In the spring of 1994, a friend of mine, David Raymond, asked me if I’d like to come to a meeting of what he called a “men’s group” that he was going to host at his house. The participants he had in mind were all graduates of the Landmark Forum, a three-day personal development course that I’d taken several years earlier, and his intention was that we would meet monthly to talk about “life stuff” (my term, not his). I had some misgivings but I had a lot of respect for David and also liked the other people he planned to invite, so I accepted his invitation. I figured I could always back out later if I didn’t like it.
To make a long story short, the men’s group (or Men’s Group as I think of it now) has been meeting monthly ever since. Sadly, David died in 2001, and another charter member, Bill Cole-Kiernan of Lambertville, NJ, died three years ago. There have also been other changes in membership as people have dropped out or moved away and others have joined to take their places, but most of us meeting today were part of that original group more than 26 years ago.
For the first several years each of us would share whatever challenges we were facing in life and other members of the group would offer suggestions for dealing with them. The coaching was invariably insightful and helpful. As time went on we all increasingly got our lives together, and the life-challenges were fewer and farther between. Eventually our meetings became simply an opportunity for long-time friends to get together and share what was going on in our lives — career developments, offsprings’ wedding plans, insights on life, observations about the political scene.
Our meetings offer both a comfortable social occasion and what therapists call a “safe space.” Occasionally we’ll hold someone’s feet to the fire when they aren’t doing what they know they need to do in order to achieve something they’re committed to, but the need for that has become pretty rare.
The number of people in the group has fluctuated over the years; these days there are four of us. Until this spring we met at my house in Lawrenceville, NJ, since I’m the most centrally located. One member of the group moved several years ago to a town on the other side of Philadelphia, but he continued to join us every month. Until the coronavirus forced us to transition to virtual meetings, I provided food and the other three rotated bringing wine.
It occurred to us during our last meeting that one of our emeritus members who moved to Singapore several years ago might be able to rejoin us now that we’re meeting on Zoom, so we reached out to him and he was delighted to accept the invitation for our meeting next month — one of those small blessings resulting from the pandemic. (Our 6:30pm meeting will be at 6:30 the next morning for him, before he leaves for work.)
The Men’s Group has long been a linchpin of my life. I suspect that we’ll continue to meet until all but one of is dead and buried. I’ll always be grateful to David for sticking his neck out and proposing something that was untested and unconventional. Our little group is a small piece of his very large legacy.