Wild Heart

Letter to Blaze

She thought she might be dying herself, and was curiously objective about it. For once she felt some relief from the itch that could be satisfied only by inserting a pen between her thumb and fingers and working it against ruled paper. ~ Gregory Maguire, from Lost

Dear Blaze,

You ask how I'm doing, how the writing is going. For days I've put off answering your email. Too embarrassed to admit that I am, once again, in a funk. I'm in a super-funk. I want to give up but I don't know how.

Today I'm finding it funny, but really, I have an undercurrent of who-gives-a-damn. My belly feels tight and my breath is shallow.

I have no faith in what I write or in the writing process. I've been writing since forever. My first journal was a tiny address book someone gave me when I was 12. It's red and the pages have come unstuck. I still have it. I say I have no faith in what I write, but I can't throw any of it away. When I die, build my coffin from all my notebooks and send them through the flames with my gnarl-fingered hands still clutching a pen.

That's how the writing is going.

I think about writing all the time. I think about the characters I've created and I wonder what they're doing. I think about that house in San Jose where most of my Married stories come from. I think about Childhood in San Francisco, and I mix up the true part with the parts I've incorporated into fiction. But what's the difference? It's all memory now, memory and photographs, and so I give a Stardust character my grandparents' home on Diamond Street. It's mine to give. In my memories, I meet her at the top of the stairs where it smells like Grandma's talcum powder and the shadows are deep.

It's February. And for some odd reason, I'm living in Colorado. Is that a story I made up?  I look out the window and see melting snow. Not San Francisco. I go outside to collect the mail and I hug the fleece jacket to my body and squint against the glare of the sun and skate carefully over ice and curse the ache in my bones.

Twenty years ago I had such an ache for the Bay Area that I moved back there, but what I ached for wasn't there anymore. My daughters were grown, and I couldn't go back and do it right this time. My grandparents were long dead, their San Francisco house almost unrecognizable from a street I remember being much wider. And where did the trees come from?

I talked to my youngest sister yesterday and told her I feel like I'm going through yet another mid-life crisis. Can you have a mid-life crisis at 66? Here's something I know from this wise old age. I can whine and complain and throw hissy-fits all I want, and each hissy fit is just an older (and more pointless) version of the ones I threw when I was 12, 27, 36. The big difference is that now I'm old enough to know better. Of course, that doesn't stop me, which makes it even more embarrassing.

There are as many ways to waste a life as there are stories about wasting a life. So I may as well tell the stories.

Nancy Blaze, here's where I land today about how the writing is going: The only thing I know to do is to keep putting the pen to paper, stop judging the stories, forget about how an audience will or won't receive the pieces I write. It's not about audience. It's never been about audience.

And it's time to stop whining. I wallow. I'm over it. For now.

Thank you for asking.

A Letter to My Sister Carolyn

Dear Caro,

Do you remember that day we were all hanging out in Dad’s garage in Indiana—it was the year he turned 80—and you turned to me and said, “Sometimes I feel jealous of you,” and I said, “What? Why?” What you said next so startled me that I was speechless. I felt flustered—and disturbed. You had been joking just moments before, but in that moment I knew you were sharing something very old, something you had harbored for years and were finally blurting out to me.

We were surrounded by family, all of us there but Connie that year, and so the moment passed and the few days together passed and I told myself that I’d call you when we all got back home again so I could ask what you meant and really listen to your answer. I did call, but you didn’t pick up, so I left a message asking you to call me. Two days later you died, just like that in the middle of the night, no warning, no goodbye, no chance left to tell you how much I love you, exactly as you are, in spite of all that has passed between us over 60 years of sisterhood.  I’ll never know what you were trying to share with me that day in Dad’s garage. What you said still haunts me, and you've been gone now for five years.

You and Dad used to joke about making contact with each other after death, and of course, Dad thought he would go first. After you died, Dad would call and say, “So. Have you heard anything from Carolyn?” I think he was half convinced that you would chat him up in the middle of the night, say, or more likely while he was working on his motorcycle or sawing boards to make something. I think he was disappointed that you didn’t contact him. It meant you were really gone. I’m still holding out hope that you’ll come to me in a dream and we’ll have a long talk.

Dad stopped joking about death when he got sick, when he finally understood that whatever was ailing him would be fatal. Turned out that the blood disease didn’t kill him—a tear in his colon did. I held his hand when he died, and the last thing I said to him was, “Tell Carolyn I said hello,” but you probably know that already.

I think of you both as being “up there,” that early version of heaven we learned at the church on Sutter Street still coloring my understanding of the afterlife. I figure you’re laughing a lot up there, you and Dad, and he’s telling you again in that loud whisper, “You’re my favorite. Don’t tell the others.” Down here we’re weighed by gravity and loss. We carry the heavy responsibility of staying alive for each other. After Connie died, Steve and Butch were joking about who would go next. I told them both that I would go next and I planned on being around for a very long time, so don’t even consider leaving. I often feel fear that another sibling will die.

