Big Crazy Idea (the letters)

It is a completely normal thing to hear me to rail against most any kind of nostalgia, whether it is in my presence or just sort of out there in the world. The Good Old Days is a phrase that I loathe and would not mind seeing eradicated from the world entirely (only to see it resurface as the name for an underground waltz punk big band).

Modern medicine is good. Ibuprofen is good. Sanitation, yes. Communications technologies are impressive and wonderful. Technologies that allow us to read and understand the words and languages of the past, and therefore challenge us to reconsider our presence not as the end all be all of everything, rather as part of continuum of incredibly stupid creatures who occasionally manage to create or develop or express magnificence.

I take from much of the nostalgia that I hear that people wish for a simpler time, when there were not so many decisions to make, and children were better behaved and played outside and families congregated around dinner tables and people took care of each other. I will not explore every avenue opened by those statements, but I will tackle one: The one of extended time spent together. The one about quiet and unrushed conversations. The one that I heard quite a lot right before I moved away from Lincoln.

"Letters? I love getting letters!" "You mean, like handwritten or typed and mailed through the Post Office, letters?"

There was a conversation around a living room about getting letters that started when I explained my Big Crazy Idea (letters) to people who did not know me that well, and who have at least two decades on me. They did not seem to believe me, and I didn't pursue it because they then went on to talk about how it felt to get mail. Mail that wasn't bill, that was meant specifically for the person opening it.

The point was made that email feels ephemeral, even if you have written and sent a letter, getting it via email makes it feel somehow less permanent or meaningful, whereas even the most trite statements carry an air of importance when written on a piece of paper and stuck in the mailbox with a bribe for the postman (stamps).

I knew two years ago that I was going to leave Lincoln, and that the group of friends that I was part of would be geographically separated, probably for the rest of our lives, barring visiting people or vacations together, or those adult types of relationship maintenance. The importance of those friendships in my life for the last several years cannot be overstated, and I realized that if I did not make some action to preserve them, it was likely, however sad, that they would fade.

I love writing letters. I love getting letters and responding to them. I love the act of sitting down with a typewriter or pen or computer keyboard and thinking about one specific person for an extended period of time. And the opportunity to share that experience is part of the joy and also the gut-wrenching tension of writing and sending letters to people. It is personal and it is intended to be that way. Individual and instant.

My letters have been labeled self-indulgent. It was a fair label, coming as it did from my second husband who received letters from me almost every day one summer as I was out in the field studying thistles and learning about dehydration and exhaustion and the wonders of corn on soft tacos. I learned some years later that he had not even opened almost half of them. It makes a certain degree of sense if you know him. I do not pretend that it is okay. I choose different recipients now.

I used to have a limit to how many letters I would send to someone without getting any response at all. And then I started this project:

I write and mail letters every day. I have a schedule and a wooden recipe box full (almost) of addresses pasted to card stock. I keep track of them, and record the dates on which I sent the last letter. They go out to new acquaintances, friends both recent and long-term, and people who may as well be family for how long I've known them.

Responses are beautiful and they make me smile, but they are not required and do not change my need to stay in touch. I am a difficult person to love or to know in even the easiest circumstances. Being away from almost everyone that I love and enjoy is hardly easy. Writing is as much a habit as it is self-expression and must be maintained as such even when it seems there is little to write about.

To be honest, I have not written every single day. Up till now, I have occasionally skipped a day and then made up for it one the next, that kind of thing. And I haven't written a letter at all for a week. (It had been a difficult sort of week.)

Guilt is an emotion I reject out of hand. We do not get along and while I am mercenary in almost everything, assuaged guilt is vile and empty in my world and I would rather have chocolate or a massage or The Ink Trilogy, thank you. Therefore, everyone on the schedule for last week will be moved to this week, beginning tomorrow, and I will endeavor, at least until December 15th, to write every single day. It is not like I don't have the time right now.

I say this and then realize that I have picked a week full of long, detailed letters filled with passages copied out by hand and fiction of caves and wordal wanderings about insect wings.

The Cat prefers the knitted rug to the sun beams

It is a slow morning, now barely morphed into afternoon and I won't really notice the time shift until evening when the walk takes me to work again. I do not mind late nights or weird hours. They leave me a bit off-center with nothing but the number of hours between one duty and another and a list of possibilities in between to define what the day becomes.

Right now the world is silent in the house and muffled through the windows and I am jealous of its movement and crisp air and sunshine and errands. I have an errand to run and may turn it into more than one, just for the sake of the fresh and the fall.

I've been writing lots of letters and find that I crave the moments of silence and thought to think of what to say to this person or that person, to have a conversation, no matter how one sided, that is thoughtful and concise and specific, or maybe wandering and filled with words of moments long since passed.

