Les vieux

It's no shocker, I guess, that ramblers seek ramblers. Or it might just be a demographic foible (middle-class, overeducated, with European roots) that most of my friends and family are scattered all over the place.

Even the ones who've chosen to settle permanently or semi-permanently have picked spots far from where they started, including me. We all have a hometown, a home base, wherever we happen to be for now, and a list of 100 ideas for what's next.

Chapel Hill, Philly, Ann Arbor, Baltimore, Nashville, Mt. Vernon, Portland, Seattle, LA, Amherst, Cambridge, DC, San Francisco.

Lisbon, Glasgow, Beijing, Tours, Buenos Aires, London, Paris, Kyoto, Sydney, Dublin, Cape Town.

It's exhilarating and lucky to be this free to roam, but there's bittersweetness in not seeing each other much. Then again . . . we're all used to it, so it's easy to pick up right where we left off during the last stolen visit.

Maybe you were on your way to Italy while I was heading back from Paris, so we had dinner at the Amsterdam airport. Or you were in Jersey and I was in DC, so we met in New York, because everybody checks in there once in a while.

Last week, I had the chance to catch up with a friend I hadn't seen in about four years. We've never lived in the same place (California and France for me, Arkansas and China for him), but we've managed to get by well enough on letters, email, the occasional phone call.

You could say it's a phenomenon of our generation that we've figured out how to stay connected with people across the globe, but history illustrates otherwise. The real trick modernites have played is in discovering out how to make distance and time feel like little more than minor inconveniences.

I feel sure that most ramblers I know would agree: When you have a few hours in a shared city, a couple of drinks, a photo booth, and a DSL line, four years are just a hiccup. 21st-century friendship can handle it without thinking twice—while booking the next plane ticket.