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.

Letter from a Dog

The other day, I received a piece of correspondence in a legal sized "envelope," really a piece of construction paper folded and taped with packing tape, addressed in crayon in the writing of a child. No return address. Curiouser and curiouser.

I had to cut it open with a knife, and inside was an unsigned, typewritten letter. I knew instantly who'd written it, because the author referred to my dog, Bill, as "Sir William of the White Lawns" and I know only one person who does that. The letter informed me that my dog had learned to use a computer, and written the story of his life. "He doesn't type well because his paws are too wide, and his nails (he refers to them as his "claws") get in the way."

I share the the text of that letter here, unedited. It is relevant to the story how feebly I hail Bill when he's run off into the woods behind my house. I clap twice and say "Bill, come here." He rarely, if ever, complies. You might need to have a 9-year career reading the writing of students with disabilities to decode this letter, but if you try hard enough, you will surely laugh from the belly, until tears come out of your eyes. Or maybe you won't. Maybe you have to know Sir William of the White Lawns personally to get it. Do let me know.

                                            my life asd clapc lapb illec om ehere.

My bnanme isz c lapclap b iloycomkehere. I found a person dwebrqa wjhere I livgfed wjhen I wazs b orn. I saw debrqa and tolldx her I was her dovgv. My name was boy when I was boern and debr4qa named mje c lap clap bill c omehere. Mty sjort name is nobil.

Ilove debra.she lovews me. we libve in a gungle but she doesn't go in there sdhe like her box kmore than to live in a gun gle. She wsmells so good. She put hot wqatfe3rf on me and made me smell baed.i still smell bnad and feel baed. Ican get under the3 couch next time. When I had anotnhner houjse I hade to go to I would poop in teh carf. Inever poop in debrazcar I lovedd debra and debrqa lovfedsmed. I dont let people hurt debrfa. She hqas monsterrfsz that are afdrid of me.thwey come in and hide evedrywhere wjhen ewee go outrsdide but ialways find them rmonsters rhright awazy and mazke them diee. The enf. Clsapclapbiklcomhere.

This regal animal is literate, too.

The Xmas Letter

My mom is the expert at Xmas letter writing. She's not one of those people who shrinks the font and expands the margins so she can fit every last detail of all 365 days on both sides of the candy-cane bordered quality paper from Office Max. No. She is brief. She is chipper. And she does that thing that everyone seems to do - she brags about her kid. I am 46 and haven't lived at home in 27 years but my antics are still prominently featured and yeah, I kind of love it.

Recently, my mom attended an Xmas Letter Writing Workshop. Yes, there is someone out there teaching people how to do it (and it isn't my master mom). My secret fantasy is that this teacher concentrates on brevity and the limits of braggadocio. "Cut it by 75%" she says in a commanding voice to gasps of horror across the room. I admit, I'm throwing pebbles inside my champagne glass home, having been the guilty writer of more than one overlong, over-boastful Xmas letter. But let's not dwell on my shortcomings...

Back to other people's letters, the senders with the incredibly perfect lives. Their children are in AP Honors classes and winning soccer trophies. They themselves have just purchased their second Mercedes SLS. It's all yang and no yin, all pictures of beaming, beautiful children. You are left to wonder what your old friends, the letter-writers, look like, and you just have to assume they are wrinkly and fat. (Unless they're working out at Crossfit and running the Ironman. Then, you'll see their photos, too.)

Wouldn't you love to get an Xmas letter someday that says, "This year, my husband left me for a man and my kids dropped out of MIT to deal crystal meth"? The only problem with that is, should such a letter ever arrive, it'll conclude: "Everything's worked out fabulously - my husband's lover just redecorated my home and my kids? They're making more money than they ever would have with college degrees so ... they're flying us all to Tahiti! Happy Holidays, Everyone!!!"

I've decided not to send an Xmas letter, and not just because there's been an inordinate amount of yin in my life lately. I usually try to never say never, but I'm not sure I'll ever write another Xmas letter. It just doesn't fit my plans, which are to write, and continue writing postcards and personal correspondence for the rest of my life. Why jumble it all up with a form letter?

If you hear from me this holiday season, it'll be something like you'd get any other day of the year.

However. I still want your Xmas letters, each and every one of them. Especially if your husband's a secret homosexual and your kids successful drug dealers. As Dorothy Parker famously said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me."

Vintage

I recently received a "letter in postcards" from my friend Laura: 8 vintage postcards, to be exact, numbered and mailed in one fell swoop.

I cannot put into words the joy and delight that filled me upon opening the mailbox to find EIGHT postcards - all at once - from a beloved friend who lives on the opposite end of the continent.

She is 34 weeks pregnant (probably 36 or 37 by the time of this writing), and philosophical about her future as a parent. While I had a brief stage under the influence of my biological clock (tick-tock, tick-tock!), it passed and now I'm basking in the simplicity and splendor of being a GINK (Green Inclinations, No Kids http://www.facebook.com/GINKthink and http://ginkthink.wordpress.com)

So I must confess, most of the time I can no more relate to pregnant women than I can to mothers of young children.

But Laura said something that finally put the whole thing into a perspective to which I can relate. She wrote, "It's kind of like this... When you have a 'BIG TRIP,' you spend months reading guide books, getting essentials, learning about your destination, etc. etc. When you come home, you pretty much go back to life as it was before the trip. Yet for PARENThood, your life is different forever."

