
Bill was the facility director when I worked in a children's residential treatment center, and we were both social workers. He was handsome and blonde and wore a leather bomber jacket to work every day. The women who worked there were all in lust with him. I run into him once every few years; the last time, he and his wife were just starting out on a run, setting his watch for the time, when my friend and I were walking in the same neighborhood and happened upon them. He stopped, and we caught up. We shared about four years in time working to have children's lives be bearable, better than they were, transformed even--a lofty goal. One time, something unbearable had happened to a child on my watch. When he saw me that day, he came up and just gave me a long hug. Some things just can't be said in words. That is structural language, something else I learned about somewhere else . . . our first language as babies.
Lovely. Glad we’re acquainted.
A wonderful reflection on all this! I have been writing about what a home away from home means for a nomad and the presence of acquaintances, and better yet friends, is definitely part of it for me.
I'm forever defending "the acquaintance." People will use an expression like, "we're just acquaintances" like it's a bad thing. 1. It's a great place to start if you're looking for deeper connections. 2. But also, it's okay to keep it as is. Acquaintances round out our lives, add richness to our every day worlds. They're who missed so much during Covid. We spoke to our close friends or texted or zoomed. We didn't FaceTime our acquaintances, and life was dryer for it.
Bill was the facility director when I worked in a children's residential treatment center, and we were both social workers. He was handsome and blonde and wore a leather bomber jacket to work every day. The women who worked there were all in lust with him. I run into him once every few years; the last time, he and his wife were just starting out on a run, setting his watch for the time, when my friend and I were walking in the same neighborhood and happened upon them. He stopped, and we caught up. We shared about four years in time working to have children's lives be bearable, better than they were, transformed even--a lofty goal. One time, something unbearable had happened to a child on my watch. When he saw me that day, he came up and just gave me a long hug. Some things just can't be said in words. That is structural language, something else I learned about somewhere else . . . our first language as babies.