Tell Me a Story

"In Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”  

—C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

• • • • •

My grandmother had a black eye. She also had a tremendous bruise on the back of her leg, vaster and more technicolored than any I'd ever seen. She was sporting the injuries of a prizefighter after a street brawl, but there was no violent tale to tell—no sweat or glory or heroic story behind those black and blue welts. They were simply the evidence of an aging body—of the falls she has taken in recent weeks while trying to perform the mundane task of walking from one room to the next. My grandmother is 92 years old, so her failing health should have come as no surprise, but during the last month her decline was sudden and precipitous. Although she has begun to improve, she remains weak, and tired, and frustrated by her inability to perform basic tasks.

My grandmother, who once spent her Saturday nights swing dancing at the Hollywood Palladium to the live music of Benny Goodman, can hardly stand without help. She, who never left the house without every strand of her thick red tresses pinned perfectly in place, now struggles to lift her arm to brush the tangles from her thin white hair. She, whose graceful fingers once speed-typed scripts for Jack Benny at NBC studios, can hardly bend her crooked knuckles to sign her own name.

Her health and strength may rebound as they have done so many times in the past, but they may not. And as I visit her and try to help her in what small ways I can, I am constantly nagged by the realization that so much of her story is unknown to me, that there must be countless episodes of her life's adventure that  will go unremembered and untold.

Here is my grandmother, living right in my own town—even in the same house for a time—for all these years, and I have hardly begun to explore the pages of her history. I feel like that person who, having lived her whole life in New York City, is now about to leave it forever and is realizing she's never visited the Statue of Liberty, never seen the view from the top of the Empire State Building, never attended a Broadway show, never strolled through Central Park. It was always there, so I could do it anytime. And now time is nearly up. I have had this tremendous and enviable array of stories and memories close at hand for nearly two decades, and I have not availed myself of it. Her life spans nearly a century, but I could not recount more than a pitiful handful of the episodes that her long story comprises.

• • • • •

Realizing that the time I will have with my grandmother is limited, I started making a point of hearing at least one story from her every time I visit. As we chat, I simply ask a few questions, and then I sit back and listen as she turns to the colorful pages of her past. These hours with my grandmother have been some of the most rewarding of my life. In one short hour I was with her recently, scene after scene unfolded before my imagination.

She told me stories of family members whose names I'd never heard. I learned that her grandfather died in a coal mine collapse, and that her grandmother, who never remarried, spent the subsequent years cooking meals for the coal miners in order to support herself and her two young sons—Grandma's father and his brother, Charlie. 

She told me how her father was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to be the postmaster of their small Illinois town, and how the subsequent postmaster was so incompetent that her father remained on the job to perform the other man's duties. She chuckled as she suddenly remembered a huge, friendly German postal carrier named Otto who delivered the mail on horseback and who knew everybody in town.

With a wry smile, Grandma recounted her first date. A high school senior had invited her, a lowly freshman, to the Fireman's Ball, and was she ever flattered! Knowing how much she loved to dance, her parents gladly gave her permission to go, and her mother immediately set to work sewing her a new dress for the occasion. At the ball, the high school coach—a young newlywed nicknamed "Hap" who had been a friend of Grandma's older brother—was cutting the rug with his pretty wife. As they spun around, they both lost their balance, stumbled, and fell right on top of Grandma and her date, knocking them to the floor where they all fell into fits of embarrassed laughter. Grandma laughed till the tears came as she remembered it.

And tears continued to trickle down her creased and freckled cheeks as she told me about the painful years of World War II when her brother, Rock, served on a munitions ship carrying explosives across the Atlantic from New York to England, always fearing attack by the Germans. Her voice quavered as she recalled how she never knew where her youngest brother, Ken, was during those years or whether he was still alive. She frequented the movie house, partly for distraction, partly to see if she could glimpse a familiar face—his face—in the news reels at the start of every show. She did not hear a word from Ken until he came home, and he would tell only one story from his time serving in the Marines: his unit had stormed the beaches at Guadalcanal, and as they neared land, he was certain that they were all going to die. As they ran together up the tropical sand, the men on either side of him were shot and killed, but somehow Ken survived. And that was all he could bring himself to tell her.
  
