Didn’t we just have a snowpocalypse?

We’re having exactly the kind of winter I would have adored as a little girl. Snow day upon snow day, the whole world turning magically into a hill to climb then slide down at high speed.

Snow as an adult is different. Mostly we have to go on with our regular lives but with more inconveniences, more things taking more time, more cold wet piles of clothes and shoes to deal with at the end of the day. And I don’t even have to juggle children and the difficulties that arise when schools are closed but work is not.

Snow like we had today is like kid-snow. There’s nothing to do about it while it’s falling. As soon as it’s over it’s about digging out, scraping off, checking the roads and assessing the risk, but while it’s falling – no. While it’s falling, we can watch. If we’re lucky, we can watch inside where it’s warm, and where we have enough to eat and drink. We can slow down and do nothing. It’s okay. It is, in fact, fully sanctioned.

I was going to do my taxes today, but instead I went for a walk. It’s an okay to do nothing day. I hope you had one too.

Sunset and the road home.

February 6, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  4 Comments

Closing Time

Over the years alcohol and I have had a very on-again, off-again relationship. I don’t often examine it but for the early years of my adolescence (by which I mean “until I was about 23”) I was fairly prudish and had some very conventional ideas about how life should go. They were basically modeled on my parents’ life: I would get decent grades in school, go to college, meet a nice man and get married after college, settle down and have kids. There may have been something in there about a white picket fence, too, but don’t quote me on that. My parents both rejected using alcohol in great quantities for varying reasons, though neither was a teetotaler. Therefore that never appealed to me either. My 21st birthday was not a drunken binge; a few friends and I went to a nice restaurant and I got an Irish coffee for dessert. Fun. Tasteful. Tasty!

Fast forward to 23, remember? The later years of my adolescence arrived, well, later. And with a vengeance. I had tried the route my parents went and it had let me down. I’d gone to school and faced challenges I wasn’t sure how to deal with; I’d met a man but it had not worked out; what NOW?

The answer can be summed up with a single word: VODKA. Oh, we drank vodka. Cheap, crappy, plastic-bottled-in-Dundalk vodka. I have the very distinct memory of watching that one X-Files episode (“Syzygy”) where Mulder makes a screwdriver by carefully, deliberately spooning dribbles of orange juice concentrate into a pint bottle of vodka and honestly believing that this was a brilliant idea. My friends and I were once accused of “closet alcoholism” because we never went out to bars, we just got enormous bottles of turpentine-grade vodka and sat around making up drinking games. (An example: Watch the movie Dune. Drink whenever you see sand.) On the contrary, we were merely being thrifty: a liter or two of “Ruble” vodka shared out between ten people was a much cheaper way to getting an evening’s drink on than going to a bar.

Eventually these thrifty ways caught up with me. I’d done my drinking. I’d done my (admittedly somewhat later in life) rebelling. It was time to put aside childish things. Suddenly, drinking did seem childish. Wanting desperately to be – or at least seem – more together, I veered almost completely into teetotaling myself for a few years, mainly in my early 30s. I might have a beer or a glass of wine, but more often than not I’d volunteer to be a sober driver and not fuss about it. Two years ago, when I was 35, I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. The slow changes I had been making to my health and habits turned into Big Fast Changes. Alcohol was an unknown quantity and so I just stayed away at first.

Now I like to think I’m at a happy medium. Between no longer consuming truly stunning amounts of vodka and losing 90 pounds, my tolerance is back down to laughably cheap-date levels. And do you know what? I love it! I love that a beer or two is all it takes to set me giggling. What I see now about alcohol is that it does have an acceptable place for me socially, now that I’ve finally figured out what I use it for.

