Dearest Loula,
It may be that the reason I’m so inclined to prefer this whole correspondence-by-post (rather than those other, faster, more demanding new forms of communiqué) is the convenience of slowness. I mean, yes, besides my stupendous (but exclusive) ability to hold long conversations with myself. To be entirely honest – which is roughly 15% more honest than I’m sure I should be at one-seventeen in the morning, old grouch that I’ve become – I was originally going to fib a little on the date up there.
Because I do admit that it is now several days past Christmas, your birthday, and a few days past the new year. All celebratory moments which deserve a letter from your favorite sister’s-ex-high-school-boyfriend (I hope!). And I admit I felt the days whizzing by me in the way that I expect the holiday days to continue to do for the rest of my years in this body, and I thought that a letter – right off the bat – to kick off the new year and tap out a little review with hopeful conclusion, would be an acceptable encompassing of the three.
But having spent today (the 2nd, that is) revving up my engines for the “no longer recovering; ready to be gainfully, and prayerfully employed” status switch, I feel like I’m sliding my theme under the door at 3:32pm, hoping that my professor won’t (hasn’t) come in on her day off.
I offer apologies. I claim to have been kidnapped by my family, shopping, wrapping, etc. I assure you I had absolutely no fun this season that will not be replicated herein.
So. I invite you to share in my family dinner. Both Grandmas are in town as of a few years ago, along with Melissa (my mom’s twin sister), Aunt Sandy, cousins Jenny and Denise, their husbands Ron and Brad, and their four young, wide-eyed children. Who, as it so happens, have apparently reached the age at which they are no longer scared of this hairy, quiet, sniffly man who avoids so much of the adult conversation by – whether meaning to or not – eating particularly slowly. Leave it to the wonder of youth. In previous years Adam, Andrew, Michaela and Vica have nervously experimented with moments of including me in the two games that occupy their family dinner-time, tickling and hide-and-seek. It’s generally taken no more than three or four minutes for a retreat to be called back to the more familiar territory of my sister. But this year, Lou, I was the whole of the entertainment for the evening. I only magically escaped the world of Sisyphean laughter and faux-growling through the miracle of bingo.
It really has been that type of season. Despite our still-total lack of holiday weather (there was some fluff on the ground the morn of the 26th, in fact, but it was hastily swept up in one more near-fifty degree day), my missing out on some daytrips I really do need to start fitting into my trips home – namely our dear Malabar Farm, and the rest of that country out there. Despite the impending doom that sore throat after Christmas dinner represented.
It’s the first month of this new year and, although you get to change your number, we’re all a little older. We begin our new calendars, planners, diaries, resolutions (mini-revolutions) with perfect intentions. It may be the one instance in which this particular writer has only love for the blank page. Because there’s no doubt that the pages will be filled. There’s no struggle to determine whether we have anything to fill them with. Whether what we fill them with will fit properly, conform to the generally accepted rules of punctuation and grammar (or whether we really want that to be the way we conduct our writing, anyway). All of these new pages will be filled, whatever the effort. And O, the character development! If only the words to describe such journeys came so easily to the dim glow of our bedside laptops.
So, dear Loula. What of this new year? What of that New Englandish home you’re making? The job you’ve taken, your companions and solitary time? Do you have plans for them? Do you have any idea the ways in which their waters are going to seep around the dams you put up? Where their currents (and if fast or slow) will take you, like it or not? Not to be overly fatalistic. I do, in fact, believe that you’ve made some pretty damn brave choices thus far in your career as a person on this planet. I do believe they’ve brought some warranted results. But listen: with all the thousands of decisions you’re making every day (is it really worth the effort to brush your teeth this morning? Probably.), so are all those things you’ve surrounded yourself with. Perhaps, even, the things you don’t think might be. Who’s to draw the line between the many law-abiding chemical and physical things it takes to happen before that rotting floorboard finally gives way and, maybe, some part of that process occurring at one time rather than another for some purpose unknown and unimagined? Or who’s going to tell me my mind is free from those same laws anywho? I see us all: starlings; maybe you’ll decide to turn, in which case we will all turn. And maybe I’ll decide to turn; most likely, you will turn as well. Meanwhile our own spaces stay our own, stay filled only with our little starling bodies, hovering there in that moving pocket of freedom we can coast around in. There are so many of us, deciding to turn, gain altitude, dive, stop for a moment in that stand of scotch pine, that there may come a point at which we’re not sure whether the decision to do one or the other was, as we thought, ours, or part of the larger flight path of this community we’ve settled into.
The cacophony we’ll create!
Which brings us, which brings me, in fact, to Cat Stevens. Yusuf Islam. In a recent interview with Neil Conan on “Talk of the Nation,” he performed this utterly peaceful-quiet version of ‘The Wind,’ then proceeded to say something like “Some people are calling it a comeback… I’m calling it starting all over.” His reasoning being that after a 28-year sabbatical (making me feel slightly better about this six-monther I’m coming out of), there isn’t much of that old self left. Even singing 28-year old words, they come from a different place. So why not tomorrow, too? The difference between a night of rest and 28 years of rest is time (along with, probably, some receding gumlines), and time is a singularly human understanding of events. We can stretch and knead that perspective however we wish, or are urged to by our circumstances (which, also, change and stretch out over time). So. Every day, starting all over.
I was thinking about this last night, trying to come to a new religious theology that included the entire world being destroyed and recreated every night, so as to better serve the “live anew” attitude many of us might benefit from. I finally concluded that I really should go to sleep a little earlier.
But live anew, Loula. Take this new year in your newly realized age, and feel absolutely no pressure to come to the same conclusion about who you want to be, whether you like vanilla milkshakes, peanut butter and coconut sandwiches, Beech trees, Jane Austen (I would, however, urge you, to maintain your conclusions about hot stoves, sharp knives, steep cliffs, etc.). The opportunities you have every day to start over, come to new conclusions, see things a different way, are yours. You don’t have to take all of them. There is no penalty. You will (probably) not reach the pearly gates or your next life as a lemur or blade of grass and think “Damn, I wish I’d planted that elm tree at 1283 Liberty on the thirtieth of April with its low branch facing six degrees more toward the road.” But you should remember you have all of those options. And love the positive and negative outcomes. And let them help you in spreading joy through your little cluster of starlings. Why not encourage us all, through your lead, to do a little flying upside down?
I don’t doubt you will. I doubt I need to urge you very forcibly. But all of this is a message of my faith in you, of my subscription to this next year of yours. That I’ll be waking up, putting on the bathrobe, and hurrying down to the mailbox to see if the next chapter in your serial is arriving that day. A message through the murmuration (this really is, apparently, a group of starlings. I think I’ll have to use that metaphor more often), through our language of turns and dives, that you’re a damn good flier, and that I can’t wait to see how you glide over the next few miles.
As ever,
T
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