One hour with my grandmother was all it took to sit and relive all these scenes, and a half dozen more, from her colorful life. One hour. And this is just the beginning. I could have made a point of doing this countless times before, so why didn't I? Even at 92, my grandmother's mind is still lucid and her memories  vivid, so I am learning as much as I can in the time that we have left.

I know that every cinematic genre is represented in the sweeping screenplay of Grandma's life—action, comedy, adventure, tragedy, romance—and at this late hour, I am realizing how much of the plot is simply mystery—at least to me. Having casually walked in near the end of the show, I am now scrambling to find out how to stop and rewind to the better scenes before the screen fades and the credits roll.

• • • • •

In revisiting the the Little House series of books this year, I have been struck by the gift that Pa had for telling stories to his girls—stories about his own life and about his family. His daughter Laura committed those stories to memory and was able to put them in writing so that generations of readers can still enjoy and learn from them. What a gift. What a legacy.

I suspect that we as a culture are losing the art of handing down family stories. We bequeath physical objects—furniture and jewelry—to our posterity, but how often do we think of stories as a valuable part of our inheritance? I have only recently begun to think of stories in that way myself. But now that my grandmother's story is nearing its final chapters, I want to hang on—and hang on to—every word of her recollections. I want to remember them and bequeath them to my own children, precious heirlooms that cannot be broken but that can be easily lost.

As I've considered what questions I should be asking my grandmother, I have also been asking myself what family stories I hope to pass on to my own children and grandchildren. What form should these stories take if I want them to be remembered? What can I do to make these stories a joy to hear? A good story well told can express powerful truths that will stay with us far longer than any abstract proposition. Good stories give shape and color and texture to ideas. Good stories put flesh on words. And family stories can also help us to understand our own lives in the context of history.

My great-great grandmother raised two sons on her own by cooking meals for men who worked in the mine that had killed her husband. As a child, my grandfather was struck on the knuckles at school for speaking Norwegian instead of English. And years later, those same knuckles were lost entirely in a logging accident involving a chainsaw. My great uncle narrowly escaped being shot to death in the South Pacific. When my great-grandmother's dear friend fell ill and came from St. Louis to live with the family until she could recover, my great-grandfather had to seek special permission from the city council to have this woman stay with them—because she was black. These family memories help me to see my own experiences from a different perspective. Their lives helped shape the story of my own life. This is part of my inheritance; those stories are my stories.

So what if we made a point to not only read to our children but to share our own stories with them? What if our children grew up with a sense of their own history, of their unique place in the greater narrative arc of time? We have a history that bears repeating. In Scripture, the people of Israel were commanded to tell the story of their Exodus from Egypt to their children (Deut 4:9-10). The people were told to take care lest they forget. And if we are able to see our own lives in the context of history—as a brief chapter in a tale that stretches back to the first "Let there be"—then we may realize that the Exodus is also a part of our own story as much as it was part of theirs. And we forget it at our peril.

But forgetting is all too easy. Remembering will take work. It will take writing and repeating and re-telling. It will involve more talking around the table, more asking, more listening, more patience. In this tweet-riddled age, we rarely produce so much as a handwritten letter to save in a box of keepsakes, let alone a book of family history to pass on to our posterity. So, as I focus on collecting my grandmother's stories, I also need to think about how to collect my own stories and how to teach my children to do the same. We may need to spend some time learning the Calormene art of storytelling if our lives' narratives are going to amount to more than a disconnected series of status updates.

I want my sons to know that they are characters in a grand epic that includes all of us. I want my sons to learn and remember the best tales from their own lives, from their parents' lives, from their grandparents' lives. I want them to learn the stories from their great grandmother's life. But this means I would do well to learn them first, before her final chapter closes. It's time to look my grandmother in the eye—the one that was swollen and black and blue—and ask her to tell me a story.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Better is a neighbor who is near than a brother who is far away.

—Proverbs 27:10

I live in my childhood home. There is something charming—and almost anachronistic—about raising my own children in the same house my parents bought when I was nine years old. I know every corner of this century-old farmhouse by heart, and every room holds memories in its walls. I am comfortable here. But as familiar as this house is, we are, in many ways, living in the middle of unfamiliar territory. A foreign world lies outside our doors.

