Page 19 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Names get confused, as we age, in letters just as they do in conversations. In one of her letters, my mother calls Nicole Noelle again (Noelle being my sister’s daughter). She goes on to tell me how she calls Guy (my brother’s son) Tom, and will likely someday call Nicole (my daughter) Beth, in the same way. I so fully understand all of it now, an early insight having come from a Margaret Laurence novel I read ages ago, while still young.
~
Offices hardly ever come up, despite lots of exchanges about work—though I suspect many of us spend too many hours in offices.
Cathy and I were officemates (in what’s now a room full of computers and printers), before she moved away, and I moved up the hall and to a different department. We dealt with (or dodged) some challenging situations in our years working back-to-back in our shared office. I loved her dry humour, but the letters also remind me of her acerbic side. Maybe those traits balance one another. They definitely serve to spice up a letter.
“Knowing what matters, what holds meaning,
brings joy or understanding, is the challenge. We ask each other in those introspective years, nudge one another as
~ we mature, and remind one
PS, the Post Script seems a standard feature of our letters, no matter the time or style.
Prized, among the more than three thousand pages of these letters I’ve accumulated over the years, is a letter from my Aunt Phyl. It’s from 1988 and she’s writing to tell me how happy she is to hear about our older son’s birth. She also says she thinks she’s “getting senile and can’t remember things” and has kept asking my mother (twelve years younger) if she’d written to me yet. Mom has told her that she thought she had. But she’s giving in to her doubts and writing anyway. She’s feeling confused, partly, she says, from so much company, and her furnace also “developed a crack” resulting in soot all over the place. And they’ve had a bat in the house. And then her fridge “sprung a leak,” and as a result, she’s forgotten to congratulate me on having our son. Small wonder!
Q, R, S, T
Questions probe for how we’re doing, or how I’m recover- ing from my back surgery, or a mysterious intestinal flare up in those early years of marriage. The frequency of those exchanges makes me wonder if recovery provided more time for corresponding, prompting an outburst of mail in return.
Quills? Never for me. Too sophisticated by a long shot. But these two letters in my box are on fine, crinkly paper,
another as we age.”
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