Forging & Fruits (Or, the Presents of Presence)
i. the forging (2020)
In the early days of January 2020, I was helping my daughter pack for her semester abroad. It's what we do. She goes, I help get her ready to go. It's my way of staying close while saying goodbye.
The winter break had already reached beyond that particular point of restlessness, when the comfort of home and family starts to chafe against the pull of what's next. And what was next had her practically vibrating with anticipation. A semester abroad in Europe. A flat in the heart of London shared with a group of her closest friends. That vast, ancient continent spread out before them like a buffet this group would devour. Weekend trips to countries they'd seen in movies, late nights in bars and clubs where no one knew their names, the kind of freedom that only exists when you're twenty years old and an ocean away from everyone who thinks they know who you are.
We'd done this ritual so many times we had it down to a science—our own little choreography that looks to anyone else like packing but isn't really about packing at all. She can pack just fine without me, been doing it since she was a kid. What's actually happening here is that she wants company, someone to make it fun. I'm that someone.
We review outfits laid out across her bed, debate what stays and what goes, work through the practical necessities—toiletries, chargers, adapters, the battalion of makeup and skincare products—then move on to the intangibles: books, notebooks, trinkets I insist she needs (she humors me, then later hides them away in her closet). Our favorite part comes at the end, making the final cuts. Does she really need this long coat, is she ever going actually wear those shoes, and yes, "you're taking the freaking hat and gloves because its cold there now."
Oh, and there's something else I do, my own small act of subterfuge I'm still certain she doesn't know about but wouldn't be surprised at all if she does. I always tuck something special in her luggage somewhere, some little thing that when she finds it she'll know it was me who put it there, my way of making sure she brings home away with her. That's a dad with access.
Among the books she packed for this particular trip was The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson's head-to-toe tour of the human body, a book about how our bodies function, how they heal themselves, how they sometimes fail us. "We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh," Bryson writes, "and yet take it almost entirely for granted." On it's face, it's an interesting choice. Though we had no idea yet just how interesting, or how ironic, this book choice would soon become. She was bringing it to read on planes and trains between cities, in cafes on lazy afternoons, on some tiny balcony overlooking whatever charming European city she happened to be in.
That irony, of course, was already unfolding on the other side of the world. A respiratory virus was tearing through Wuhan, China, leaving a fast-growing body count in its wake. Europe would be next. Within weeks, the only thing anyone would be talking about was the human body—its vulnerabilities, its failures, the impossible ease with which it could betray us. But we didn't know that yet. Not really. Not in any way that felt real or urgent or close.
She left.
Her calls and messages home started almost immediately after she landed. The flat they'd found, small but perfect. The friendly neighborhood pubs they'd already scoped out. Day trips to places I remembered from my own study abroad in London decades earlier. Now it was hers to discover. Classes that hadn't even started yet but already felt like an afterthought to the real education happening in the streets and cafes and late-night conversations in languages they were fumbling through.
Then the calls shifted.
One Sunday night she and her friends found themselves in Venice's Marco Polo Airport and nothing felt right. The terminal she described sounded like something out of a dystopian thriller with military personnel carrying rifles that seemed designed for war zones, not airports, their faces obscured by masks nobody had seen outside of pandemic movies. Medical workers in full hazmat gear were setting up actual checkpoints, taking everyone's temperature with handheld scanners, pulling travelers aside for questioning in rapid, urgent Italian that felt more like interrogation than inquiry. By then the world had learned about the strange sickness that had slipped out of the far east into Western Europe, and northern Italy had become the epicenter. Or at least the first one the West was forced to pay attention to.
Everything that had felt like the thrilling opening act of four of the best months of her life suddenly felt like she'd stumbled into the third act of a horror film, the excitement curdling into a creeping dread that settled in her stomach and wouldn't leave, the suffocating sense that the walls were closing in and there was nowhere safe to run, that the adventure they'd all been promised was about to be yanked away and replaced with something none of them had signed up for.