Of course, it’s not as though a whirlwind has pulled us from our foundations and given us a yellow brick road where the sidewalk once was. Our street, in fact, looks almost as it did twenty-some years ago. The buildings themselves have hardly been altered; their structures, their yards, and even their paint colors are largely the same as they have been for two decades. The difference, rather, is their occupants. Most of them have been replaced. A couple of familiar faces remain, but after 17 years, they no longer recognize me.

The residences on our block—including ours—are mostly rentals or "starter" homes, which means that the people who are here now won't be for long. We’ve spent three years trying to learn the names of most of our neighbors, and within that short time, several of them have already moved on.

We rarely see many of our neighbors, and with so few of us likely to remain for more than a year or two, putting forth the effort—and it is an effort—to meet them feels almost futile. Some will never even make eye contact before ducking hurriedly into their house-shaped bunkers. They live in hiding, and then they leave.

* * * * * * * *

Twenty years ago, meeting our neighbors seemed easy. With so many kids sharing the same block, spontaneous encounters were practically inevitable. There was a time that children formed a part of the landscape, a time when I could recite the names of the occupants of nearly every house within view of our front yard.

I could tell you that the neighbor in the white house across the street would step onto his front porch at five o'clock each night—you could almost set your watch by his appearance—and call for his son John, stretching his short name into two long, operatic syllables. And John, with the blond rattail flying out behind him, would race his bike home for dinner.

In the fading red house facing ours lived two little girls, younger than I, whose father owned Southside Mini-mart down the alley. I envied them. They could skip over to their father's business after school and have their pick of free candy.

Two houses down, with their mother and the hard rocker step-dad they called Tony, lived Chris and Jennifer, unkempt in their oversized Def Leppard t-shirts. They smelled like dirt.


And at the end of the block was a family with three children who attended our Christian school. They had a friendly brown and white dog named Ginger, and their mother taught me how to sew Barbie skirts by hand.

But for all our quotidian interaction, we never grew close to the people around us. We knew their faces, and we knew their names. We said "hello" when we met on the street, but we never so much as shared a meal. We never really knew them.

Most of these people are gone now. I don't know where. Or why. Or how long ago. Maybe some of them are dead. And, to be honest, I have a hard time caring.

* * * * * * * *

Ours is a small college town, so the student population is in constant flux. As unsettling as that can seem, it's at least to be expected. What distresses me more is how rapidly the rest of the population turns over.

I often wonder what subtle effects our modern nomadic lifestyle has had on our society. What would our neighborhood look like if the people in it had stayed? How much different would our attitudes and expectations be if we knew we couldn't just pack up and leave every few years? And what investments would we be willing to make in our relationships with the folks next door if we expected to find them still living there in twenty years?

* * * * * * * *

Twenty years ago, those casual encounters with our neighbors cost us nothing; it likewise cost us nothing to say our casual goodbyes. Because forging friendships with our immediate neighbors requires more from us than it once did, it’s just possible that those friendships will seem more valuable in the end. But what, exactly, will it take to reach these people in the first place?

Most of us are just not home enough to regularly bump into one another. We spend too little time in our own yards. We're busy. We may have collected enough virtual "friends" to keep us from feeling the need for the kind with flesh and blood. We invert our sense of community by allowing Blogger and facebook to turn our private spaces into public spaces and iPods and cell phones to convert our public spaces into private spaces. Even when we do find ourselves forced into some kind of neighborly small talk, our fragmented culture has made common experiences next to impossible to find.

Bleak as it sounds, the only sure-fire way of making contact and forming relationships with these disparate individuals seems to be disaster of some sort. A massive windstorm this fall knocked out power and downed several trees around us, damaging a number of nearby homes and vehicles. Destructive, yes, but also an easy and natural topic for conversation. It provided an opportunity to finally meet some of the people on our block. I even had a chat with a man on the corner who had the top half of a giant pine tree resting comfortably on the roof of his camper. Before that day, I had never so much as seen his face.

My husband does a much better job of making friends with the neighbors than I do, but even so, it hasn't been easy. Sharing food has been somewhat successful—excess garden produce in summer, hot cross buns at Easter, homemade cookies at Christmas. A couple of neighbors have even accepted our invitations to dinner, but we have a long way to go before we could say we know them. When we tried to share a plate of treats with one man across the street, all he said was, "No thanks," and shut the door in our faces. Maybe he thought we were trying to poison him.

