Dearest You

Twenty-Eight

2010-12-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

Do you remember that time we dyed your hair dark brown and you cried because you looked like Maria in "West Side Story?" We were bored and broke and so we did lots of random things in our small (so small apartment.) We sat at our table and painted with watercolors, we made milkshakes in the blender from ice cream we bought at the little bodega across the street. We smoked lots and lots of cigarettes and wrote in our journals. I once built a desk from scrap wood in the living room and it turned out to be so large I couldn't fit it through the door to my bedroom. We laughed really hard. And then you helped me take out all the screws and move the parts one at a time.

We journeyed across the country together, from your childhood home in the South to the big city on the West coast. When I picked you up, your mother poured us glasses of fresh squeezed lemonade and we played Hearts in the back yard with friends you had known your whole life. The next morning, after we'd loaded all your things into my tiny, red hatchback you wrapped your arms around your mom and cried. You cried all the way out of town. I drove through the gray light of early morning and worried about you. I also admired the way your new haircut fell in waves around your face. You were probably wearing overalls over a tank top and probably I was, too. After a while you stopped crying and we listened to Dwight Yoakum and Randy Travis and sang all the songs at the top of our lungs as we drove into the heat of the summer day.

On that trip, our air conditioner gave out in Arkansas and we didn't have enough money or time to get it fixed. We rolled down the windows and stopped often for Cokes and crushed ice. We dunked our heads in the sinks of rest area bathrooms and still we were hot. So hot that on a particularly long stretch the print of your sundress bled onto the pillowcase of the pillow you kept on your seat. It was hot and sweaty and the car was filled with everything we thought we might need for our new post college life out West.

In our first apartment, we danced on the wide, empty wood floors of our living room and threw parties where we served hamburgers on English muffins, potatos mashed with cheese and salsa and your famous "Jiffy Mix" muffins. We sat around our table with friends and made Christmas cards and Valentines, paintings and collages. A friend dubbed us "the Feminist Craft Circle." It was so nice to share a glass of wine, a pair of scissors and a tube of glue with you.

In our second apartment and second city, we circled ads in the employment section of the paper and layed flat on the floor to stay cool. We spent a whole summer working our schedule around the airing of "All My Children" to see if Hope would ever, ever get out of the well. We drove to the beach and charged fried clams and Bloody Marys to our credit cards. You worked at a smoothie place and I served hamburgers to tourists and the days went by. One day you packed up your things. You missed your family and your town and your friends. You hated the noise and pollution and grind of the big city. I was so sad to lose you, but without a better plan, so I stayed behind.

Before you left, you helped me find a new apartment. You checked the locks on the doors, made sure I was on the second floor. Together, we painted my kitchen yellow and rolled a coat of turquoise paint on a very damaged wood floor. It was your idea to paint the inside of the kitchen cabinets so that every time I reached for a glass, I would find a surprise burst of periwinkle blue.

It has been a long, long time since I have heard your drawl (always more pronounced after a drink or a phone call home), a long time since we have shared a meal or twirled around the house in an impromptu dance party. I see photos of you and your children, hear little bits about your life and look with wonder at what we have become. I think you knew what you wanted long before I did, but we both seem to have figured out a way to live happily in the world.

Love and Spuds O' Rama,
T

Twenty-Seven

2010-09-23T11:57:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

Once we went to your house for the afternoon. You met my brother and I with a gleeful smile, telling us you had a “little project”. The project turned out to be a veritable forest of cut willow you wanted neatly bundled into latillas for her ceiling. Here we were, teens with all the bad attitude and slump inherent in the years between twelve and twenty and somehow, we enjoyed the project. Swept up in the tide of your enthusiasm, we enjoyed the simple, rhythm of our task and the supple bend of the sticks in our hands. Later, you fed us soup and tortillas on a pile of adobe bricks. That day, bellies full and backs warmed by the sun, we were all part of your growing home.

“You know,” my Dad said once, “she could have been a beauty queen. The real deal, Miss America and everything, but here she is out here in the sticks. A real diamond in the rough.”

Back in 1984, when I was a junior in high school, I brought home one of my first dates, a tall, shy fellow that I thought was the living end. A city boy, he had no idea that he shouldn’t drive his little car all the way to the bottom of my steep and icy driveway and we were immediately stuck. After a few tense, tire-spinning moments, we ventured into the house to enlist the aid of my parents and walked right into the Australia slide show. You and my dad and my stepmother had been drinking wine, clicking through slides and re-living your travels and your welcome was, shall we say, most effusive. My tall, shy date suddenly became a bit taller and a lot shyer. Arriving near the end of the show we were just in time for a series of photos of you and my stepmother in teeny, tiny bikinis culminating in a grand nude beach finale. The last slide clicked up and the carousel rotated, leaving a bright square of white on the screen and my Dad lurched up and outside to heave against the tail end of my date’s car and shout directions over the roar of the engine. I huddled on the sidelines and prayed for this night to end. When the car was finally unstuck, Dad gave me a wink and left my date and me for a moment alone in the driveway, but my date was flustered and fled into the night and I returned, unkissed, to the company of these so-called “adults.” I collapsed into a chair and you leaned over me and, put your cheek against mine and said, “our girl’s all grown up.” I leaned back against you and felt the weight of your hair on my shoulders like a mantle.

You are one of my stepmother's dearest friends. I grew up watching her get decked out for her annual holiday lunch with your merry trio. She’d pull on a pair of tall leather boots, a furry skirt from Panama, perhaps a silver sequined tube top or a spangly cardigan that belonged to her Grandmother. I knew that in two other houses a similar costuming was underway. In my twenties, I was asked to join this threesome for holiday sushi and this invitation was enough to make me feel that I had become a woman. Since then, I’ve raised a fair number of champagne flutes with you, my self-proclaimed “Auntie.”

On one of these outings, your car wouldn’t start and we all stood shivering and laughing in the snow in our jewel toned dress up clothes while you poured a can of Coca-Cola over the encrusted battery poles and banged on the thing with a wrench. When the truck turned over and revved to a steady chug, we all cheered and hugged and I wished we could start the night all over again.

In the first hard months after my Dad died, at least once a week, I’d find an envelope addressed in your elegant looping hand. Inside there might be a clipping from a local paper, a photograph or a couple of postcards. Sometimes you wrote a long letter, but often there were just a few scattered post-it notes with hearts and exclamation points. It was not until some time later that I realized you weren't just sending me articles, you were reminding me that you were there, that you cared. From two states away, you were keeping me company in my grief.

Just as long ago, I had a hand in building your home, you have had a hand in building me.

I am sending you love.

T

Twenty-Six

2010-08-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

The day we went fishing you wore a beat up straw hat and cut-off jeans and a big plaid shirt. It was as if you were auditioning to be Huck Finn. If Huck were over six feet and from Argentina. Your crazy, floppy hair was in your eyes (as always) and your lips parted to reveal those big, white teeth. When we drove to the lake (the lake we eventually discovered to be completely flooded out) I sat between you and my boyfriend. He was your best friend. My leg touched your leg. My leg touched his leg. That was how it was with us. There was lots of good will and very little looking back.

It wasn't as though you and I had really dated, anyway.

In the front seat were these nice, married people you knew. They seemed really adult to me at the time. They always had boxes of crackers and plates of cheese out on the big farm table in their house. (They owned their own house!) They bought wine by the case and drove cars that were big enough and had decent enough tires to take us all safely to the lake.

I didn't have very much money when I knew you. Once you asked me just how much I had and when I told you, you slipped a twenty into my hand.

There was a great night when you cooked for me and my boyfriend (your best friend.) You made veal cutlets and mashed potatoes and a huge salad with tons of garlic in the dressing. I still think of you when I make mashed potatoes. When I think I've added enough pepper, I always add a little more.

