Dining with Squirrels

I’ve been reading through some old letters this week.  They’re from a friend who died many years ago and they make my memory of him shine.  His writing was just like his personality:  sparkling, irreverent, delighted with life and himself. He wrote me letters on the back of postcards, wedging in 200 hundred words where anyone else might have mastered 50.  He wrote me one letter on the backs of paper menus from the restaurant where he worked.  Business was slow or he was wantonly slacking, skewering customers in cutting detail and describing his efforts to achieve a Savage Tan.   His words wrapped me in a memory so strong it made me cry.

I have boxes and boxes of letters:  stacks of airmail letters from Karl tied with a ribbon, boxes of birthday cards from every year of my life, old letters from my Big Blue World penpal Mindi who was a huge disappointment as she was from Michigan and therefore not really the international contact I was hoping for.  It may be that I’m the only one hoarding letters, that most people have long since tossed their birthday cards from 1979. But my memory is astonishingly bad.  I’ve contemplated a CAT scan to see just what sort of gaping hole there is in the cerebral cheese.  I have a friend from high school who can tell me exactly what I was wearing at every event we ever attended:  “the light blue, knee-length linen with the sailor collar at the Mother-Daughter Tea and Chapel.”  I cannot remember being at the event. Sometimes I think I’m remembering an occasion and then I’ll find a photo that matches my memory and realize I’m actually just remembering the photo and nothing else.  I find this really frustrating, sometimes terrifying.  So my letter collection is probably some talisman against an old age with no memories at all.

I’m wondering if Ben and Lucy’s generation will have any letters to save.  Who writes letters anymore?  I can’t remember the last time I got an actual letter and I myself am a sender of letters.  One might expect I would receive a letter or two.  I guess there will be electronic records ad infinitum.  Certainly people will be able to reflect back on their blogs or Facebook accounts and there will be enough photos to account for every other minute of one’s life.

So I’ll try not to be romantic about letters, just as I’m trying not to be romantic about paper books. I have a Kindle.  I get the advantages:  it saves my place, it gives me definitions of words on demand, I can order whatever book I want and have it in less than a minute.  Oh, I LOVE that last part.  But reading an electronic book is not without its losses.  Reading my Kindle gives me no physical sense of where I am in the boook — it’s hard to know I’m nearing the end and so must slow down in order to prolong the joy of reading it.   Each book is in the same tedious format with no beauty at all.  And the greatest loss of all in reading electronic books is that most of them do not come with cover art. I sometimes pick books based on covers alone, don’t you?  There are book covers I want to frame and hang on the wall.  Cover ART.

Ok, I’ve gotten romantic after all.  But I’m trolling through this box of letters and it is beautiful.  Letters in business envelopes with typed labels, green envelopes with MS’s loopy scrawl, a creamy thick envelope inscribed by my mother’s smooth and elegant writing, a note from my father written on a church bulletin in his all-caps, bulleting style, Karl’s chicken scratch on scraps of paper, ML’s fountain pen on Crane paper.   Some of them say things that mean way more 15 years later.  Some of them connect dots I couldn’t otherwise connect.  Some are  surprising and leave me with more questions.  Like the letter from Karl’s girlfriend before me assuring me that it was great with her that we were together and that everyone had seen it all along.  I must have sent her a letter first — oh, that she were a letter-hoarder too — I’d ask her to hunt it down.  And what about the letter from a boy in high school with whom I remember having absolutely no contact at all?  He wrote me from UNC on lovely engraved stationery that I’m sure his Lily-Pulitzer-wearing mother packed in his Izod suitcase.  But why?  I like the letter from Melissa asking me if I knew what Karl Swedberg was doing for the summer of 1987.  She put an “sp?” by “Swedberg.”

I can imagine myself in my bed in the nursing home, reading my letters like a good book.  Reading my friend’s letters today was like time-traveling.  It put me in a reverie.  And if I do end up in a nursing home someday, I expect I will appreciate a reverie or two.