These people could be suffering some horrific trials in their lives, and we would be blissfully unaware. And tragically unable to help them—tragically unable to love them.

We've all heard the story of the Good Samaritan. We've all gotten the message that "Love your neighbor as yourself " doesn't literally mean to love your neighbor; it just means, as the old rock song suggests, to love the one you're with. But what if loving my neighbor actually meant loving my neighbor? As in, the person next door? The one with the Buddhist prayer flags and the political bumper stickers covering his door? The middle-aged single lady who plays the cello? The young couple that leaves for work in the pre-dawn hours and comes home at lunch to walk their tiny dog? The former police officer with the gorgeous flower garden? The registered sex offender whose front door was inexplicably smashed to slivers one night? What about those neighbors? What would it mean to love them?

Unless some of them stick around, we may never find out.

* * * * * * * *

I, too, have been a nomad. I may live in my childhood home, but I've taken a long time to arrive back here. As my facebook "friend" list reflects, I have put down shallow roots in other states, in other countries, only to pull them up again and be transplanted elsewhere. But there are fibers in that soil, traces of me, that I've left behind with every move. Those transitions, however necessary, are never entirely painless.

I'd like to say that we'll stay comfortably rooted forever in this house, but that may not be up to me. And honestly, I have the same wanderlust as those around me, the same hope for something bigger, something better, something we can call our own. Our family is growing, I tell myself, and we'll need more space. I truly do want to hold some kind of principle of rootedness, to maintain a deep sense of belonging to a place, but on this point my principles and my desires work at cross purposes. I don't think we'll ever leave town. At least I hope not. But even if we stay here in this neighborhood until our dying days, I can say with almost prophetic certainty that most of my neighbors won’t.

It’s our modest hope, however, that in the meantime we will build a few friendships here that will cost more—and be worth more—than a shallow hello.

The Digital Muse

While we're on the subject... As I was writing the last post about digital communication it crossed my mind that the great stories of history and literature—and of our own lives—might have been drastically altered by 21st century communications technology. For example:

Remember that fateful letter from Friar Lawrence to Romeo, telling him that Juliet was only mostly dead? The one that arrived too late? If Shakespeare had instead given each of those two men a Motorola Razr, timely communication would have been established and tragedy turned into comedy. ...Except that the Capulets and Montagues would have continued biting their thumbs at one another until the world's end.

Or how about Robinson Crusoe? If he'd made a satellite phone call from the sinking ship, he might have been rescued about 28 years sooner. And nobody would ever have cared much about his survival story. Oh, and Friday would never have been rescued from murderous cannibals.

Then there's the whole Midnight-Ride-of-Paul-Revere thing. One if by land, two if by sea? Totally unnecessary. "Through the night went his cry of alarm, to every Middlesex village and farm"? A waste of breath. Just text it, Paul, and all those colonial farmers will be ready with their muskets and their night-vision goggles.

And if Odysseus had bought matching iPhones for Penelope and himself before heading off to battle the Trojans, the trip home would have taken on an entirely different tone:
P: Honey, where are you? I left you like ten voice mails yesterday. 
O: Long story, Penny. After a rough day on the wine-dark sea, we took a pit stop on some island. I had already checked Google Maps, and I told the guys that there was a nice, authentic Greek gyro joint on the next island, but did they listen? They were so hungry for a steak, they just couldn't wait. They came across this herd of grass-fed, free-range cattle and just went nuts with their battle axes—had a big ol' Texas barbecue.
P: Typical men.
O: Yeah, well, it gets worse. It turned out that those cows belonged to Helios the Sun god. Seriously bad news. Let's just say I'll be home a bit later than we'd planned. I'll tell you all about it in dactylic hexameter when I get there.

Poetic, no?

It seems pretty clear to me that our modern hyper-connectedness would have drained a lot of the color from many of history's best stories. And even from my own life's stories.

When I was 13, my family lived in Kenya for 6 months. Without a cell phone. Or a home phone connection, for that matter. My dad did have a phone at his office, but the line would mysteriously go dead whenever he mentioned anything negative about events taking place in the country at the time. E-mail was in its infancy, and few people ever thought of communicating via computer. (This is making me feel old.) Our contact with home was minimal and normally involved letters that might take weeks to arrive.