You didn't have much furniture, but you had a nice cutting board and good, sharp kitchen knives. When whatever happened between us first happened, you seemed to want it to go further, but I told you that I had too many pots on the stove. And you were okay with that.

I liked watching you bounce up the stairs, your long legs taking the steps two at a time. I liked the way you bombed down these same steps, still buttoning a shirt.

On Valentine's Day, you drove me to a local flower shop and bought me a carnation. We hadn't even kissed. Another night, you knocked on my door and took me to a tiny bar on Melrose where almost everyone spoke Spanish. We played pool and drank beer. You knew everyone in the place.

When I think about my twenties, I think about how lonely I was a lot of the time. I was coming out of a group of college friends and I hadn't yet found another group to call my own. You seemed to recognize that. You were an inclusive person. You liked it when there was a party. Why be alone if you have a choice to be together?

When I moved out of the apartment building, we sat outside on an old wooden table and you said you were sorry it hadn't worked out between us. You were sorry it hadn't worked out between me and your best friend. You congratulated me on making it work with another guy. Any connection was better than none at all. You wished me happiness.

You were a good neighbor. The kind of adventurous, hilarious, colorful neighbor every girl in her twenties should have.

Fondly,
T

Twenty-Five

2010-07-16T10:01:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

Lined up on a shelf in your room, staring out with their placid eyes and gently curved smiles, were more Madame Alexander dolls than I have ever seen. When I visited you, I brought my doll. Her tag said she was Scarlett O'Hara, but I'd christened her "Jolene," in honor of my favorite Dolly Parton song. She had black hair and green eyes and a white lace dress with a tulle petticoat.

You had long, blonde hair like Alice. You were older than I was and your parents were already divorced. You had a rug in your room made out of a real lion. I liked to lie on my back on the fur with my head propped on the head of this lion. Because his mouth was open in a roar we could push our fingertips against his sharp, white teeth.

I once spent a rainy summer night at your house catching frogs in your back yard. We caught dozens of frogs and put them in a bucket. Some of them were as big as my two hands and others the size of a quarter. The grown ups drank wine on the patio, the light from the kitchen window illuminating the empty dinner plates and crumpled napkins. Our long hair grew wet and ropey, our hands and knees were covered with mud. Later, we set the frogs free and in return they sang us to sleep.

Your dad and my dad were business partners. They had a country store. They sold art and Indian jewelry and embroidered shirts made by my aunts. They sold kits to make your own dulcimer and kachina dolls and stick candy. The phone number to the store was printed on wooden nickles. In the store, your dad sold tiny glass beads by the pound. We liked to dig our hands deep into the barrel where these beads were kept. In the summer, the beads stuck to our skin like sprinkles on a cake.

The country store closed down and you moved to England. For a long time, you sent letters on pale blue airmail stationary. You told me it was cold. You wondered how I liked school. You missed me. I missed you.

I wish for my own daughter a friend as magical as you. I wish for her, too, the kind of private childhood we shared. I don't think our parents watched over us as much as I watch over my children. Though I want them to be safe, I am trying to let them move more freely through their lives. In your company, it was as though we were always striking out on an adventure of our own making. It is good to remember this feeling.

Fondly,
T

Twenty-Four

2010-07-12T14:05:00.001-07:00

Dearest You,

My daughter has been watching a documentary about The Buddha and it reminded me of you. In the documentary Siddhartha begins his quest for enlightenment by denying himself everything. He eats one grain of rice per day. He binds his body and hangs upside down from a tree. The statues of him at this time show him to be emaciated and frail. His bones stand out like a ladder on his chest. His eyes sink deep into his skull. My daughter wonders why he would want to be so skinny. He looks scary, she says. He is weird.

I think of you and how when you began your own quest, you, too started with denial. You began to wear only white. You cooked vegetarian meals. You declared yourself celibate. As your girlfriend at the time (your college girlfriend) this last seemed ridiculous to me. We were in college, for the love of mike, if you're not going to have lots of sex in college then when? I slept with other people then and you were angry and I was angry and we both spent a lot of time crying and being hurt. It seems so strange to me now just how much we cried.

