My friend C joined a book group, which is not something I would've imagined her ever doing, but I can understand the impulse. I don't know how long the group lasted, or how many times she went, but one of the books they read was Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, a book I read and enjoyed a few years ago. Hearing this book mentioned provoked in me a detailed memory flash of another old friend, N. N and C and I worked together at a bookstore, and I summoned this memory of seeing N putting her bookmarked copy of Birds of America in her bag before leaving for the night, and then glancing up and smiling at me in this particular way she had which always made me smile back, a way of smiling which produced in me a strong feeling of camaraderie, some almost childlike emotion of inchoate fondness, the source of which is a mystery but is all the more pleasurable because of it. Everyone has known people who make them feel this way, whose mere presence provides such moments. N was one of those people I never knew very well but always wanted to, the kind of person you somewhat take for granted at a time in your life when interesting people are seemingly everywhere. You become complacent at those times, and feel little urgency about friendships, not realizing till later that such situations are very much the exception to the rule, the rule basically being that life is full of non-reading, TV-watching dullards with the most dreary conventional opinions and ordinary imaginations it's possible to conceive, characterless and humorless vacancies passing as individuals, who couldn't keep up their end of an intelligent conversation if their lives depended on it, who couldn't make you laugh and in fact couldn't sustain your interest for any reason whatsoever.

Many people can, in retrospect, point to one time in their lives when they knew many interesting, like-minded people, people of substance and humor, to whom attachments could possibly have been formed, but that at that time many possible attachments were in fact not formed, or were only casually formed, for one reason or another. And then inevitably this time comes to an end, and the people in this group move on to different things, and those other people who have dispersed or scattered or simply vanished may or may not have moved into even better situations, but the fact is that you didn't, the situations you moved into were in fact worse, these new situations constituted your immersion or rather re-immersion into the dullard world, and you look back on this prior period and realize that even though you might not have been happy, the times were interesting and the people were interesting and lively and surprising, and you think that perhaps that is more significant than happiness anyway. And the thing is, you can be happier now than you were then and yet you still feel wistful about it because happiness in oneself is not the same as happiness with others, and it's rare to have periods characterized by either condition, much less both at the same time.