I use alcohol to stop thinking. But unlike when I was young and thought I had to obliterate all thought, what I know now is that my brain is a busy place. I’m an over-analyzer, a studier of things, sometimes maybe an overenthusiastic looker-for-signs. I write and I talk and I ponder and I try to create and also I gesticulate a lot. There’s not a thing wrong with that but I have learned to admit that it’s exhausting. A night out with a few friends and a couple of beers, where someone else can drive me home? It’s a tiny mental vacation. With proper hydration, and with sparing use (don’t want to build that tolerance again!), good friends raising a glass together can be one of the most rewarding ways possible to spend an evening.

–

Note: With many thanks to Genie, I submit this as my first tentative entry into her brilliant Living Out Loud project. You totally owe it to yourself to go check it out. Cheers, Genie!

February 1, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  14 Comments

Let it go, kid.

Sunday night was a big night. I got home from Mom’s before it even fell dark, and it seemed I could do more than my usual weekly ritual of cleaning the apartment. There are still unpacked things in my bedroom and office, things that can be more neatly sorted and organized. I spied that one particular box in my bedroom and knew: it was time. I bustled for a sharp knife and sawed through the packing tape. A single word was printed on the box: “WRITIN’.”

Inside that box, I knew, were all my childhood journals. I’ve been keeping a journal in one way or another since I was 11 years old. There are a few gaps, but never for too long. What I imagined happening when I finally opened that box was taking the first steps on a long journey, a journey back to The Girl I Was, a chance to search for clues to the Woman I Have Become. I may as well have gotten a hanky and a glass of wine when I got that sharp knife, may as well have baldly stated my intentions to get wrapped in a ball of nostalgia so immense, so dense, that it would qualify as its own roadside attraction.

Turns out that didn’t happen. Oh, there were discoveries that made me pause. Sheaves of beginnings-of-stories that I’d forgotten. Poems (seriously?) written for boys I no longer remembered. The lovingly hand-written lyrics to a song by my high school boyfriend’s punk band. (I cannot be 100% sure but that slip of paper may have once hung in my locker.) By the time I excavated my way down to the actual journals, past all the loose sheets of ephemera, I felt numb, and not just because my leg had fallen asleep. There was so much! Plenty to smile and laugh at, but also a reminder of the way writing used to be for me, more vital and more urgent than it usually seems now.

In the journals themselves, though, was another side. It was easy for me to idealize the energy of youth, to look wistfully at the work I could do before I had Bills and Responsibilities and Worries and wonder if I could ever do “pure” work like that again. The first thing I saw when I cracked one of those speckled composition books, though, was red ink. What I had managed to forget was that throughout my adolescence, I would read what I had written before in my journal – months, even mere weeks before – and make derisive, self-mocking notes in the margins in colored pen. The me of October 1986, for instance, could not BELIEVE the stupidity of the me of July of 1986. And let’s not even discuss poor little me of December 1983. The older the journal entry, the more buried it was beneath jokes, editorial comments, and insults born of embarrassment. What a strange pattern! I would open up, to no one but myself mind you, and then later I would feel so uncomfortable having opened up that I would have to put myself on the record as disagreeing with my younger self.

What? Woman I Have Become was, frankly, appalled. I’d forgotten how hard on herself Girl I Was had been. Just when I should have been letting myself work with the unfettered enthusiasm inhabiting my fiction, I was slamming the door on my own ideas, on the story of my own life.

Say what you will about this blog, but I’m putting these ideas up here, for me and for others, with no self-derision whatsoever. Funny or serious or sad or ridiculous, there’s value in these observations, not despite but because of who I am as I write them.

January 26, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  3 Comments

Reductio ad absurdum

It’s been nearly two years since I set up a Facebook account. I’m the first to admit that I did it somewhat begrudgingly, accepting that it is becoming the normal way for people to connect, or to reconnect after being out of touch for a while. It’s certainly a useful tool in many ways, a mildly terrifying example being the official word I received there recently of my 20th high school reunion to be held this summer. My acceptance can even become enthusiasm, getting in touch with a few long-lost friends and even making a needed apology many years later than I should have done.

