w i n t e r
i once wrote letters
"...the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
{Kundera}
It's been months now. Cold months turned to warm turned to cold again. The walk to the bar turned into a drive as I moved farther from the epicenter of campus life. Now I live on a street lined with crape myrtles. Further down the block the boughs of oaks reach over the small two lane street as it turns into the park and around two opposing sharp corners before disappearing from view.
A creek runs straight down the middle and reminds me of the small Mississippi on Mud Island that I floated plastic boats in as a kid. I've turned over rocks and found crayfish. And I've let brown and green algae tickle my bare feet where it moves with the moderate current. Most of the algae free floats in the water where the sun can't break through the trees and the rocks cause it to cling in places where circulation is low and small pools have formed.
Sometimes I'll sit on the rocks and write, but most of the time I just look at them from the street and remember what it was like to be there without actually climbing down the bank to find out. Yeah, that's mostly it.
Back in the bar I wrote letter after letter on cocktail napkins 'cause I always forgot to bring my own paper and pen. I wrote with a blue ball-point, the worst kind of pen to write with in my opinion, especially on a napkin. I smoked house cigarettes that came from a small wooden box painted silver. They were not my brand but they were free.
I scanned line upon line, wrote in circles and around the margins. Sometimes on to-go menus or tickets left on the varnished counter top. My beer glass would sweat on the napkin and blur some of the writing but it never seemed to matter either to me or to the process because somehow I knew I'd never do anything with them anyway.
Not the letters I wrote there.
There were others. Letters I wrote sitting at a piano on the third floor of the old music building. There was always plenty of sheet music there to write on. Much of it full of students notes too which I thought only added to the character. How thrilled would you be to get a letter in the mail on sheet music! I could never write the words fast enough while I was there and when I left it was as if the price of a stamp were too much or the post was simply too far away and I began to wonder if I ever had any intent of mailing those either.
No, not the letters I wrote there.
Most of them are still in the secretary, though it is now up in the attic and a bit harder to get to. And I wonder if I ever planned on doing anything with the inspirational ideas I scribbled down after cold afternoon naps while sipping a gin & tonic on the stairs leading outside. Or was I just killing time before the night fell and I could go out without chasing away the thoughts of alcoholism. Who was I writing to?
Were we not in touch anyway? Did we not have the typed word as well? Spoken sometimes over somewhat questionable connections. Did we not even jointly share memories and could we really ever forget them?
So why the need for the scribbled word at all? Perhaps because it started that way. Perhaps because I love getting mail and just assume it is the same for everyone. Or is it something more sinister than that, as Kundera may suggest, am I merely a character attempting to justify the careless actions of my life? Not out of fear of the words on the page because I've nothing to fear from the state as Mirek might have, but rather from the words themselves.
I am scared to death of them.
And that's why I never mail them anywhere. Why they sit safely in a secretary in the attic in dated piles. Why I can put my hands on any one of them instantly, but know they will probably never again see the light of day. Because they, more than anything else, will pass judgment on me.
They can break me you know.
This...I can simply delete, but the written word will speak for me as long as the paper it is written on survives. In some cases that's okay, but words will turn on you as opinions change and you grow older, those kind words of youth will sound silly, foreign, strange, and so will the acts that caused you to write them down.
I've notebooks attesting to that.
And the true letter I could never live up to.
In the late 1930's a young woman wrote many letters to a man in Philadelphia. They ended in March 1942. I found them held together by a dry rotted rubber band in the Fall of 1992. I feel as though I could write the rest of my life and not reach the quality of emotion and succinctness achieved in those letters. And perhaps it is because I know the rest of the story for the letters were my grandmother's. I was able to look at her life in a way I never saw it while she was alive. Never imagined even.
For those of you that love the letter you know what I mean. For those of you that keep shoeboxes of them hanging around, they remind you of something. They can register, deal with, and admonish a bad day make it all seem relative. This is the job of a letter. The long term goal. To change a mood or justify one, or supply the material to fill and empty space somewhere.
And so I think I write mostly so I don't forget, while silently wishing the memories away so I can read.
goodnight 11.30.00