One month after I graduated from college, I drove 2,600 miles in six days with my best friends, who had packed a Penske truck full of their belongings to relocate from Columbus, Ohio, to the Bay Area.
These were no ordinary friends. I had never sat in a college lecture hall with them, nor had we gone to high school football games. We had never even lived in the same city.
We were youth group friends, from the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization specifically, and for six years we had subsisted on handwritten letters, e-mails and weekend visits. Now we were roadtripping westward, giddy at the prospect of six consecutive days with each other.
We met at age 16 at leadership summer camp, where we celebrated Shabbat together in sundresses and Teva sandals in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. Instead of canoeing and berry picking, we talked about being leaders and read binders bloated with related handouts.
It sounds boring, compared to regular overnight camp, but I assure you it was not. As teenagers, being asked to think seriously about leadership, Judaism and identity — and articulating those thoughts without anyone telling us we were right or wrong — was revelatory.
It was unifying, too, because light-hearted moments complemented the serious ones. We debated the merits of camp food, laid out in the sun and strategized where to make out without getting caught.
We became so close that when we got home from camp, we talked for hours at a time, driving up our parents’ phone bills in the pre–cell phone era. We worked at mall kiosks or baby-sat so we could buy plane tickets to visit each other. We had big sleepovers and laughed until our stomachs hurt.
We requested to be on the same Israel trip the summer after we met at camp, and in Tel Aviv we declared our group “the six of us.”
We puffy-painted picture frames for each other and invited one another to our senior proms and homecomings.
Somehow we continued to stay in touch throughout college, visiting each other to see a Phish concert, or celebrate birthdays, or just because.
And then we graduated, and things shifted. We began to lose touch as a group. A few connections remained, but the family dynamic wilted as we moved across the country — Jonah to Washington, D.C., Max to Keystone, Colo., Adam and Erica to San Francisco, Jamie to Chicago and me to Cedar Falls, Iowa.
The common denominators of youth group and college no longer applied.
Would our relationships profoundly change, our affection fade, our bonds sustain an adolescent friendship through adulthood?
I got my answer in September, when Adam and Erica got married. I signed their ketubah. Just moments before I walked down the aisle as a bridesmaid at their wedding, Jonah (the groomsman escorting me) leaned over and whispered, “Did you ever think we’d be here?”
I didn’t. After all, we met each other when a typical Saturday night out involved attending youth group programs, hanging out with friends in our parents’ basements or playing laser tag in their backyards.
And then, arm in arm, two old friends walked toward the chuppah.
I don’t think any of us imagined that 10 years after connecting through BBYO we’d still be so close.
The enduring bonds with childhood friends have been on my mind a lot lately, because of how this September wedding reconnected a family of friends.
We were so over the moon about spending time together again that one week after the September wedding, all six of us — plus a few new friends and partners — booked airline tickets to Denver for a snow-filled reunion at Max’s house in the Rockies. That trip is later this month, and I can’t wait.
Joining a Jewish youth group transformed my life, both as an adolescent and as an adult, because the friends I made then are still my friends today.
And I wouldn’t be who I am without them.
Stacey Palevsky lives in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected].