April 14: "Angelus," Letter Writing, "Birthday Card"

Billy Collins gets some mail . . . 

Angelus

by:  Billy Collins

Church bells

from across the water--

a breeze blows

the letter I was reading

into the lake.

People don't write letters anymore.  They email.  Text.  Send snaps.  Communication these days is instantaneous.  Unless you're standing on the summit of Mount Everest or diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you can get in touch with practically anybody in the time it takes to sneeze.

I come from a letter-writing generation.  Maybe the last letter-writing generation.  If I went on vacation, I sent home postcards.  When my girlfriend (now wife) and I were separated while I was in grad school in Kalamazoo, I wrote long letters to her every day.  Sad letters.  Sexy letters.  Joyful letters.  Angry letters.  It was how I kept myself connected with my distant love.

We've lost something in this social media age.  It takes me maybe 30 seconds to send a text ("Can you bring my car keys with you when you come to the church?").  It takes even less time to answer a text ("K" or "Yes" or a thumbs up emoji).  Writing a letter takes time and thought and a more than a little creativity.  It also takes a person who can read and write cursive (a rarer and rarer skill these days).

Perhaps I'm old fashioned.  Maybe I'm a Luddite.  But I get more excited about receiving a handwritten letter or card than any email or text  Electronic communications are transitory.  Here today, deleted tomorrow  Yesterday, I took a book off my shelf and opened it up.  Inside, I found a birthday card from a good friend who has been dead close to ten years.

As I read the words he'd scribbled inside the card in his tall, thin script, it was like he was right there with me.  I could actually hear his laugh followed by the watery intake of breath that always followed it.

That's not something you can get from an antiseptic, autocorrected electronic message.  It's something

living.  Breathing.  Like a poem.

And Saint Marty will take a poem over a text any day.

Birthday Card

by:  Martin Achatz

from a dead friend, 

found in the pages

of Leaves of Grass,

mixing with

the beer and peanuts

of Whitman's breath.

January 7: A Few Items, Birthday Card, Letting Go

But most sorrowfully, there were a few items kept hidden in a closet that related to his son--a white leatherbound New Testament, a baptismal card, a pile of paperbacks, and a new watch, never used, that had been purchased as his Christmas present at Macy's the afternoon before his death.

I understand Edward Ives' inability to let go of these items belonging to his son.  Throughout the novel, Ives sinks deeper and deeper into depression over the murder of his son.  It's devastating to read.  He simply cannot move past this tragic loss.  He holds onto his son's belongings, frozen, unable to let go.


I think I'm a lot like Ives.  I love the sentimentality of Christmas.  The lights and music and church services.  And I have a hard time letting go.  For instance, I shared the same birth date as my friend, Ray, who passed away just before Thanksgiving.  Every year, we gave each other birthday cards, trying to find the funniest or most inappropriate.  A couple weeks ago, I found the card Ray gave me in October.  The last card.  I've been carrying it around ever since.  Every once in a while, I'll take it out and read the personal message he wrote on the inside.  It makes me smile and feel sad at the same time.

Letting go is tough.  I have all the diaries and journals saved from the time I was in middle school.  I've never reread them, probably never will.  They simply reside in a box in my closet.  Maybe, when I win the Nobel Prize in Literature, they might be valuable.  Or maybe not.  Perhaps I should pull a Franz Kafka and ask my wife or best friend to burn them after I've died, tragically, of consumption.  That way I don't have to do the letting go.

When I return to teaching next week, I'm going to put Ray's birthday card in my office.  I may even frame it.  Just to remind me of his snorting laugh, his kind spirit.  Letting go is a process, like sand being eroded from a beach.  It takes time.  Lots of it for me.

In the mean time, Saint Marty's got about 40 or 50 diaries/journals to keep hidden.

Not ready for this yet...