It's actually been my experience that the BIG TRIPs never let you go back to life as it was before. So we have that in common. As Angelina Jolie famously said, "A single journey can change the course of a life."

And so I wish you - Laura in particular, future and new mothers in general - Bon voyage! May you have the most splendid of journeys.

Mother's Mail

Twenty-two years ago, when I first set off on my life of adventure, I think I was mad at my mother. I’m not sure she had actually done anything wrong. With the benefit of more than two decades of hindsight, I now believe that in order to become a woman, I felt like I needed to rebel against something, and so I picked her. I took a backpack and went to Europe, and made excuses to not write her anything but the spare (and all too infrequent) postcard: “Yes, Mom, I’m still alive.”  Even after returning from Amsterdam, what paltry bits of communication I’d been doling out tapered off to a tiny little drip.

That went on for an eternity – something like eight months. Then, fully fledged (and I hope a little less self-absorbed) (though probably not much), I gave a little more to my mother. Years passed. More travels ensued. But in those passing years, I learned to stay in touch with my mom because I wanted to – not because I felt obligated.

For years now Mom and I have emailed and facebooked and let that suffice (along with a couple of visits to each others' far flung states each year). Then, what with saving the U.S.P.S. and all, my mother and I started corresponding by post again. At first it was a postcard or two. Then I got a one-page note with a clipping from her small town’s newspaper. After my parents’ spring visit, a four-pager arrived, and this was the first sentence: “I want to tell you thank you for so many things that I fear I will take up too much of your time…”

You could dismiss this as finely-honed guilt-tripping – all mothers know which buttons to push, especially the ones raised Catholic – but I didn’t read it that way. Now that I’m just about the age she was when I rebelled against her, perhaps I’ve developed a little empathy. Perhaps she thinks that I still think I’m too important or special or whatever it was I believed way back when to sit down and read a letter from her. 

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, Waving Girl.

I want to assure her that is not the case. I am learning, from my little experiment, that we all write better correspondence when we write by hand, but my mom? She really knows how to write! She can tell a story on paper as well as anyone, and her letters are fun to read.

I’m also old enough to recognize the good fortune I have that my mom is alive, and healthy, and reasonably sane, and loving toward me. She’s worried she’ll take up too much of my time?

Mom. We have all the time in the world. Let’s not waste another minute of it.

The Letters of ...

Correspondence is its own genre in writing.  Like essays and diaries, written communication between and among authors and dignitaries is published and frequently lauded. King James the Sixth and Elizabeth the First have a book published of their letters; Lawrence Durrell and Alfred Perles corresponded about infamous Henry Miller (in a book with the terrific title Art and Outrage). Eminent diarist Anais Nin and an obscure poet named Felix Pollak wrote letters to each other interesting enough for a volume of their own. Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, even Ronald Reagan wrote letters someone believed should be published. And Charles Darwin? His correspondence, the publication of which began in 1985 and is so vast it isn’t even complete yet, is expected to take up 30 volumes.

Alas. I’m not even slightly interested in reading any of the above. Really. I don't even read letters to the editor -- even in the good magazines.

In fact, the only mail I’ve ever been interested in besides that which I write and receive was between a couple of relative unknowns named Helene Hanff and Frank Doel. I wish I could say I stumbled across this pair in a secondhand book store in the Lower Haight Ashbury back when I was a young San Franciscan, but no. Ann Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins brought them to my attention in a 1987 film called “84, Charing Cross Road.”

Hanff was a sort of 1960’s Nora Ephron; a “professional New Yorker” according to Wikipedia. She loved old, obscure, classic books, and in her quest discovered an ad for the bookshop Marks & Co. in England. She solicited the shop for titles beginning in 1949, and for the next twenty years she and Frank Doel, the buyer, wrote letters to each other. These letters are the stuff of great literature and good film. 84, Charing Cross Road is a love story like no other, one developed solely through correspondence, for Helene and Frank never met.

The movie is great. The slim, little book - 112 pages in all - is even greater.

Car Wash

I have a car I bought in 2009 that I still think of as new. But aren't people supposed to treat new stuff better than old stuff? Not me. I rely on its newness to take care of itself in a kind of Picture of Dorian Gray self-sustainability. 

Which is why, in three years, I've washed this car maybe six times. It bugs me when it's dirty, believe me. I think, "How can you be so dirty, you new little car?" Every time I drive it, the same thought crosses my mind: "I've got to try at least to dust the dashboard." 

Half a year's worth of inner grime has recently been matched on the hood with spring pollen. It's South Carolina's gooey, yellow dust that drifts visibly through the air for weeks on end and renders even the best cared for cars abandoned in appearance. 

So when the group email at work rolled in about a mobile car detailing service setting up in our school parking lot, I signed right up. (My parents' imminent arrival may have a tad to do with a sudden willingness to part with money for something I don't seem to need the rest of the year.)

To cut to the chase: I dropped $45 and got a car back that blinded me with shine. They even vacuumed the trunk! I took off my shoes before I got in the driver's seat. I took off my shoes and bagged them. 

The best part is this: when I arrived home a week later, a handwritten envelope from Adriene's Personal Touch Mobile Carwash & Detail was in my mailbox. A thank you note! With a paragraph of handwriting inside it! 

Yeah, baby. It's safe to say the art of correspondence is making a comeback when you get a thank you note for letting somebody wash your car.