Page 20 - WTP VOl. XIII #2

Letters (continued from preceding page)
with words flowing in streams of undulating script which appear to have flowed from a quill. (How would I know?)
~
Re-reading to reduce her own stacks of letters is what my friend Cindy tells me she’s doing, after a move to Philadelphia compels her. She tells about re-reading mine and says she could only discard one. She’s trying to fathom the leaps, from Maine to New York (stages we have shared), and then Montana to BC.
Risks are commonplace, and recounted in letter after letter. My friend Marcia writes about getting back to Missoula after visiting me. She’s hitchhiked with a friend to Kalispell, and from there, catches a ride with some band hauling their equipment in an old bus. It’s slow going, so when they stop to eat in Polson, they leave to try again, only to be picked up by the same band again. Later she tells of falling into a tree well while skiing at Lolo Pass, and the deep powder (a new challenge for east-coast skiers).
Another letter from another friend from the early years, Ginny, tells of feeling solitary, and how that feeling terrifies her. She goes on to describe the rat or mouse in her ceiling, though admits it’s “hard to tell at night when everything is so still” whether she imagines it, and then signs off saying “everything is going really well.” Indeed.
~
Stationery, another whole aspect of the art of letter- writing we seldom give any thought to now, but in my own and my daughter’s desk I’ve found various styles of stationery, personalized, often given as gifts. Of the array of stationery in my stores of letters, I’m sur-
prised to notice that the most striking is from Noel, my sister’s first husband and father of my niece. He was a drummer in a band when I first knew him, and not the sort of guy I’d imagine to have written to me. But his musings fill the odd asymmetrically shaped page, folded in a strange kite-like configuration.
In an entirely different way, my mother’s stationery is also interesting, and always changing. For a time, her letters are written on the back of bank memos. Mom, like me, could not waste, and her stationery changes with whatever excess stash of paper she’s come by. I feel a tug of familiarity seeing her hand- writing, too.
~
Trick-or-treating comes up in letters from my sib- lings, but also in one from one of those friends I must have made living in Montana, or perhaps during grad school in Washington. Her name is Amy, and she’s travelling with a Robert, in 1999. She tells me how she really appreciates meeting me and is “so grateful” to get my letter with a picture of my kids playing out- side. She talks about how “we didn’t know each other long” but she feels “so connected.” She asks, hoping not to sound too ignorant, if our kids trick-or-treat, or “if that’s just American.” Amy sounds sweet, but I don’t have even the faintest trace of memory of her.
U,V
Unsettling letters surface, some taking me by sur-
prise, upsetting me anew.
One of the more maddening is from an uncle known for being crazy (war-damaged, we were told), in ad- dition to being intelligent, Italian, and arrogant. His letters emerge from countries, contexts, and circum- stances as exotic as they were incomprehensible to me. This one is addressed to my oldest sister and
me (never mind that she lives in the south-western US, and I’m in British Columbia). He tells us that he’s furious about the trip to Maine we’re planning. (I was bringing our first-born daughter to meet my mother, and my sister would join me there.) But Uncle Jim claims that “the Baby has no personality as such for people to admire,” going on to advise waiting until she’s “at least two.” Never mind that he’s never mar- ried or had children (to our knowledge anyway). He goes on to say that he “can’t fathom” my being here “in Siberia” and says just because I miss Maine, this is no reason to waste our time and money. And in case it’s my mother I miss, he adds that on his last visit he found her to be “rather dowdy, poorly dressed, etc.”
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