For the most part I haven’t paid much attention to my profile over the years other than to upload new photographs from time to time. Not long ago I went to do just that and happened to take a look at the rest of my profile. There was my status, “Single”…and there were my political (“liberal”) and religious (“weird”) views. Why on earth had I let those tossed-off answers stand? Talk about two things that can hardly be summed up by one word each. My “religious views” answer bothered me the most, because they are something I consider a constant work-in-progress, and it seemed wrong to dash them off with a single word. Therefore, after I set up my new photo I also deleted my religious and political views from my profile.

Sure enough, there was the little notice: “Jen Raffensperger has changed her religious views.” How absurd. Was I going to get “like” messages on that? Putting out a chipper little notice like that just seemed wrong, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

Today I happened to hear the news that a friend of mine had ended a relationship. She reported that when she went to change her status on Facebook, the message it gave her was: “Clicking ‘save’ will cancel your relationship. Are you sure you want to save changes?” I was incredulous. I’ve never had to change my relationship status on Facebook, and was struck by the absurdity of that comment. Really, Facebook? Clicking on a button will cancel a relationship? As if we’ve suddenly achieved the memory-wiping technology of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? As if all the hard work, thought, occasional tears and sometimes very great pain of ending a relationship could somehow be summed up with a single little click? Sure, boom, it never existed, right!?

That’s when I thought of that little message. “Jen Raffensperger has changed her religious views.” Sure. Sure, that’s what I’ve done, just with a click! I didn’t have to live through angry years of denial, didn’t have to explore the legacy of religion within my family, didn’t have to confront the failings that my spirituality presented me with, didn’t have to own up to years of willful ignorance, didn’t have to struggle to come to a mindful place where I could explore my own ideas and beliefs and respect those of others. Just had to push a button! Silly me! I’ve been wasting all this time praying, writing, reflecting, railing, crying, fist-shaking when I could have just clicked “save”!

When I first heard about click-to-cancel-your-relationship, I laughed, but I was angry. By golly I was ready to write a screed about the work behind human connections, and the folly of reducing them to a mouse-click kiss-off. I would say it’s taken a step back from screed, but I think it’s important in today’s click-intensive world to remember that the messages we send aren’t meaningless, even if the semantics surrounding them are thoughtless. Canceled relationship indeed.

Friends, the next time you’re on Facebook you might notice a little something in your news feed. It’ll say “Jen Raffensperger is no longer listed as single,” but don’t get all excited. I just decided the next time I do make a large, and largely thoughtful, change in my life like that…you’re going to just have to wait until I can tell you about it. In person, at length, and possibly with hand-gestures. Click on that.

January 21, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  6 Comments

Scrabbling

My maternal grandmother loved to play Scrabble. When I was a little girl and she would stay with us, she and my mother would stay up late playing Scrabble and smoking, peering intently at their little trays around the kitchen table, occasionally adding new melty burn-marks to the vinyl tablecloth. How I wanted to join them! They always seemed to have such fun! They would laugh and talk throughout the game! Surely something was going on that was very exciting!

As a girl I longed to be older than I was, always. I wanted to talk with the adults at the dinner table. I wanted my nine-years-older-than-me brother’s friends to talk to me, to like me, even though I was a little kid. The thing I most wanted was not to be a little kid any more, but try as I might I couldn’t really do anything about that. I just wanted to be in on more of the jokes, to understand more! I read books and listened to music that I saw my parents or brother enjoying. And of course I got in on Scrabble as soon as I could.

I was terrible at it. My mother and grandmother were kind and supportive and encouraging, and I figured it was just something that would get easier for me as I got older, like reaching things on higher shelves or understanding “Doonesbury.” I got older. I got smarter. My vocabulary became, frankly, intimidating.

I could not beat my grandmother at Scrabble. Ever. I am not sure I ever did, at least not before she started sliding into senile dementia in her 90s.