That's exactly what happened.
Light-switch fast. There was no gradual dimming. One day she's hoping to salvage the semester, the next day the university is sending emails about "monitoring the situation," and just forty-eight hours later BAM every American student studying abroad was recalled to the U.S. Just like that. Semester over. Come home. Now.
Five weeks after leaving for London, she was back home in New York.
A few weeks later, she returned to school on the west coast, to the off-campus house she and nine other girls had rented for the year. The place that was supposed to be their base for football weekends and Thursday night parties and all the loud, messy, spectacular nonsense of being young and free and invincible in college. Instead, it became their quarantine bunker. Their whole world.
By early March, the government shut it all down. They closed the world. Issuing emergency declarations, stay-at-home orders, shelter-in-place mandates. They shuttered schools, emptied college campuses, closed businesses. They forced every major professional and college level sports league to halt seasons mid-stride. They shut down concerts and theaters and comedy clubs and every form of live gathering where people came together to feel something collective. They closed restaurants and bars. They canceled weddings and funerals and graduations. Some genius in California even had the stellar idea to close the public beaches because apparently… nah, I can't. I can't dignify this galaxy-brain decision with analysis.
But that wasn't all. We locked kids indoors, severed them from their friends and classmates and coaches and professors, from games and dances and bars and first apartments and summer jobs and road trips and all those small, irreplaceable rites of passage that mark the distance between who you were last year and who you're supposed to be becoming this one—all without anyone even bothering to run the most basic cost-benefit analysis, as if simple logic had been declared non-essential too. Never slowing down long enough to ask which posed the greater threat—the virus itself or our barbaric, scorched-earth reaction to it—especially for the youngest among us, was a masterclass in ambitious stupidity. Fucking up an entire generation while patting ourselves on the back for "keeping them safe."
Countless millions of young people lost time they'll never get back. Not just the memories they never got the chance to make, but all the formative chaos and beautiful mistakes of early adulthood. The revelations that only come from stumbling through your early twenties with no script and too much freedom and nobody telling you what comes next.
Entire generations paid for the losses immediately, in real time, in the isolation and fear and crushing boredom of those early days. They're still paying now, in the flattened social skills and the anxiety that won't lift and the gaps in timelines where life was supposed to be happening. And they'll pay for decades to come in ways we can't yet see. In all the versions of themselves they never got to try on, all the paths they never got to explore, all the becoming that got frozen in place and never quite thawed.
But scattered in all that wreckage, underneath all that loss and menace and fear and stolen time, something else was quietly taking shape. Something nobody saw coming. Beauty in them there hills. Small pockets of grace emerged not despite the awfulness but because of it—unexpected gifts that only became visible once everything else had been stripped away, once all the noise and distraction and busy-ness that normally fills young lives had been forcibly removed and what remained was just people and time and the question of what to do with both.
I know because I observed one of those pockets of grace up close.
Those ten girls marooned together in that rented house when their campus went dark and the bars closed and Greek life simply evaporated. The noisy chaos of football Saturdays and the sweaty crush of fraternity parties gave way to something slower and quieter and much more profound, something none of them could have predicted would matter more than any of it, something they were building while they were living it, unable to see what it would become.
They were forced into an analog existence their generation had never known. At a time when so many others used lockdown as permission to do nothing, to scroll and sleep and let everything slide into a blur of sweatpants and Instacart sugar highs, these women filled their days. Dinners around their kitchen table that started at six and ended whenever they ended. Long walks through empty streets. Drives out to the desert just to remember the world was bigger than their walls. Trivia nights invented out of boredom. Craft days where they painted just to fill hours. Late-night talks that sprawled from the kitchen table to the living room floor. All they had was each other and hours that needed filling, so they made their own entertainment, filled time with conversation instead of content, talked until sunrise not because they were avoiding something but because they actually wanted to, because being together like this felt rare even then, felt like something worth staying up for. The college all-nighter, redefined.