I remember fitting my thumb into a little hollow just below your sternum and laying my fingers over the bones of your ribs. I remember the way your wide, warm mouth felt against my own.

In a letter, my stepmother writes, "Oh to be young and in love in the Spring." She was writing about us. We were young and in love and it was Spring in Chicago, the kind of joyous Spring that can only emerge after the deep, bone cold of a Midwestern winter. Our love was like a crocus. Brilliantly colored but fragile.

We took a long train ride once from Chicago to Albuquerque and we played cards almost the whole way. Hand after hand of Gin Rummy. We sat in the observation car with the sun in our eyes and your laugh was deep and rumbly. On this same trip, we were caught in a freak snowstorm near the Organ Mountains of New Mexico. We wound up spending the night in a public library with dozens of strangers. We played cards there, too.

Once, just after we'd first decided we were in love, we spent the day with friends at the park. I wore a sundress and lounged on the picnic blanket making eyes at you. At one point, I leaned back in a way I thought to be extra-sultry and my head landed in a bucket of bubbly water that we'd mixed to blow soap bubbles. I felt ridiculous.

When we parted for the summer, we exchanged long letters and postcards. Every day, I walked to the post office, hoping to see your tiny, careful printing across the front of an envelope. You sent L.L. Bean catalogs addressed to "ILY Tanya Ward." I swooned at your creativity.

When you finally visited, I took you to the little town where I'd been doing summer theater and you wandered through the dusty streets in your white shorts and blue striped shirt. A fire broke out and the whole town turned into an emergency bucket brigade. We joined in what would soon prove to be an impossible task and eventually stood back to watch while the fire devoured a house. The bright flames against the dark night and the destruction they wrought were so troubling to you that we stopped twice on our long drive home to weep and talk and embrace and weep. I thought then as I do now that you were an ocean person and I was a desert person. Though I am weepy in my own right, there is cholla cactus and red dust and dry arroyos in my DNA.

Later that same summer, I cheated on you.

Do you remember our trip to New York? We missed the first act of "M. Butterfly" because we were having dinner with your Nonna. We were so careful to mind our bags and our coats, so vigilant on this trip, so worried about theft and worse. It wasn't until we were out of New York and back in Chicago that we were mugged.

In our junior year, you drove an ancient VW Bug that you'd re-built yourself. The heater didn't work and so in the winter, we drove everywhere with blankets on our laps and an ice scraper for the inside of the windshield. This car irritated me. You could have had a nicer car, but you opted for this. You found some satisfaction in the cold and the smell of fuel and the rattle of the engine. You were pleased to have grease under the nails of your long fingers.

The last time I saw you, you got into this VW. We'd graduated from college and you were headed away from me. We hugged but I don't think we kissed. I cried, but I don't know if you did. I patted the rounded fender of your car the way you might do to the haunches of a horse. I stood in the street, in the gray early morning until I could no longer hear the high, hollow rattle of the VW engine.

We spoke after this. A few times on the telephone. Once, we made plans to meet for dinner, but you cancelled. You wrote me a letter asking that I never contact you again.

I am writing this letter now because I am thinking of the part when Siddhartha realizes that it doesn't have to be so hard. I am thinking of the part when he realizes that he's looking for joy. He realizes that it's hard to be joyful when you are hungry. I think a part of you was hungry. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to feed that part of you. I'm sorry if I only added to your pain.

In the documentary, Siddhartha finds the middle place. Not too much or too little. He finds that you need a little food, a little love, a little comfort to be happy. I have found those things and my hope is that you have found them, too.

Fondly,
T

Twenty-Three

2010-06-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

Do you remember tap dancing down a set of cement stairs with me? We weren't wearing tap shoes. I had traded in my feathered gown for a pair of Guess jeans with zippers at the ankle, but it didn't matter because I felt like I was Ginger to your Fred. You were tall (really tall) and hilarious. You often wore white shoes and white pants and favored button-down collar shirts in shades of pale blue or yellow. You were really tall. So tall, I could see you over the heads of all the other kids at the Speech meet. I thought you were wonderful. I remember going home the night I met you and writing in my journal that I thought you were "it."