As a surly young adult I turned against the game I’d so wanted to enjoy as a girl. Clearly Scrabble was a stupid game and not worth my time. When my grandmother would visit and we’d get out the board, I would heave a meaning-laden sigh and make it very clear to all that I was resigning myself to my imminent defeat out of a sense of familial obligation only. I was a good daughter, so I did my mother and grandmother the wonderful favor of “playing” Scrabble with them, for some definition of “playing” that really meant “whining and complaining.” I’m sure they were thrilled to have me “playing” with them by emitting a constant low-volume stream of mild obscenities occasionally punctuated with an outburst of “ALL I HAVE IS VOWELS!” and some scowling. Surely the light of shared experience shone in their eyes as I practically tripped over my own feet getting away from the table at the end of the game.

When I grew up still a little more I learned something. My mother was never all that fond of Scrabble either. “Your grandmother just loves it,” she said, shrugging, when I asked why she kept playing. That certainly put a different spin on things. I started getting into the games a little more. Instead of focusing the whole time on the fact that I have the pattern recognition skills of a three-toed sloth with a migraine, and that the biggest vocabulary in the world can’t help you when you have six “E” tiles and an “X” sitting on that damned little tray, I started to focus on the shared time we had at the table. Mom and Grandma weren’t smoking inside anymore, and maybe the games took a little longer now that Grandma was moving a little slower. But there was talking and laughter for hours. The smiles around the table got more genuine, mine because I was finally starting to get it, theirs because I was not such an insufferable git about the game anymore.

I almost got it. Sometimes we do things that we don’t love with, or for, the people we do love. At first I thought that was all – suck it up and do the thing you hate because it will make someone else happy. What it seems to have taken me forever to learn is that it’s about more than sucking it up. It’s about letting the love you have for the other person transform you. About feeling the joy that they experience, nearly as your own. True empathy is hard to come by, but maybe if we sit at enough Scrabble tables we can start to figure it out.

January 18, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  9 Comments

Nowhere else.

The cats are wrestling behind me and my ears have a little of that post-concert jangly sensation. I’m sitting on a folding chair that reminds me, every time, that I need to build myself a better workspace, a desk instead of a folding table, a chair that’s kinder during long writing sessions. The bills are paid for another month, but more will come. In a few minutes I’ll brush my teeth and swallow more pills, continual reminders of what my body can and can’t do without help. My legs are a bit tired. Not ten minutes ago I rubbed my right eye so hard that it got a bit red and irritated.

Not a single bit of it matters. Post-concert, remember? For years, and no I don’t remember which ones, I didn’t go to concerts. I drifted away from radio (too boring) and mainly concentrated on artists I already knew, deeper into catalogs rather than broader musical experiences. Plus concerts were expensive. Turns out the artists you grew up with, if they’ve had careers that long, can sell some pretty expensive concert tickets.

I no longer remember quite what got me back into going to concerts, either, but if I could I’d go back and thank it. Or kiss it full on the lips. The experience of live music is like nothing else. There are bands out there you haven’t heard of, they’re probably local, you might not like them. But maybe you will. Do you know you can try out a local concert for less than the price of a movie ticket?

Driving home tonight felt like it took no time at all. And one thought stuck with me: For a concert to be successful, I think you have to ask yourself when it’s over if it ever once occurred to you during the show that you wanted to be anywhere else on earth, doing anything else at all. If that never occurred to you, the concert was a success. Nothing, no one else could have gotten my attention for a couple of hours tonight. No cats, no chair, no bills, no pills, no worries. If that’s not worth the price of a movie ticket, what is?

January 17, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

The Long View

Let’s face it, any retrospective I try to write about 2009 is going to be full of my father’s illness and death. Anything else that happened in my life paled in comparison, and even when I think about other important things from the past year I think about them reflected in the light of that experience, and of my grief. That is as it should be. It is all still too close to set all that aside even for self-examination.