What began as makeshift—as making do—became something they didn't yet have words for. A chosen family. Not the family you're born into, but the one you choose and then build without meaning to, brick by brick, meal by meal, laugh by laugh, crisis by crisis, all those hours you'd normally scatter across hundreds of people and places now concentrated on the nine other women in your living room.
What they forged in those strange, suspended months isn't the loose weave most of us remember from college. Those bonds that feel enormous and unbreakable in your early twenties, only to watch them thin and fray as everyone scatters to distant cities and demanding jobs and marriages and versions of themselves that don't quite fit with who they used to be. This was something else entirely. Something forged under pressure that most people will never experience, will never understand. Something earned. Something with weight and permanence. Less like vines that curl and climb for a season and more like roots driving so deep into dark soil that nothing can pull them loose. Ever.
It was an experiment in closeness and intimacy, in friendship and devotion, in memory-making and myth-building, and the experiment worked. They'll carry it for the rest of their lives. And seeing my daughter at the center of something this rare, this good means everything to this dad.
Sure, I marvel at this group—at their tight bond, their fierce loyalty, the way they move through the world like people who know something the rest of us forgot. Who's asking? It's my daughter, so yeah, I'm biased. Of course I'm going to see magic where others might see ordinary friendship. Call it paternal pride if you want, but I know what I'm looking at. I don't think I'm wrong. In fact, I'm certain of it.
I'm also certain they weren't the only ones, that this same miraculous alchemy happened in living rooms and apartments all across the country during those locked-down years. Young people who went into quarantine as friends and came out as family, bound by something no semester abroad could have created, no four-year blur of Greek formals and spring breaks and late-night pizza runs. Something you can only forge when everything else gets stripped away and all you have left is the people in the room with you and the question of whether they're going to be enough.
So when I say that for these ten women, being enough for each other wasn't even a question—I mean it. It was a certainty. It was everything.
And five years later it still is.
In the middle of so much loss this was the gift nobody saw coming. That in being driven apart from the world, separated from everything familiar and comfortable and easy, whole circles of young people found themselves bound together in ways they never imagined possible, in ways that will define the rest of their lives. Something beautiful growing in the darkest soil.
ii. the fruit (2025)
This past summer, my daughter and some friends came to visit for the weekend.
It was a weekend that felt charmed from the start—perfect weather, good energy, great food, everyone in sync. I knew that much even while it was happening. What I didn't realize until a few days after they left was what made it special, that particular quality of fullness I couldn't quite name at the time.
Five years had passed since those locked-down months when the ten of them lived together in that rented house. Five years of first jobs and apartments in different cities, of weddings and breakups and all the scattered chaos of your twenties. Things changed. People changed. But not this group. The forging held. And that weekend, I got to see the fruit.
Those few days unspooled in that unhurried summer way, each one bleeding into the next without anyone checking the time or worrying about what came next. Mornings meant coffee and easy conversation where nobody's in a rush to be anywhere or do anything except sit and talk and let the day find its own rhythm. Afternoons by the pool where their laughter seemed to fill every corner of the yard, conversations bouncing from the profound to the ridiculous and back again. They did their workouts together too—this synchronized yoga-dance-fitness thing where all of them moved through the same routine at the same time, nobody worried about looking graceful or getting it right, just this coordinated chaos that made me smile every time I saw it. Trips into town for errands that somehow always turned into small adventures. The sound of cars on the gravel driveway announcing new arrivals long before you could see them, friends passing through, stopping by, the group absorbing each visitor seamlessly, naturally.
Later the sun would set in impossible layers of orange and pink and purple that looked Photoshopped but weren't, and by the time darkness finally settled in it felt like the whole world was exhaling. Nights meant gatherings in the kitchen—chopping, slicing, laughing, telling stories, recounting memories—while smoke from the grill drifted across the yard and made everything smell like summer. Dinners that started at a reasonable hour and stretched until reason was no longer a thought. Movies chosen by committee after long, hilarious debates about what everyone was in the mood for. The particular comfort of being around people who never have to perform for each other, who can just be.