While we lived there, a day came when my brother and I could not get home from school because of a riot taking place in the city through which we needed to travel. Cars and trucks—so loaded with people that the bumpers nearly touched the road—were streaming out of the town, and ours was the only car going toward it. Our driver stopped to ask what was happening, but we could only get hints and rumors. A few people said that they had fled because everybody else was doing it. So we waited. Meanwhile, news of tear gas and gunshots spread through the surrounding area, and my parents had no way of finding out where we were—or whether we were alive. For a few nervous hours they felt the way that many Haitian parents must be feeling now: fearful and wondering where their children might be. With today's technology, a quick text message could have told my parents that we were safe, and spared them those hours of distress. But then we wouldn't have had much of a story to tell afterward. Every good story involves some kind of conflict or tension waiting to be resolved. Who wants to hear about the day that started happy, went along happily, and ended with smiles all around? I want to live that day. But I don't want to hear about it. Without those hours spent in fear, this story wouldn't be worth telling. And a cell phone, I'm quite sure, would have removed the uncertainty that made the afternoon memorable.

Another event that my sons love for me to recount is the day in 1998 when I was driving alone through the barren wasteland of Central Washington and slid off the highway into a field. My car came to a stop directly on top of an ancient, rusty plough that was half-buried in the dirt. After trying everything I could to free myself from the grip of that antique piece of machinery (4-wheel-drive, reverse, digging, pushing), I only managed to spin my tires deeper into the dust. I was stranded and clearly needed help. With a cell phone, I would have let my fingers do the walking. Without one, my feet had to do it.

The nearest sign of civilization was a dilapidated farm house about 40 yards away. I waded shakily through the dry grass, climbed up the steps onto the collapsing porch and knocked insistently on the ripped screen door. A couple of hung-over teenage boys dragged themselves off of their bare living room mattresses to answer my persistent pounding. "The party ended like three hours ago," they informed me. When I explained my situation  and asked for a phone, they said that theirs had been disconnected for months. In an act of selfless heroism, they pulled on some shoes and walked back with me to my car. After helping me try unsuccessfully to push it off the plough, they shrugged and walked back to the house to sleep off the last night's beer binge. But before they did, they sent me to search for a man who was wandering the property seeking antique farm machinery to weld into fences. I found him behind an old silo. He turned out to be a fifty-year-old, three-hundred-pound Mexican immigrant with a great dane. And red pickup. After laughing a bit at my predicament, he drove his truck to the scene of the accident and used it to push my car free of the plough.

Unfortunately, once he did, the radiator began to empty its green contents into the dirt. He raised his eyebrows and whistled through his teeth. "There's no way you're gonna make it to town like that," he told me. We climbed into the cab of his pickup, and he drove me to the next farm with a phone, called a tow truck for me, and drove back to my car to wait with me. For the next hour, we sat  on his tail gate and learned each other's names. I told him I was an art student. He told me he'd sent his daughter to the Art Institute of Seattle with money he'd made from welding fences out of farm junk—the kind of farm junk my car was stuck on. He offered me a cold Pepsi. I showed him the design projects I had in my car.

Thanks to my lack of a cell phone, I ended up spending a ridiculous and fascinating hour on the back of this man's pickup, exchanging stories and sharing soda under the baking sun, next to a dog the size of a pony.

It's true that the story could have turned out differently—so differently that I'd never want to repeat it. A cell phone offers a sense of safety, and I wouldn't want to find myself in a similar situation again without one. But it's also true that if I'd had my little flip phone at my disposal, I would never have made human contact with the people at that farmhouse, and I would have one less memory to laugh about with my kids. In retrospect, I'm thankful that I (and Romeo and Crusoe and Paul Revere and Odysseus) didn't have a phone that day. But I think I prefer the way things are now. Mostly.

A Byte That's Hard to Swallow

She doesn't own a cell phone. She has no e-mail account. She knows "tweeting" to simply mean bird song, and she would never think of writing on somebody's wall. This old friend of mine went out for coffee with me on Friday, and it was refreshing to share face-to-face conversation without the usual interruptions that motherhood brings—and without the digital distance that has slipped between me and friends both old and new.

This dear friend of mine, my 90-year-old grandmother, never witnesses the non-stop exchange of digital small talk, never sees the volley of information that shoots across my computer screen, never finds text messages popping up on her LCD. She's missing out on an unprecedented level of human interaction. But then I have to wonder: When it comes to human interaction, which of us is missing out more? She never meets the Niagra Falls of data that pours over the rest of us. What she meets are people.

