It is easy to compartmentalize friendships into periods of life, to sort people into specific, fixed stages. High school friends here, college friends there, grad school friends beyond, clumps of people associated with certain cities or hobbies. At my friend Andrew’s wedding this past weekend, however, I realize I know people from all his scattered clumps in some way: his parents and brothers, a few others close to them, the high school crew from our trivia team at Billy’s on Grand, his fellow Minneapolis teachers, the Georgetown set at my table for dinner, and of course his new wife, Kara, from his law school days. We have, through no great design, charted our way together through the past fifteen years, each of our adventures somehow bound up in the other’s, sometimes near and sometimes far but always somewhere down a shared road.
Andrew is the oldest of four brothers, a boisterous clan forever glued to sports and debating issues great and small, a home that welcomes me in easily whenever I pass through their Roseville abode. He is the son of a girl from Willmar and a Filipino boy from Iowa, two Northwestern Wildcats and Minnesota doctors who set their boys off on their respective pursuits. His family’s story is one of everything a country can be, one that left in him in a lifelong dance with dualism and mixed identity, at times weighty but inseparable from who he is and what he stands for. “The world is a complicated place!” was his Minneapolis era slogan, the catchphrase of a kid who lashed out at hard dogmas of any stripe, my fellow trafficker in nuance, at times overwhelming but still a grounding foundation for the long slog through the meritocratic pressure-cooker. Together we have swum through the ebbs and flows, sometimes in fierce debate, sometimes quietly processing as we walk in Minnesota woods, selves constructed as we string together the various strands of our lives.
We met as two Georgetown kids, fresh off the plane and thrown into a pre-orientation program that took us deep into the hidden corners of DC, our ties deepening as two Minnesotans drawn to Latin American affairs who shared sporadic classes and interests. I remember it cementing on a night when we returned from our semesters abroad, Andrew from Buenos Aires and me from Mexico City, gushing about what we’d seen, locked in our own side conversations in the kitchen as an Australian visitor from my Mexico days captivated the crowd and earned my off-campus house its only ever police call. Though he did not live at 3731 R, the site of that night’s festivities, Andrew was such a regular feature that we came to call him the fifth roommate in that tiny rowhouse in Burleith.
Our paths took us back to Minnesota, Andrew for a Teach for America stint, me for whatever it was that I did in those first two years post-graduation, and when he stuck on for more teaching and I went to Minneapolis for grad school, it was obvious enough that we should live together. We settled into 2107 Hennepin, an old brick apartment just south of Downtown, ideally placed for Lake of the Isles strolls and Uptown revelry and right next to Minneapolis institutions such as Sebastian Joe’s Ice Cream and the late, great Liquor Lyle’s. We toured the city and sampled breweries and dashed together halfhearted Trader Joe’s meals, longing for days when we’d have the time and resources for more. Andrew became a regular in my urbanist circles, while I joined his family for soccer games and fall hikes in state parks. We both had our ups and downs in those two years, saw each other in some of our less composed moments, but in retrospect it is a blur of contentment, each of us settling on our subsequent paths and for the time being enjoying everything Minneapolis had to offer. When I think of my 20-something self the frozen image from that age will no doubt involve Andrew and me shuffling back from Lyle’s, deep in debate, never with all the answers but determined to chart our way through.
As two restless searchers, we pushed outward together from our Uptown confines. First there were those fall hikes in pursuit of leaves, up toward Duluth and down the Mississippi and that one sublime trip to Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin, a tradition continued even this year. Early in my time there we took a jaunt to Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, and we capped our time as roommates with a grand road trip across the American West. If two friends can together endure a broken car window in San Francisco and snoring Germans in a Vancouver hostel and generally survive a steady string of ten-hour days on the road with just each other, it is probably something that will stick. When we went back home we went our separate ways, him to Cornell Law and me back home to Duluth. But still we kept crossing paths, him returning to Duluth deep in midwinter and me heading for New York, me dragging him to see the state hockey tournament and him making Covid-era escapes to the freedom of the Northwoods.
Andrew returned to DC two years ago, and his wedding there this past weekend gives me the chance to walk back along all these paths we’ve known. I bring two other newlywed friends along on a Georgetown tour and see this city of my teenage dreams with fresh eyes again. We meander the old haunts, drink a pitcher at the Tombs with a basketball game against Syracuse running in the background, and I reminisce on how this place made me who I am, able to flip the switch between different worlds with ease. I take my own moment on a run up and down the steeper-than-I-remembered hills of Northwest DC, Embassy Row and Rock Creek and the Glover-Archbold Parkway and Dumbarton Oaks, across the checkerboard of lettered and numbered streets where this friendship was forged. Much as I may appreciate my time in Minneapolis or Mexico or the places I have deeper roots, there are only two places I can unabashedly call home: Duluth and here.
Yet again, the dualism, the pushes inward and outward: Andrew and I both nest deeply but are both School of Foreign Service graduates, forever making sense of the broader world around us. The melding of Kara and Andrew’s worlds takes place at the Meridian International Center, a stately manor for a diplomacy thinktank where, on a terrace beneath carefully tended lindens, they found a venue with the class and decorum that befit them. As the night rolls along we sip cocktails in gilded rooms and dine beneath laden bookshelves, but before long the night explodes into energy and a plot hatches to get Andrew airborne on the dance floor and he sails up above all these revelers between different stages, united in celebration of a couple who seem meant to be.
In Kara I saw quickly that Andrew had found someone for him, someone who can both match his pace and pull him out of his head when need be, someone who transfixed him even as they lived apart for a time. She grounded that mixed soul, she turned him into a cat person, and she and I laughed together at some of the quirks that come from living with Andrew. The raw emotion in their vows, filled with sincerity and depth and reminiscences on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, made it obvious this will last. I wondered if I would get emotional, but instead I just found myself beaming, pleased to know such a good friend, pleased to be in the company of so many fun humans, ready to push this night as far as I could because every second was worth embracing. These are the friendships we build for life, the collective stories that pull together and push us toward the selves we want to be. They give us our homes in the world.