Things You Weren't Supposed to Read

Last century, when I was in college at San Francisco State, I fell in love with a boy who was in love with someone else. Though he was moving to England to be with her, it didn't stop him from falling in love with me before the semester ended. We said good-bye in tears as I boarded a plane for Germany, determined as I was to beat him out of the country.

Three months later, back in San Francisco, I received a package from my mother: a large manila envelope stuffed with 24 fat letters, each one addressed to me and postmarked from a small village in England.

The gist: he loved me, not her, she was insecure and needy, he had to get out of there, he was flying to Florida, meet him in Orlando, move to the Caribbean, work on sailboats, bask in the glory and splendor of our love.

Based on three weeks and 24 letters, I packed up my life and moved 3,700 miles from home, never asking myself what he told the English girl, or how she might have felt had she read those letters. It never even occurred to me.

Half a year after that, our relationship as worn and crusty as a derelict boat, I picked up this notepad of his that was always laying around. For the first time in my life, I read something I wasn't supposed to read.

It was addictive.

Especially when it turned out to be letters to the girl in England. And now it was me he no longer loved.

Back in San Francisco, I moved into a flat with two roommates. In no time, I was reading their letters, their journals, anything I could get my hands on when they weren't around. I learned in the pages of their flowery diaries what they thought about each other. Even more sickly satisfying: what they thought about me. In person, Jen said, "How cool!" as I walked out the door wearing a fedora to a Humphrey Bogart retrospective at the Castro. In her journal, she mocked me with mean little jabs. Vividly I remember the knotty pit in my gut as I read it.

It hurt, but I kind of liked it. It felt wrong the same way I imagined shoplifting felt wrong to Winona Ryder. A thrill it was, like jumping out of an airplane, freefalling into private thoughts as I listened for the key in the lock. It was deliciously toxic, that mix of good and terrible. I craved it like a smoker for a cigarette.

When I moved out, I quit, cold turkey, never again. In that year of living dangerously, I learned suspicion is not your friend. If someone doesn't have the guts to tell you their truth, then you have to trust your gut. It's the best evidence you'll ever have, and no written words will ever prove better than what you feel and carry inside you.

The Original Snoop Dog's Love Letters

I heard a great story about Charles Schulz on "Morning Edition." In the 1970's, when his marriage was deteriorating and he hadn't yet met his second wife, the creator of Peanuts courted a young woman named Tracey.

He sent 44 letters and 35 drawings to Tracey over an eight-month period. Most of the letters were brief; in the drawings, Schulz let his alter-ego Charlie Brown stand in for him to deliver the bittersweet messages of love. In the report, a manuscript specialist described how unsatisfied Schulz felt during that time in his life. The collection, then, reflects - however briefly - the way correspondence can sweetly fill a void.

In my youth, Snoopy was a great love of mine - that wacky little dog who dreamed of being an author. One of the illustrations Tracey received was an excerpt from Snoopy's novel. "It was a dark and stormy night," it began, accompanied by a cover note: "Who else do you know that gets a manuscript from a dog?"

Does anyone have an extra quarter of a mil I could borrow? The auction starts on Friday, and I can't quite come up with the opening bid.

Click to read (or listen to) the whole story on NPR

Abundance

I've been rereading Eckhart Tolle's book A New Earth. It's the third time. I almost never read books more than once, so that tells you something. I think of it as a how-to manual for staying in the present moment, being kind and generous, and spreading good will. It may well be the best book I've ever read.

In the chapter "Finding Who You Truly Are," Eckhart writes about abundance. I was listening to it in my car, and had an Ah-hah! moment.

"Who you think you are is also intimately connected with how you see yourself treated by others," Eckhart writes. "Many people complain that others do not treat them well enough."

Boy, have I walked a few hundred miles in those shoes! When I got home, I pulled my print copy of the book off the shelf found the section where I had the Ah-hah!

Try this for a couple of weeks and see how it changes your reality: Whatever you think people are withholding from you - praise, appreciation, assistance, loving care, and so on - give it to them. You don't have it? Just act as if you had it, and it will come. ... You cannot receive what you don't give. 

Eckhart goes on a few sentences later to say:

See the fullness of life all around you. The warmth of the sun on your skin, the display of magnificent flowers outside a florist's shop, biting into a succulent fruit, or getting soaked in an abundance of water falling from the sky. The fullness of life is there at every step. The acknowledgment of that abundance that is all around you awakens the dormant abundance within. Then let it flow out. When you smile at a stranger, there is already a minute outflow of energy. You become a giver. 

I want to live my life every day like this.

It's shallow, I know, to think of postcards having anything to do with this spiritual quest. But, for me at least, they do.

I'm actually getting plenty of praise, appreciation, assistance, and loving care. My life feels full and rich, and I don't take that for granted.  I've got nothing to fuss about. But - dammit - my mailbox runneth empty. (There are approximately two exceptions. You know who you are.) And I get it. Summer's over. Back to work. No more vacations to Myrtle Beach, to tourist shops, to five postcards for a dollar. But I had been rather enjoying a run of receiving several a week, and now I'm back to redplum.com advertisements and my water bill. Blech.

The only thing missing in my life - what people are "withholding" from me - is postcards!

So, on the advice of Eckhart Tolle, I will give what I'm not getting. I will go through my entire address book and give, and give, and give. I will remind myself, "You cannot receive what you don't give."

Click this link for more on Eckhart Tolle

Is Friendship Really Dead?

