When is was 6 years old, I came up with a name for myself - Thunder. I was obsessed with the ability to control electricity, and for a solid while, I would draw lightning bolts next to my name. My first usable email address remains just that, “rthunder.” I remember excitedly telling my parents my new name, and my dad was super happy, because to a lot of his friends, he went by the name Bolt. Even on old college medals, the engraving says “BOLT.”

This past week, I spent time in New Jersey, with family friends, people who I spent a great portion of my formative years with. But as anyone who has ever been a child, the quality of relationship that you can have at those ages is fairly limited. We engage on things that aren’t exactly fully developed. What do you know of morals and values and interests at the age of 7? Or 12? Even at 18, you’re still figuring out what you believe. Amongst the children from family friends, they’re never real people during that time. It’s entirely surface level - what depth can you have in such fleeting experiences? And your uncles and aunties and whoever, they entertain you in the ways that you entertain children. Nobody is a real person.

And in a way, your parents aren’t real people, not until they’re required to be. When they start having opinions and are clearly wrong, when you seem them vulnerable and when they whisper in hushed tones their beliefs and worries. When you see them grow old. (Is it too late to be their friend?) Even then, there is a distance that is difficult to know, where your feelings for a peer relationship are muted by multiple decades of practice on a parent-child relationship. It’s, almost, like you don’t want to know.

The way we make close friends, its usually not simply through active effort. Everyone my age seems to want to argue with me on this fact as if their closest friends happened because they found someone they liked and pursued it in avid effort. But realistically, we make our friends through unplanned passive interactions. We grow together in similar environments and know each other over time. And sure, we can spend the effort to maintain or expand those relationships. But let’s be real, often that’s like dating each one of your friends. You can only take on so much responsibility before the effort required is self-defeating towards your other maintained relationships. There’s a reason it’s difficult to make friends after your thirties.

What a family friend is, is your parents’ friends. And running around as a child, this idea was entirely lost on me. The kids are the obligation here. But having stayed a few days with family friends, as an adult, alone, I saw three things - the real people I failed to see in the children of my generation; the real people in the family friends, the uncles and aunties who previously were relegated to entertainment prop pieces; and through their stories, glimpses of the real people in the parents, previously deified, occupying the space between Deva and Asura.

I’m in Boston now. I have never been. But once upon a time, my dad went to college here. Made pizza to get some paychecks. When he was working in Southern California as a what…productions engineer? He would call my uncle, once a week. “I hate it” I could hear in the stories of my uncles a collective narrative of shared meaningful struggle for my dad and his friends, coming to America. In this generation, I hear the result - we don’t have to struggle. We have our safety net. We have to search for our own meaningful values, and invent a meaningful struggle. We have all of the tools they may never have had. We know how to use them. But,there’s something different in our drive.

You don’t really get to experience your parents as people. They are a well worn collection of stories and beliefs and it’s one of the great tragedies of being a child - the embodiment of their lives.

but this week was unexpectedly nice.

To mom and dad. I love you.