A New Year's Resolution: Deepening our connections

Recently, while helping a client organize her office after downsizing to a continuing care community, I came across a Tupperware bin of letters. “What are these?” I asked her. She put on her reading glasses and said, “Oh, it’s my Round Robin.”

“Round robin?” I asked.

“When we graduated from Ottawa University in Kansas in 1958, a group of seven of us promised to never lose touch,” said Carol Springfield.

The group had met in 1954 and had lived together in the Women’s Dorm. At graduation, they were heading out in different directions all across the country.

“Shirley Pemberton, who lives in Florida, would write the first letter,” Carol explained, “send it on to Kathy Dillen in North Carolina, where she would read Shirley’s, then add hers. From there it went to Barbara Thyr in Kansas, next to Nancy Knight in California, then Jackie Pritchard in Iowa, then Ruth Evans in Wisconsin. By the time I got it in Maryland, the envelope was thick. I would read everyone else’s letters between cooking and teaching and raising my two boys, then add mine, and then send it back to Barbara. Barbara would replace her outdated letter with a new one. Getting those letters was like getting a Christmas present. They would make me laugh and cry.”

This group of seven friends would add between two and four letters to the Round Robin each year. Carol said, “I slowed things down the years I had babies and was teaching!”

Jackie once told the group, “I didn’t know this was the way I’d get a family.” She had grown up as an orphan. In 2008, she was the first to pass away. “Jackie was the funny one,” Carol said. “In all the pictures with Jackie, our mouths were wide open laughing.” (In fact, she's the one in the back row, second from the right, in the photo running with this piece.) Carol and Jim drove up to Iowa three times the year Jackie was dying.

Over the last 60 years, this group of women, who are now in their early eighties, have gotten together as a group at least ten times. At the first reunion in 1963, many brought babies to Canada. Since then, they have met in Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Kansas and North and South Carolina.

Carol kept her letters. In one from the 1970s, she starts, “First for the good news—I think Jim’s years of teaching Amy Carter Sunday School paid off because we got invited to the White House!” The second page goes into the bad news. These letters detailed marriages and divorces, births and deaths, details about children, grandchildren and parents, high moments and low ones.

“No one dropped out,” Carol said. “There was such a connection. I think a small school does that for you.” Carol paused, then her eyes began to water. “Kathy is dying now with stage four lung cancer. She never smoked a cigarette in her life.” Kathy’s husband Jon had been in Jim and Carol’s wedding and they had been in Kathy and Jon’s.

Carol said, “I’m going to call Shirley and see if she has a photo from when we got together in Hilton Head.” I listened to her say in the phone, “Shirley, don’t fall out of your chair. It’s Carol…” She explained what she was looking for and moments later Shirley's grandson Robert had scanned a photo and emailed it to me.

Many years ago, my husband and I lived briefly in Japan with two of our three kids and a kind Japanese woman there told me that in the Japanese language they have discrete words to indicate whether you have been friends for fifty years, sixty, seventy, even eighty years. These words indicate the depth of the friendship. The women in Carol's Round Robin have been friends for 64 years and as we head into the new year, I thought what better way to have people consider how to build their own equivalent of a Round Robin. After all, at the end of the day, what's more important than investing in friendships such as these, people to walk with you through the high highs and low lows and all the gray areas in-between that make up a life?

Cheers, and Happy New Year!