Aware of my particular interest, people who are better read than I (and you know who you are, Dan) have lately mentioned blogs, opinion pieces, news articles, and other online musings about the state of the U.S. Postal Service. Andrew Sullivan's The Dish gave readers a forum to weigh in on the USPS Crisis at least five times last year. 

In one of those, a reader mentioned Senator Claire McCaskill's suggestion that "there is a longing out there right now, especially in these uncertain times, for some of the things that have provided stability over the years." Joe Lieberman chimed in, "We should be writing more passionate letters to those we love."

Sullivan's astute reader then offered this priceless opinion:

Does McCaskill live in 2011, or 1950? The personal letter is DEAD. Everyone calls, texts or emails the ones they love, or they Skype. It’s like saying that cars and gasoline are too expensive, so let’s start a campaign to get more people to ride horses.

The New Yorker gets it.

Meanwhile, another friend (okay, it, too, was Dan) posted this link to an article in the Times: Friends of a Certain Age. In case you're disinclined, as I am, to read too much in one day, I'll summarize: the older we get, the harder it is to make friends. (It's a good article by Alex Williams. You should read it yourself. There are loads of funny examples, like the woman with 857 Facebook friends and 509 Twitter followers who couldn't get enough people together to celebrate her 39th birthday.)

The article also reminded me of that experience - you know the one - where you're hanging out with someone cool, finishing each other's sentences, laughing your heads off, and then everything comes to a screeching halt when one of you says, "Let's do this again sometime." Blackberries are consulted - on rare occasions, among my fellow Luddites, notebooks are whipped out - dates are tossed, and sometime between dessert and calculating the tip, a mutually agreeable date is discovered.

And it's sometime in February 2014.

Having read the two pieces back to back - Andrew Sullivan's reader opinion and Alex William's article -  they merged in my brain to form one disturbing question: Is friendship, like the personal letter, DEAD?

Nay, I say, nay. Or perhaps, only if you let it be. The evidence is in, the jury is out, the verdict is clear, I've been saying it all along: we can't sustain friendships - not the meaningful ones, anyway - exclusively through email and social media.

If we live too far apart, or our schedules are just so hectic that we no longer feel like B.F.F.'s but K.O.F.'s ("Kind of Friends"), then what other choice do we have?

Don't Skype your friend. Write him an old-fashioned letter. Maybe invite her to save gas with you and go for a horseback ride.

Even if it's just for old times' sake.

Death and Writing

Thoughts about death have so consumed me lately that I’ve begun to think the whole purpose of the postal experiment has been a means of holding it at bay.

The school year has come to an end, which is always a kind of tortured death for me. In the weeks leading up to it I fight it, I am exhausted by it, and as much as I want a summer vacation, I don’t want school to stop. I don’t want my students out of my daily life, I don’t want my lessons to come to a halt. I can’t ever remember how in August, I always feel like a phoenix rising out of the ashes of summer heat and lost skills when we are all reborn.

Our dog Sophie died in March, and we were with her as they administered the lethal dose.  I wept and moaned and clung to her as the life left her eyes. I spent the next two days curled up in a ball of loss and longing. Every time I woke or entered the house at the end of the day, I looked for her. I still do a double-take when I see a wadded up blanket on the couch, expecting it to be her.

In the two months since, I’ve regretted my bawling as Sophie died, believing I may have added to her anxiety in those last moments of her beautiful life.  I still worry over that, and cry. I was selfish. I am selfish. If I am like this over a dog I knew for five years, what will I be like when I lose one of my human loved ones?

A woman in my book club recently recommended Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as a book that demonstrates how one woman gracefully coped with the death of her beloved.  Wanting to learn how to do this very thing, I raced to the library to retrieve the book.  I’m reading it now, almost finished in fact. In this memoir, Didion is as concise and lyrical as a poet.  Yet while she illuminates the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness… about marriage and children and memory… about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.” I disappoint myself in that I don't seem to have learned anything more than “Time is the school in which we learn.”

Even a lighthearted card-and-letter-writing campaign can be viewed, at this moment anyway, as my attempt to either hinder death or learn to cope with it gracefully. We don’t know when, we don’t know how, but everybody’s got to go – we do know that much. Correspondence is more – much more – than having no regrets at someone else's passing. It's more than making sure you let your people know how you love them, or think about them, or forgive them, or want them forever in your life.

Or maybe that’s all it is.

Slowing Down

I’ve experienced an unexpected side effect of my campaign to go postal. It’s called patience.

The definition of patience is “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”

Those who know me are aware that I’ve pursued serenity most of my adult life. I’ve explored yoga, various religions, meditation, beer and wine, all in the chase of a calmer, less angry, more tolerant self.

The parents of my students invariably tell me, “You must have so much patience.” My internal response is, “Hah! If you only knew!” But they are onto something. Little kids with disabilities relentlessly test adult kindness. That’s why it’s them, more than Buddhism or focusing on the breath, who can lead us in the pursuit.

Still I struggle, even with the little ones. It takes effort and awareness to keep my cool.

Antithetical to the search for tranquility has been my overuse of email and IM and facebook to correspond. When I started writing letters and postcards again, at first I raced and waited anxiously for instant response. And waited some more for someone to write back. 

 

Then - eventually - they did.

Now I slow down when I write a letter – even with a postcard, I take my time. I’m no longer in a big, breathless hurry to finish, to hear back. It’s improved my communication, I think, this thoughtful, measured writing, and the results continue to open slowly, like envelopes. Or birds learning to sing, butterflies spreading their wings, blossoms in Spring.