"It" was a term I'd heard my stepmother's single friends apply to men and I thought it sounded grown up. I thought it sounded right. "It" meant that you were my soul mate. "It" meant that you were "the one," but in a more subtle way.

At any rate, at some point, after a lot of telephone calls and notes passed and whatnot, we went on a kind of a date and it didn't work out that great. It would seem that you weren't "It." At least not in the prince and princess live happily ever after kind of way. That you were also looking for your prince didn't come as that much of a surprise.

Unlike most couples who date in high school, we have managed to live happily ever after.

I still have the string of pearls you gave me. They are made of clay, each pearl bearing the imprint of your fingers. You knew me when I had breasts. When I had a retainer. When I had a boyfriend (and another boyfriend and another...) You knew me when I went to camp and to college. We saw "Dirty Dancing" one more time than we saw "Top Gun," and we saw them both a lot. First run.

Those lunches at Ikea when I was hugely pregnant with my daughter and you pushed my son in his stroller are still some of my most pleasant memories. What a nice time we had. You with your plate of meatballs, me with my slice of strangely green Princess Cake. My boy asleep and the air conditioning blasting out over blond wood. People thought we were a family. And we are.

I have a photo of you holding my son. You are wearing a red lace dress and a gigantic hat. You look so happy and he looks utterly unsurprised. You made the dress yourself. Just as you've made dozens of hats and pillows and parade floats. You like to cook. (You are the first person I ever met who could make Coq au Vin. Not bad for a tenth grader from Albuquerque.) You bake pies when you are low. I understand this need to nourish yourself in times of sadness because we share it. Just as we share a love of books and of country music.

That time at your caberet when you sang a Nanci Griffith song just for me still makes me want to cry. It was amazing to have that happen to me. Like a movie or a book. Amazing to have that happen to the girl who thought you were "It" and didn't have even the remotest idea how much more you could be.

You dearest, you. I have baked you a chocolate cake. You will come for dinner and we will celebrate your birthday. You are a wonderful friend.

Love,
T

Twenty-Two

2010-05-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

I have known you since before you were born. Since you were a big bump under your mama's chic maternity top. She rubbed her hands over her belly and told me your name. I rested my hands on my own big belly and introduced you to my boy. Neither of you born, but both already with a best friend. Such luck.

You are as fair as my boy is dark. You are steady where my boy is easily distracted. He bounces from toy to toy while you build long Lego bridges and stretch train track in tidy curves. You have a high, silly giggle that always makes me smile.

Before you could walk, we walked with you -- me and your mom trudging up the hills of Griffith Park. We pushed you boys in strollers or strapped you into slings and backpacks. At first, we stopped frequently, plopping down on the side of the trail to nurse you into sleep. With the city spread out at our feet, we fed our babies and shared stories of sleepless nights and endless crying. We wondered about the future though we couldn't imagine that you would ever be any bigger, any different than you were right at that moment.

When you began to walk, you still sat peacefully in the sand, surrounded by brightly colored shovels and buckets while my boy tested out his running legs. Around this time, your mom and I didn't get to talk nearly as much. I saw her (and you) from a distance while I chased down my boy. We started and stopped the same sentence a dozen times and often parted with only half of a story.

Like my boy, you were a late talker. When you did finally speak, your voice was deep as though it had been percolating inside you like coffee or a long steeped tea. You use this voice to report. When I want to know what's been going on, I always turn to you because you are a reliable source. You take a certain pride in being this source. You create a certain amount of order. My boy craves this order, but cannot seem to create it on his own. This is how you help him. He helps you by racing ahead into adventure, knowing that (however begrudgingly) you will follow. Each of you is ballast for the other.