Yet it’s a time of year when we look back. A list of songs (or movies, or books – I could bury myself in lists) is one tool to use, another might be old blog entries, a collection of ticket stubs, an array of photographs. This blog was new in 2009, and it falls under the same shadow as the rest of the year. I didn’t intend for it to turn into a place to talk about Dad; when I started it he didn’t have a single symptom. I don’t keep ticket stubs any more. Photos of the year can still bring a special kind of pain.

What’s come to mind has been the longer view. It’s the end of the “Aughts,” that fraught decade. Somewhere I read someone else’s look back at not just the past year but the past ten years. That got me to thinking about New Year’s Eve 1999.

It was honestly the worst New Year’s Eve of my life. I was very sick, and no one could yet tell me what was wrong with me. I was on two “just in case” antibiotic prescriptions, strong ones that could not be mixed with alcohol without dire consequences. It was “Y2K” of course, and I worked in the internet industry. I hadn’t drawn the truly short straw of working the overnight shift on 12/31/99, but I did have to be at work at 8 a.m. on January first. For whatever reason, even though I was bleeding from places you’re not supposed to and felt like hell, even though I couldn’t touch a drop of alcohol, even though I had to be home very early to get enough rest before work the next day, I still insisted on going out to whatever huge party was being held that year. Everyone was stinking drunk but me, and as I sat there and got beer spilled on me and confetti lodged in my ears, I wondered what the hell I was thinking.

It seems to me I was in that state a lot ten years ago. Not only unhappy with my own decisions but sometimes actively confused by them. How could I be confused? Wasn’t I the one behind the decisions? The truth of the matter was that I was badly out of touch with myself. I struggled with both money and work ethic, not able to see how the latter affected the former. I still felt entitled to things I hadn’t worked very hard for. I was unable to ask for help; at times I was unable even to determine if I needed help. For various reasons, even though I was 27 years old when the clock ticked over to midnight on January 1, 2000 I still wasn’t behaving like an adult.

That summation makes it sound like it was all bad; it was not. There were good times all throughout the decade and say what you will about the start of it, I was making real progress throughout it. There were lessons to learn, some the very-hard way, and I wasn’t always gracious about them, but a lot of them did take eventually. I’ve made some of the best friends in my life in the past decade, and that is worth a lot.

The things that happened to me in 2009 were difficult, but they were a part of life, a part that comes to all of us in time. The searching, honest conversations I had with my Dad as he was dying are among my most treasured memories. The thing I keep coming back to is that me ten years ago could not have had those conversations. Me ten years ago could not have been strong the way my father asked me to be strong. I could not have been as honest about my feelings, my grief, or my need for help. I am proud of who I am today, proud of the daughter I could and can be, proud of the help I can give and receive, proud to admit I still have so much to learn and so far to go. I cannot even begin to imagine the next decade. I can only hope I have the grace to experience it fully.

January 4, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

5 Songs 500 Words

Just in case you were worried, that’s one hundred words per song, not five hundred for each. Why limit myself this way? I’ll admit it just felt like a fun exercise, but I also realized as I made my Top Five Songs of 2009 list that I found it difficult to articulate why I chose each song. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how important music is to me, and how ill-equipped I feel to describe precisely why. Examining my choices closely might enable me to better explain them. The list was made for WTMD’s end of year best-of countdown. I allowed myself to use “100 or fewer” words per song because hitting exactly 100 might have driven me over the edge.

“Got Nuffin’,” Spoon

Sometimes a song’s melody hits me first, sometimes the lyrics. With “Got Nuffin’” it was lyrics: “I’ve got nothing to lose but darkness and shadows / Got nothing to lose but bitterness and patterns.” Describing how music is put together is where my abilities fall apart, but this is a driving song, a song of force, a song that demands admission to your brain and doesn’t quickly take its leave. “Got nothing to lose but emptiness and hang-ups.” Words of daring, words of exhortation, the drive to convince.