We are five now, and that feels like so few. I wonder sometimes what life is like for people who have only one sibling. When we were kids, all of us girls sleeping in the same room, we used to fantasize about having no sisters or brothers and wouldn’t that be nice, not having to share anything, getting to have our own room, not having to put up with each other.

Carolyn, I’d do it all over again if I could. And this time we would like each other earlier in our lives. I wish we had’t waited so long. With you gone, I feel like I’ve lost an essential part of myself and a huge part of my childhood. When I’ve forgotten some piece of memory, I want to call you up and say, “Do you remember that old lady who lived down the hill from us in the projects, the one who paid us to read the Sunday comics to her? What was her name?”

“Do you remember the Dance-Me-Hilda dolls we got for Christmas one year?”

“What was the name of that game you and me and Butchie played under the kitchen table when we lived on Blythedale?”

See what I mean?

I see you sometimes in the grocery store, just a glimpse as you toss a box of Cheerios into your basket and turn the corner.  Today at the gym you looked at me out of the eyes of a woman named Dolly who smiled at me as she was doing laps on the track. Once or twice I’ve sensed you in the car with me, but as soon as I say your name out loud, you’re gone. Sometimes when I fall asleep at night, I think I am in the lower bunk in our room of the house on Hillside Blvd., and I hear you turn over in your sleep, and I whisper, “Carolyn?” You don’t answer.

Letters to Someone Else

A long time ago when I was barely old enough to call myself an adult, I worked in San Francisco and would take a bus to my father's shop on Pierce Street for a ride home. Dad's work was to clean old buildings that had been used for everything from living quarters to business offices to typewriting services and music schools. Sometimes he would find things that he thought one of his kids might like, and so I had my first fountain pen, an old Smith typewriter before Smith joined Corona, and once—a famous story in our house—someone had left geraniums in bloom in a window planter, so Dad carefully dug them up, leaving lots of dirt around the roots, wrapped them in a wet San Francisco Examiner, and brought them home. It was only when he was planting them in our yard that he discovered they were plastic.

Before Dad would bring anything home, he would try to return the item, often not possible. So one night when I was waiting for him at his shop, I saw that he had brought back an old steamer trunk like you sometimes see in old movies.

Who could resist such a thing! I unbuckled it, swung it open, and one-by-one I drew open the drawers. The only thing I remember from that trunk is the packet of ancient letters tied up with ribbon. I ran my fingers over the elegant handwriting (clearly written with a fountain pen), examined the stamps and postmarks, untied the ribbon, and read them.

They must have been love letters to have been saved that way, treasured in the drawer of a steamer trunk, but I don’t remember one bit of the content. I do remember the room in my father’s shop growing dark and that I had to turn on a lamp. I remember being afraid that Dad would catch me at this invasion of some unknown woman’s privacy. I remember longing to take that trunk home, hoping that no one would claim it and it could be mine, to savor the letters instead of reading them furtively in the semi-dark.

The owner must have claimed the trunk. It was gone the next time I stopped by the shop for a ride home. Dad never knew I had read those letters. In the almost 50 years since then, I have written many a love letter of my own, kept love letters from those deepest loves (and burned the others). I never wrapped them in ribbon, never stowed them in such an exquisite cache.

These days I suppose people send love tweets, sex texts, skype messages, email. I think of those messages as more temporary than paper letters, but really the opposite is true—they remain forever in the ether, publicly private, but without substance: no ink to smear a bit on the signature, no postmark to tell us the exotic or domestic where, no foreign stamp that had to be licked before it could be stuck, no postman’s hand dropping the letter through a slot in the front door and eagerly retrieved to be read from a wing-back chair next to a fire or from a pillow or from a barn loft smelling of hay and horse manure.

Back in the very olden days, mail was delivered more than once a day, and a person could write to a neighbor inviting her to tea that afternoon and get a letter of acceptance back in time to put the kettle on. I own several volumes of Virginia Woolf’s collected letters and several of her collected diary entries. By far the most interesting and revealing are the letters. Something about knowing that the words will be read changes the tone of the content, invites the reader in, either through the front door (by being the recipient) or by the back door (by being a voyeur). For this reader there is the vicarious thrill of knowing both writer and the recipient through the relationship between the two that creates that particular letter, one that could be sent to no one else.

I feel no shame about having read those old letters between two people who have long been dead, who may well have been dead by the time I read them. That discovery of letters stashed away and treasured came to me at a time when I was well on my way to being a dedicated letter writer myself, though I was yet to write the true love letters.

Over the years, I have had relationships with other writers, and as one of them said, “When two writers have a love affair, it is well documented.” No kidding! Where’s that steamer trunk when you need it!