What struck me throughout the weekend was how much they got done without ever seeming rushed, how easily they moved through it all, how comfortable they were together, how genuinely supported each one of them seemed to feel. There's a maturity to this group that's unusual for their age, a sophistication that comes partly from the families they grew up in and partly from the special authenticity of their friendship—the way they make each other sharper, more curious, better versions of themselves.
One morning we found ourselves deep in a conversation that ranged broadly across a wildly random collection of interesting topics. The group's recent trip to Sicily, how sun-drunk they still were on the memory of it, the sobering details of the AI 2027 report, friends and family who'd lost homes in the LA fires, Hulu's new Amanda Knox documentary, wildly speculative conversations about Helter Skelter and the Manson girls, and the unexpected parallels they'd drawn between the deaths of Princess Di and JFK Jr. And when I stepped back and just watched them talk among themselves—at the pool in the afternoon, over dinner that stretched for hours, late into the night when most people would have run out of things to say—I kept seeing that same elastic spaciousness of their bond, how they can hold tragedy and trivia in the same breath, how they give equal dignity to the light and the unbearably heavy, refusing to collapse life's full, unwieldy register into something tidier or safer.
There's an depth to them as a group that feels almost anachronistic, like they're operating on frequencies most people their age have forgotten exist. Real emotions across the full spectrum—joy and grief, profound and silly, wise beyond their years and beautifully young all at once. Because the truth is, if you want to really know someone, you can't just look at them individually. You have to see them in their friend group, watch how they move through the world with the people they've chosen and the people who've chosen them. This group in particular is the embodiment of that—ten people who've somehow figured out how to bring out what's best in each other without diminishing what makes each of them singular.
When they left that Sunday afternoon, the house settled into that particular quiet that follows good company. The quiet felt like quiet, but the emptiness didn't feel like emptiness. It felt more like afterglow. Their laughter still hung in the corners of rooms. Their warmth still lingered like heat from stones that had been sitting in the summer sun. It's always fun and special spending time with any of the many iteration of this group. Always. But something about that visit shimmered differently, and I couldn't quite place why.
It took me three days to pin it down. When it finally came to me, the difference wasn't in what was there. It was in what was missing.
It was their phones. For three entire days, I barely saw one. No heads bowed in thrall to the glow. No restless scrolling or half-listening while half-elsewhere. No eyes glazing over mid-conversation because someone's attention just got yanked away by a buzz in their pocket. No conversations dying mid-sentence because someone "just has to check this one thing real quick." No one shoving their phone in your face forcing you to watch the "funniest video ever." No compulsivity. No presence-splitting. It was just them. And their unbroken, undistracted, and utterly radiant presence.
And then my brain did that funny connect-the-dots thing when I realized this, in many ways, was the flip side of what happened in that Venice airport five years ago. Back then, the threat was external, visible—soldiers with rifles, medical workers in hazmat suits, a virus you knew was coming even if you couldn't see it. The invasion was real and obvious and menacing. Everyone could point to it and say, "There. That's the danger." These phones are different. They represent a completely different kind of invasion. One that's quieter, more insidious, and arguably, more dangerous. One we've all learned to accept as normal even as it hollows us out from the inside—our friendships, our relationships, our sanity, our ability to just be with another human being without always needing something else to fill the space and crackle the silence.
The crucial difference is that we didn't choose COVID. It came, we dealt with it—terribly, destructively, catastrophically—but we dealt with it. The phones are all choice. Every time we reach for them, every time we let them interrupt a conversation, every time we choose the screen over the person in front of us—that's a decision we're making. I've written about this threat from every angle I can think of because I believe it's the defining crisis of our time. The invisible pandemic we're choosing to live with.