“Even If It Breaks Your Heart,” Will Hoge

When it gets down to it, it’s hard to deal with other people. Day in and day out, it’s continual frustration, from small traffic annoyances to news stories about horrors perpetrated in unspeakable hatred. When we look our neighbor in the eye, we can get worn down. We can lose that empathy, can forget that we’re both just people. This person has dreams just like ours. This song articulates someone else’s dream so perfectly that it reminds me to be more patient with everyone around me. “Keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart.” I will if you will.

“Eyes So Strong and Clean,” Caleb Stine

This album came out at the end of June, so maybe it was just timing that put it at the forefront of my mind throughout a lot of drives this summer. Drives to my folks’ house, to the hospital, to the nursing home, to church. A couple of albums, always including this one, on repeat in my car underlining a lonely, frightening journey. Even when my eyes blurred the road, the thought of a time “when all your scars will just be maps to where you no longer go” held powerful sway. The power of thought, time, and always love.

“(I Keep On) Risin’ Up,” Mike Doughty

Okay, this one? Just makes me want to move. Mike Doughty’s a hundred times the wordsmith I will ever be even when he has a bad day. The music makes me want to move and the words make me want to think and practically command me to feel. It hasn’t always felt like a year for rising up. This song makes me remember how good it can feel anyway.

“Little Pieces,” Gomez

This year’s perfect song for putting on your headphones and just blasting. Of course what I want to blast might not be what you want to blast. Gomez has sonic complexity, this song changes up the pace enough to play with expectations. As for the pieces of us that we share and that we choose to keep inside? When we speak and when we’re silent? Words, it all comes down to the ones we share. Of course I love this song. I come here and share the pieces that mean the most.

December 17, 2009  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  2 Comments

November 29, 2009

Today would have been my father’s 70th birthday. We always celebrated his birthday on Thanksgiving (his favorite holiday), adding an apple pie (his favorite, that he taught me to bake) to the pumpkin pies and adding an extra layer to the festivities. This year, the family spent Thanksgiving together quietly, peacefully, with a different layer added to the day’s events.

Today was impossibly gorgeous for late November. It was sunny and 70 degrees, with high beautiful clouds of a type usually reserved for the most hope-filled of May days. It’s the first Sunday of Advent in the church calendar, another big time for hope. During the final stages of my Dad’s illness and during the week between his passing and his funeral, the weather was some of the most lovely imaginable. It felt to me as if the world were softening its edges, as if there was a kindly give to things that might otherwise be hard at that time. That little window of grace existed, and while some things were so difficult, worse than I’d ever had to deal with, everything else seemed beautiful and easy and gentle. Today felt like a glimpse of that spirit.

I am not much of one for graves. Whatever happens to us at death, I know that our bodies do not signify once the spirit leaves them. I had always suspected this before and now that I have been present at the moment of death, it is fully confirmed. I have never liked open caskets or viewings, though I have come to understand some of the ways they can comfort other people. When I’ve visited the graves of my grandparents in the past, I’ve come up short. What do I do? Do I pray? Do I remember the person? Do I make silly jokes? Believe me, in my family, that one’s definitely an option, and not a disrespectful one.

Today for the first time since his funeral, I visited my father’s grave. I took some flowers even though he was never very fond of them. “I can’t see the colors,” he’d say with a shrug, since he was so colorblind he could really only see shades of gray. But it’s what you do, right? You say, I was here, I love you. Since Thanksgiving was his favorite holiday, I also brought a small slice of pumpkin pie. Apple was his favorite but he loved my pumpkin pie too. I leaned the flowers against the white wooden cross at the head of his grave (a place-holder until the granite memorial arrives) and then I sat on the little bench at the foot of his grave and ate a slice of pumpkin pie. I cried and I sniveled and I laughed, and though he would have rolled his eyes at me he also knew me well enough to know that this is going to have to be how I mourn.