I have been sleeping longer these last few days. Noticeably. I believe that the excitement of extended conversation with a beloved friend and the realization that I must do this more often with different people probably lead to a certain amount of that sleep. Well, that and the damn cricket that chirped all friggin' night long and inspired tremendously deep sleep the next night. Stupid loud mouth. Rather: loud legs.

Something begins to settle into the silent parts of my psyche. Deeply felt joy and self-expression, and something about Haircut Day at The Antiquarium. Of course we were there. Of course. It goes like this:

I met my friend Aubrey for the weekend in Brownville, NE. We stayed at the apartment of a mutual friend (thank you, Cin, you are awesome). We each had something very specific to talk about with the other, and we also had a (as in one) specific place in the area that we wanted to go and sightsee. There are requirements when you visit Brownville and those must be accomplished in and around all of this.

We talked libraries. We talked cave adventures. We found the graveyard and drank some wine. There was lunch and there was an apple and there were salami and cream cheese roll-ups and granola bars and fruit juice. I bought a cookbook with showy soup recipes and we sighed and gasped over the desk and the type left from the newspaper that was there when Southeast Nebraska was the place to be. We strolled. We followed a map, and stopped at the statue of Gov. Furnas and showed a bit of honor and then made the point that it may not have been the best idea to plant a bunch of trees on the prairie. Which is not a place of trees, but of scrub and yucca and wild rose and lead plant and bluestem and thistles and nighthawks and poppies and gut-sucking assassin bugs. And wind. Oh the blessed wind.

The parking area at The Antiquarium is kind of undetermined. The approach to the building allows you think that perhaps it is a lie, that it is closed, that it is really closed, that there is nothing in that almost nondescript brick face. That lasts about 5 seconds until the nose of the car reaches the top of the driveway and you see that there is, in fact, a party going on. Kind of all of the time. The cars are just lined up that way, like they are staying for a while and maybe you need to know someone to be here. And we do. They are the books.

The end of the story is a foregone conclusion: Aubrey bought a book about a library and I put on hold a book about cartographers. I will buy it next weekend when we take my niece to this place and warn her than the cat looks nice, and he is, and he bites.

The beginning of the story is a hug from the universe that we got as we walked in and looked around and saw a man sitting in a chair with a cape over his top half because another man was cutting his hair. Well, it was Haircut Day at The Antiquarium, you see. Tom's barber from Omaha comes down once a month and anyone who wants a haircut that day has to leave Omaha to get it. Nobody buys any books, but everyone gets their hair cut. Oh, and someone brought some wine. We stuck around long enough that it got opened. Shiraz. With conversation.

The cats roam around and I am soft and lightly pen-scratchy for a while longer. There are leftovers of pasta with prosciutto and books to be returned to their library from mine. Now I watch the sun beams and settle comfortably into my chair.

Big Crazy Idea (the two-th)

November: National Novel Writing Month, is just over a month away. Tonight and tomorrow and probably the next day as well will involve writing short stories based on photographs taken by one of my favorite photographer/Muses; they begin the reconnection with the stories of a larger/longer work (see below). Tonight and tomorrow, the next day and probably month will involve writing a long short story arc based on a little idea in my brain for my other Muse who will draw my voice in my absence.

I was thinking: wouldn't it be fun to write the 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo and then take the time to edit them together with the other 60,000 words I've already written of the same novel (really, I love this story. it is never going to not be in my brain. I hope.) and craft something like chapters? I do not mean that it will be fun to edit the thing, mind, I mean letters. I mean to send my writing out to people deliberately as shareable object, as art.

Now that I have quite the small stash of plantable and other sorts of gorgeous paper (paper that is not for the insides of journals, mind, but the outsides of insides that are meant to hold the ends of good decisions, or bad decisions well written), I have the means to create little books of small bits of fiction.

But what's the fun of just sending these things out into the world (of a very carefully chosen audience made entirely out of the people that I love (not a very small number, I know, but still))?

What I'm thinking is a reading. Something involving lots of tequila (for me and my ego) and friends and chapter indicators drawn out of a hat (or a mixing bowl)(or a frog) and chapters read aloud.

So.

Beginning November 22 and ending December 10 I will send chapters of my novelthing of fairytales-sort of through the US Postal Service to people whose addresses I have and who actually want to be involved in this. I do not care what state you are in - Skype is our friend. I do not care how long I have known you.

If you opt to get a chapter: 1) please be willing to share with other people, but only other people that you are going to be able to find later (readings don't work when there's nothing to read); 2) please be happy to read whatever chapter you have when it comes time to share.

I would like to wait until Spring to do something like a reading, though, as the plantable paper will need to be planted after the reading, and that is the kind of thing that spring is very good for.

Let me know if you are In. I am not interested in conscripting participants into my activity. I believe in consenting adults only.