These young women learned something during those locked-down months that most of their generation missed entirely. They learned to recognize the threat of fractured attention, learned how to protect themselves from the thing everyone else surrendered to the moment the external threat lifted. While everyone else raced back to fill the bottomless void of all the stimulation they'd been denied, they came away knowing that the greatest luxury isn't information or entertainment or the next dopamine hit. It's this. It's them as a them. It's being present, being engaged, being together without needing anything else to complete the moment.
So yes, I'll say it again—and I'll keep saying it because it shouldn't be remarkable but it is: A full weekend and I hardly saw a phone. Goodness gracious. What I did see, over and over and over, what I always see are conversations that stretch and deepen easily, eyes that actually meet in the middle, attention that never splinters, silences that settle in comfortably because no one ever seems to feel the need to fill them with noise or news or some moron yapping into a video camera.
In a world strained to the brink by distraction, their undivided presence—with each other, with me, with the moment itself—for three whole days felt magnificent. Miraculous, even. I've watched this group for years now. It's love and listening and attention and support and laughter all the way down. When one of them speaks, the others listen, and never with that glazed-over impatience of people waiting breathlessly for their next turn to talk, but with genuine curiosity. They look at each other fondly. They take each other seriously. They take care of each other without making a production of it. They laugh with their whole bodies. They exist, for days on end, in the same continuous moment, sharing the same now.
Back in 2020, when my daughter packed Bill Bryson's The Body for her study abroad trip, we didn't know we were about to become obsessed with bodies—their vulnerabilities, their failures, their capacity for betrayal. But what she and her friends discovered was something Bryson understood all along: "We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted." They learned not to take it for granted. Not the body itself, but the being-present-in-the-body, the paying-attention-with-the-body, the using-your-actual-eyes-to-look-at-actual-people instead of bowing your head to a screen because it gives some rapacious psychopath in Silicon Valley a boner and another billion dollars.
They became fully embodied in a way most people have entirely forgotten how to be, especially in the presence of the people we claim to love most. It's a remarkable thing about this group that they didn't unlearn it. That they didn't capitulate. And that they refused to give away what every generation before them held so dearly. In a world with amnesia about the importance of presence, that treats distraction as inevitable and fractured attention as the cost of modern life, they remembered. They kept what the pandemic accidentally taught them. And now, years later, it's just who they are.
What a gift.
To me, of course. To their other friends and family, yes indeed. But the real gift—the one that matters most—is the gift they give to themselves and to each other, over and over and over again because presence—true, inhabited presence—and attention is how we tell people they matter. It's how we say, without saying it, "You are worth my full attention. This moment with you is worth protecting from everything that wants to steal it," which is especially true in a world where attention has become actual currency and presence has become the rarest luxury of all.
iii. the forging and the fruit
I thought for weeks about that afterglow, the way it lingered in the house long after they left that Sunday. Real presence does that. It leaves something behind you can actually feel. Not a memory exactly, but a warmth that rests in the rooms, that changes the quality of silence. I felt it for days. Still feeling it now. That particular fullness, that ease, that comfort. The echo of their laughter, yes, but more—the deeper thing underneath it. The unmistakable sense of young people who genuinely see each other, who still know how to be together, without needing anything from it except the simple fact of being there. In a world that's mostly forgotten how to do this, watching them remember always feels like witnessing something rare and necessary and almost holy.
Something the pandemic taught them and other close-knit friend groups, other sisterhoods and brotherhoods. Something simple and profound and critically important and almost impossibly difficult to hold in our current moment. That we need each other. That we are enough for each other. That attention is love made visible. That the deepest bonds aren't forged in the highlights and the spectacle, but in the simple, sacred act of showing up and being present, fully, completely, without reservation or distraction.
What began as crisis for these ten young girls became an education. What started as isolation became intimacy. And what could have broken them instead made them unbreakable.
In the middle of so much loss, this is the gift that keeps giving. Not just what they found in each other during those locked-down years, but what they chose to keep. The roots they grew when everything else was taken away. The presence they learned to give when presence was all they had.
And oh my, what a beautiful thing it is.