Distant relatives of the Roosevelts, robbed at gunpoint, turkey.

Thanksgiving. I like to do it as gluttonously as possible. Originally, I was planning on staying home and having a sushi feast, followed by an entire pie, while watching some greatest hits, such as Gilmore Girls and the BBC Pride and Prejudice (the two have more to do with each other than you might imagine). But, Evan’s down from Buffalo, and though I turned down a bunch of dinner invitations for the indulgence you grant yourself when eating alone, I couldn’t resist heading out to Long Island to see him.

Sometimes I think Evan’s family is more like my family than my real family is. I feel incredibly comfortable with his siblings and parents, and the comfort I get from just one visit out to the Leibu estate relaxes me for weeks. I miss Evan. He was the first of my best friend super group to leave the city, and, as we realized after he left, the centrifugal force keeping us all together. In the afternoon we took a walk up his giant hill and down to the abandoned pool about a quarter mile from his house. The house was once owned by a wayward member of the Roosevelt family and isn’t entirely finished, and probably never will be. It’s sort of like Grey Gardens up there (even beyond the wayward presidential relatives connection) with these spooky ruined rooms filled with nothing but dusty, broken Victorian furniture. The pool is the same way. Complete with an abandoned bathhouse and swing set, it’s a deep cement relic of the 1960s long fallen into disrepair. Ivy covers the sides and hangs down into its depths, which are filled with old decaying leaves. It’s absolutely beautiful and one of my favorite places on the East Coast, for sure.

Evan had had a rough semester at med school in Buffalo for a lot personal reasons, but also because he got robbed at gunpoint about a month ago. What do you say to that? He had just parked his car and was a few feet from his house when it happened. He got away safely, and the cops eventually caught the guys, but what the fuck? It’s terrifying when stuff like this happens to your friends, when your forced to think about what would’ve happened if Evan had been shot? Uh, I shudder to think.

Because of all the hard times he’s been having at school he’s realized that the friends he’s made aren’t as good of friends as he thought. This statement resonated with me because it kind of echoed something I had been thinking about. The friends I have now aren’t like the friends I had two years ago, when Elaine was living down the street from me, and Evan spent every weekend sleeping on my couch. They’re not family. But the thing is, it’s not necessarily bad to have friends that don’t think in the exact same way as you, that you don’t bicker incessantly with, that you don’t have a whole network of inside jokes with that serve to alienate the general population. I miss Evan and Elaine terribly, but looking on the positive side, my life has become more diverse because of their absence. And when they come back, it feels good to see them.

The thing is, we’re probably never going to have another group of friends like the one we had. We’re getting older; our attentions are shifting. But we’ll remain in each other’s lives for quite awhile. I never really thought when I was going out dancing with them or having Shabbat dinner at Elaine’s that these people were like the people who would be in my life. But they are. For better or worse.