Sitting there, it was so still and serene that the tears eventually stopped. I still am not convinced about graves, but I know that that place is a right and good place to remember my Dad. Right now when I sit at his grave I am filled only with the memories of the end of his life, but I know that in time I will have all the memories there when I am there, the good ones and the bad. The ground of that place was sacred to him, and so it makes sense that it is now sacred to his memory as well.

Happy birthday, Dad.

November 29, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: family  5 Comments

Sincerely Yours

Dear Steve,

Forgive the forwardness of the introduction, but as many kisses as you’ve stolen from me in the dark, I think we can dispense with a few formalities. You have fun, now, referring to yourself as “Uncle Stevie,” and in your approachable, light-hearted, and – yes – avuncular column in Entertainment Weekly that’s just fine. You probably get to talk to folks who don’t go back quite so far with you, and you can be Uncle Stevie to them all you want. But for now, just for a little bit, you’re going to be Steve, and I’m going to talk a while.

You don’t remember when we first met, of course. Why should you? You’re a busy guy, meeting a lot of people, shaking a lot of hands, looking in a lot of unfamiliar faces. I remember, though. I remember a bin in a used book store, four “cut out” paperbacks for a dollar. Fifty cents’ allowance a week didn’t go far, even in 1984, but that was two paperbacks if I’d managed to scrounge a few extra pennies for sales tax.

You were in your own world, your own place in 1984. By many accounts, including your own, it was maybe not the best place, and believe me when I say I’m sorry for that. But when I was a girl, and I met you for the first time, the place you took me to was magical. Not in a unicorns-and-fairies kind of way, heck no, but magical all the same. Life in a town called ‘Salem’s Lot was changing, and I got to watch. Life in that town was stripped down to its essence, life in that town was lost and changed forever, and was it a kind of voyeuristic delight to watch that, to feel a chill down to my toes when I thought of the gentle scratches at the window? It sure was. Unicorns and fairies had nuthin’ on that place.

That’s when we met, Steve. Oh, you weren’t Steve then, and I wasn’t fully who you came to know either. No, becoming that person took a few more years, a few more books, and a bunch more nights with that funny toe-chilling creep. I got to know your friends, and you introduced me to some folks who became good friends of mine. You don’t know it, but I even fell in love a little here and there. Jack Sawyer, he was the first. Striking out on his own like that, so close to me in age, going through so many things I couldn’t even imagine. Ben Hanscom, so overcome with love in a way I thought no boy actually could be. And Roland. Did you know, when you introduced Roland to me, that you’d start a lifelong relationship?

Do you know, I think maybe you did. You sly dog. Because each time you introduced me to someone else unforgettable, and then made me feel pain and terror on their behalf, you pulled me a little closer. Each night up way too late reading, each toe-chill, was one more chance for you to slip your hand into mine in the dark.

Why write to you now, Steve? Why, after twenty-five years, should I be made so bold, to declare myself in such a manner? Simple. Last week, our paths actually crossed. It’s something I never thought or expected would happen. And of course, after such a gift of words from you across the years, I had few – and inadequate – words at my disposal at the time. You should have seen me when they interviewed me for the news, though, Steve! I wouldn’t shut up! Face to face, though, simple pleasantries and smiles had to suffice. Time was short, the line was long, and signing your name hundreds of times has got to get pretty old, pretty quick.

Let me tell you, because you’ll laugh, what a thrill it gives me to take that book down and look at your name, scrawled in actual by-God ballpoint pen. If I run my finger over it I can feel the impression on the paper. Then I grin like an idiot again. Yep, I can see why you don’t do this all that often. Here you spend all your time writing me love letters, and I go all googly-eyed the second I actually get to watch your hand holding the pen.

Thank you. For every mash note, toe-chill, stolen kiss in the dark, and gentle scrape at a dark window. I didn’t need the signature, you know, though it now holds pride of place in my collection of letters from you to me. It seemed only fair to finally write one back.

Sincerely yours,
I remain,

Constant Reader

Thanks, man

November 16, 2009   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments