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.

Another Swedberg milestone — and while this one may involve bugs, I won’t have to deal with them. Ben and Lucy are at overnight camp. I dropped them off yesterday afternoon for 4 nights at Camp Roger in Rockford, Michigan.

My mom and dad came with us because this is the same camp my mother attended in the 50s and she hasn’t seen it since! Over 55 years later, she says it’s much the same: heavily wooded along Little Bostwick Lake, sandy paths from cabin to cabin, the same dark brown mess hall no doubt serving the same creamed corn and chicken. As I bought a t-shirt for each kid at the Camp Store, she broke into a rousing rendition of the Camp Roger song, was joined by the woman behind the counter, and they sang all the verses. Seriously. If she denies this in the comments section, DO NOT BELIEVE HER.

When I suggested overnight camp to the kids back in March, they followed their personality-predetermined-pathways with dear devotion. Ben said “no way!,” then proceeded to debate it with himself — but out loud and close by of course — until he found out his cousins were also going, at which point he signed on directly. Lucy just signed on directly. We’ve talked and talked about it for the last five months, printing out activity lists from the camp website [archery! canoeing! braiding! leather crafts!] and watching videos and slideshows of happy hordes along the tender shores of Little Bostwick. I had to restrain Ben from packing back in May and spent a few bedtimes answering Lucy’s questions: “Where will you brush teeth at Camp Roger? Will you have to take a shower? Will they make me eat meat?” I did this all with the patience of Theresa of course.

Last week we started collecting supplies: flashlights, headlamps, sleeping bags, tiny bottles of shampoo that will no doubt return full as they went, piles of old clothes labeled with a Sharpie. I took the kids to their Aunt Camille’s bookstore [a darn fine children’s bookstore — check it out: www.poohscornerstore.com] to buy something for Bunk Time, which is the 45 minutes following lunch where the kids are supposed to have quiet time. This is when they receive emails from home and the candy they ordered the night before [oh yes, they order candy every night. this is a Selling Point]. This shopping trip also served as a personality test of sorts, as Lucy came away with a Rain Forest Activity Book with lots of sparkly pages that you can draw on and Ben came away with 4 books. He knows my soft spot, people. And if his counselors Sam and Kyle let him use that headlamp past Lights Out, he’ll have them all read before he returns home on Monday.

On the drive to camp, Ben writhed next to me [“Are you anxious?” Nod, nod, nod] until I handed him a book. Lucy just stared out the window. They just needed to get there, to move from anticipation to action, from unknown to suddenly known. By the time I had Ben’s sheet on his bed and had said hello to all his cabin mates [“MOM!! eye-rolling…] he was positively jumping to be rid of me. Did he hug me goodbye? I can’t even remember. He was GONE. As I put a sheet on Lucy’s bed and stowed her gear under her bunk, she proceeded to make friends with the girl above her and I left her in that girl’s top bunk, her face split in an enormous grin. Oh yeah, they’re going to miss me a LOT.

Karl and I went out to dinner last night and when we got home at 8pm [yeah, we’re still 41 and it’s still the midwest, even if the kids are Away], the neighbors were corralling the herds for bedtime. They all gazed at us with hungry expressions. “What’s it like?!…on the Outside?….” Ok, maybe not quite so hungry. But enough so I wanted to quick hustle in the house so as not to appear boastful. We’re going out for drinks on Saturday night and I’m hoping to see a movie.  If I can tear the Man away from the Computer, I’ll buy him some clothes at the mawl. This morning I had my nails done. And it’s all very luxurious.

Can I admit something? I miss them. I miss neighbor Noah at our door every morning at 9am sharp. I miss kids banging in and out of the house 20 times a day. I miss the funny things they say and the breathtaking pronouncements [Lucy in the car two days ago: “Mommy, if there was only one thing I could like, I would choose you.”] It’s not that I want them back this minute — look at me! I’m blogging! — but I’ll wake up with a spring in my step on Monday morning, ready to collect them, tired, filthy, crabby. Yum.

A few weeks ago, Karl and I kept our promise to Ben and took him to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the theatre.  It was such fun that I went home and immediately began re-reading the whole series.  I was so transported that I felt as if the real world was intruding like bad memories, usually three times a day upon mealtime and usually only with great prodding from hungry children.  I would literally finish a book, take a deep breath, and pick up the next one, sunk so deep in that being in my real life felt bleak and numbingly prosaic.  I wanted wands and owls!!  I’m a little embarrassed to admit that.   What was completely acceptable in my childhood seems faintly derelict.  But there it is.

The movies just can’t capture J.K. Rowling’s elaborate casts:  there are so many characters and each of them so sharp and delightful.  One of my favorite parts in the very first book is at the welcoming banquet at Hogwarts when the headmaster Dumbledore gets up to greet the students:

“‘Welcome!’ he said.  ‘Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts!  Before we begin our banquest, I would like to say a few words.  And here they are:  Nitwit!  Blubber!  Oddment! Tweak!'”

In just 4 sentences, Rowling shows us Dumbledore’s wit and bonhomie without using words like “wit” and, worse, “bonhomie.”

Last night, Ben was perched on top of our neighbor’s swing set and announced “I’m going to speak in random words for the rest of the night!”

“Cowboy!”

“Snow!”

“Farts!”

“Cactus!”

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, he got distracted.  I thought he was on a roll.