We’ve all been there: one minute you’re looking through the recently assembled Ikea shelves of your library for a paperback copy of Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah
, and the next — BAM! — you stumble across the box containing all your personal correspondence from 1988 until whenever people stopped sending letters.
Surely I’m not the only recording angel in the crowd! There have to be some of you out there who thought all your incoming ephemera needed saving. I’m not the only one who crossed self-fascination with OCD and ended up with a box of Virtual Memories, am I?
Okay, maybe I am. But I really have kept that box of letters, postcards and notes. At some point around the turn of the century, I sorted many of these missives by sender and put them in freezer bags. Now they look like evidence, only there’s no case left to prove, nor even a statute of limitations to consult.
It’s all e-mail nowadays, with the loss of physicality, of handwriting, of torn envelopes, of stamp and cancellation. These letters aren’t just mementos or keepsakes; on one level they’re relics, archaicisms like audio cassettes or floppy disks. The pieces I stumbled across still contain information, but I’m not sure I have the (emotional) tools to read some of them anymore.
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In my previous post, I included links to a few other guys who share my name. I wonder how many old friends and acquaintances have looked me up in recent years, and wondered, “Which way did he go: supply chain executive, trade magazine editor, or NASCAR wannabe?”
It put me in mind of that great monologue from American Splendor, where Harvey Pekar wonders how the Cleveland phone book can have listings for two other people with his name. “This filled me with curiosity. How could there be three people with such an unusual name in the world, let alone in one city?” he asks. After the other two (father and son) died, he says, “Although I’d met neither man, I was filled with sadness. ‘What were they like?’ I thought. It seemed our lives had been linked, in some indefinable way.”
Two years later, another Harvey Pekar appears in the phonebook, prompting his stand-in (Paul Giamatti in a brilliant performance) to ponder, “Who are these people? Where do they come from? What do they do? What’s in a name? Who is Harvey Pekar?”
Looking back almost 20 years, it’s not quite as though some of these letters were written to a different person — I mean, I can still see myself in the rear-view mirror — but remembering my college-persona is almost as embarrassing as remembering my famed Napoleon Dynamite look from those years, because every drama-queen note or letter I received in that period must have been prompted by my own incredibly bizarre behavior. (And my propensity to seek out crazy women.)
Case in point: I came across a note I received from a girl at college. She dramatically lambasted me for being an unfeeling, confusing misanthrope. Now, I’m sure that I could find plenty more letters in the box expressing that exact sentiment, but the problem with this one is, it’s only signed with an initial, and I HAVE NO IDEA WHO IT’S FROM. I’ve read it over a few times and racked my brain to figure out the sender, to whom I held grave importance 18 years ago (during my first semester at Hampshire), but to no avail. It’s a blank.
Sometimes we lose the memory, and sometimes the memory loses us. The letter that saddened me the most was a handmade card from another girl at college, mailed a few months after I graduated. It’s filled with reminiscences, travel plans, charity work, the day-to-day — “Other than my little crusade to save the world, I’m still working at the same cafe/bookstore that I did last summer. . .” — all written in a jaunty, lively hand and decorated with a painting (I’ll post the picture later).
It’s the saddest letter I found because she died a few years later, lost at sea. I can’t remember if I wrote her back, but I hope I did.
* * *
Despite this, I’m actually pretty happy I went through these letters. So many of them are reminders of friends and how our lives began to develop: in our college days, in our first professional years, in our travels. Some of these people are still in my life, while I’ve fallen out of touch with others were once my closest friends. Their names once meant the world to me but, like Billy Joel sang, “So many faces in and out of my life / Some will last, some will just be now-and-then.”
Taking this opportunity to get back in touch with some, I applied a little of the detective work that the internet has made so easy and rekindled one old friendship last week. Gratifyingly, the conversation pretty much picked up where we left off. (But now with 90% less crazy!)
I tried to reach another college pal, but found no trace of her online. I had to call the number at the last known address I had (from one of her letters, of course): her small Kentucky hometown. I spoke to her father, who pleasantly told me, “She’s living in the capital now.”
I paused a moment, then said, “Which is. . . ?”
“Frankfort, of course.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” You learn something every day. He gave me her address and I wrote her a card.
Sure, there are other people that I’m less interested in contacting, or don’t have time to look up, or [insert excuse here] (like, I was a douchebag and that’s why we stopped talking / writing), but even their old letters — cards sent from home during winter holidays, inter-college correspondence from high school friends, short stories sent from semesters abroad — are treasure.
So many lives, I can’t keep them all in my head. I’m glad I have Virtual Memories.
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Today’s the fifth anniversary of the launch of this blog. My thanks go out to everyone who’s visited and read my writing. I know that it’s not the most focused of blogs, and I wish I could write exclusively about a single topic, but I’m afraid it’s not my strength.