At times, I wish she did have an e-mail address; I could just "shoot her a quick e-mail" to share the latest news and consider my granddaughterly duty done. I could upload a cute photo of the kids and call it "keeping in touch." Instead, what I'm forced to do is come into real, messy, inefficient human contact with her, and it's not always so easy. I can't limit her conversation to 140 characters so that I can get back to the dishes. I have to cover my mouth when I sneeze. I can't answer her replies in my own good time. I cannot multitask while sharing a mocha. Communication with my grandmother takes genuine effort.

So much the better.

Perhaps the greatest downside to all the tech-driven interaction is how little it cost us. There's not much emotional investment in a status update. Not much time commitment in a tweet. Small sacrifice in a text message. And a friendship that doesn't cost much can eventually seem to not be worth much either. Small investments pay small dividends.
But that's not to say that they pay no dividends whatsoever.

I must say, I'm thankful for the way electronic communication and internet "communities" can help maintain friendships through years and across miles. Saying goodbye to those I love has been too common an occurrence, and facebook does help—or at least gives the illusion of helping—to bring us closer again.  Just this week, my brother was offered a job in California, and when he and his family move, the separation will be a bit more bearable knowing that, no matter how far away they are, we can Skype.

Small consolation, I know. But it really does seem better than nothing, and maybe my grandmother will think so too, when moving day actually arrives.

Then again, maybe not. All that virtual interaction may seem like merely slapping a Band-Aid on the bleeding wound of physical separation. I don't think any of us who are being honest could say that digital contact can replace a face-to-face meeting. Still, I'd rather have a Band-Aid than sit here and bleed to death.

It's when our connections with those far from us prevent a connection with those nearest to us, that I think these high-tech blessings become a real evil. If I'm walking through life plugged into a Bluetooth earpiece, I feel exempted from acknowledging the people I pass on the sidewalk. When I'm too busy blogging to an unseen audience to find out what the kids are all arguing about right here in the same house, I've lost the real point of communication. When a stranger cannot ask me for directions because he is afraid to burst the earbud-bubble I inhabit, I've sealed myself off from the flesh-and-blood neighbors I am supposed to love.

Remember that commandment? To love my neighbor? It didn't come with a digital caveat. I cannot plug in and opt out. If he'd been grooving to his own personal soundtrack while texting the friends he'd seen ten minutes ago at the mall, the Good Samaritan might never have noticed the guy bleeding to death in a ditch. What's the good of iPhone contact if it makes me forget how to make eye contact?

Too often my virtual relationships interfere with the living, breathing, sneezing, laughing relationships made through meeting in physical space. ("Oh, sorry to interrupt you, but this is an important call...") I cannot maintain a healthy marriage simply by writing on my husband's "wall" three times a day. Or thirty times a day. You and I can both eat a bowl of Cheerios while we video-conference, but we have not had breakfast together. I can sit on my couch with a cracker and a glass of cabernet while I watch a live broadcast church service. But I can't trick myself into believing that I've just participated in Communion. I haven't. Not even if my TV is a high-definition flat screen. I cannot be there in spirit only. My spirit is stuck inside my body. It's supposed to be.

We're Americans. We're all obsessed with bodies—especially around New Year's Day, when ads for weight-loss products and workout DVDs fill the airwaves, and the word "sexy" flies through the air like the swine flu. But this body obsession seems particularly odd—or, perhaps, particularly obvious—when I notice how disembodied our relationships have become. Ever since AT&T redefined what it means to "reach out and touch someone," we've been losing our ability to do it literally.

Of course, I could have talked to my grandmother on the phone, and I do. But a voice heard from across a small table is far warmer than heard through a telephone receiver. This is why it was so refreshing to go out for coffee with her, my old, old friend—to share face-to-face laughter, to knock knees under the same table, to breathe the same air, to brush doughnut crumbs onto the same paper napkin. To step outside my digitized world into hers—into the unmediated, flesh-and-blood realm of true friendship—was delightful.

Sharing a Verizon connection cannot compare with the connection made through breaking bread (or glazed doughnuts) together—sharing a bite instead of a byte. It's something I should do more often.