Because you are inherently kind and sensitive, you play well with my daughter. This is a good thing because at some point, my son will abandon your quiet games to kick a ball into the planters or toss a frisbee into the trees. He will leave your carefully ordered world for his own sweatier and messier one and when he does, my daughter will gladly fill in. The two of you will line up plastic ponies and furnish a house for the toy hamsters. You will patiently sip tea from china cups. You are kind enough to try to include her when my son inevitably returns although she (also inevitably) will stomp off to her room.

Once there was a plan for you to spend the night, but you got cold feet and left my son in tears. Your blue eyes were cloudy with regret, but you were stubborn in your need to be in your own bed. Another time, you stayed all night, but I could tell it was hard and as bedtime grew near, your mouth tightened with worry and your eyes grew wide. We gave you a new toothbrush and my son offered his favorite glow in the dark pajamas and eventually you settled in. My son fell asleep leaving you feeling lonely and so you came to our bed and snuggled in between my husband and I. We waited until you began to snore and then we carried you to bed. I like that you did that. I like that you feel comfortable asking me for a snack or rummaging in my purse for change. You think nothing of handing me a half-eaten popsicle or chewing gum that's lost it's chew because I have always been around.

I am pleased to be around for you. I am proud of you and happy to call you a friend. It is good to watch you grow.

Love,
T

Twenty One

2010-05-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

When we first met, you were living in Los Angeles. My Dad called you a "big Hollywood screenwriter." He might have also called you a "bullshitter," but then, that's what he called a lot of people. The Los Angeles where you lived is very different in my memory from the Los Angeles where I live (and have lived for nearly twenty years.) Your Los Angeles is dreamlike, quick visions of bougainvillea and poinsettias grown to magical proportions. I see leaded glass windows and curved Mediterranean walls. There might have been a window seat with a view out over the city.

When you visited our house in New Mexico, it was always in the company of a different woman. You had been married enough times to know the ceremony by heart. You proved this by joining my stuffed animals in holy matrimony with our dog and my brother. Something along the lines of "Will you, dog, take this bear and this boy and these stuffed bunnies..."

Your voice was and is the voice of a midnight disc jockey, intimate and flattering and a little naughty.

I remember a dinner at our local Mexican restaurant when all the adults were drinking margaritas and all the kids were amped on Shirley Temples. My dad was drawing cartoons on the paper placemat and when I came to lean against his shoulder, you stood and dipped me back as if you were going to kiss me. Everyone applauded and laughed and I was embarrassed, but a little thrilled. You had put your hand over my mouth and kissed your hand instead of my lips and when you pulled your hand away, I could still feel it there.

There are a lot of stories about you that I wasn't in. There are a lot of stories about you that Dad told me in the kind of confidence that Alzheimer's inspires (that is to say, the kind of confidence you have when you don't really know who you are talking to or what you are talking about...) You admit to having some stories that aren't fit to print. Don't we all?

You didn't come to Dad's memorial and so the first time I saw you after his death, it was as if your grief, postponed, was in full flood. You walked around the museum and the house and your eyes filled. You watched my children run around in the dirt and the weeds and I watched your eyes move from them to me and I could see the startlingly quick flow of time passing. You admitted to being recently married. You were the same and not the same as I remembered.

I would imagine that I am the same and not the same for you, too.

Fondly,
T

Twenty

2010-03-14T19:41:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

On the day that I met your wife, she told me that the two of you had been married for sixty-five years and were still madly in love. She confessed that sometimes you told her to check the mailbox and instead of the usual handful of advertisements and credit card applications, there would be a love letter. When she told me that, I told my own husband that the bar had been raised.

Your wife told me that you swept her off her feet in the library of your university. She told me you became a dentist and later flew helicopters in the war. She told me that when she was stricken with polio, you swore you'd find a cure.

On the day we became neighbors, you gave us a handful of toothbrushes and a business card with your name and the Rotary symbol. You offered to let us use your phone until ours was connected. You wore a jacket with elbow patches, a collared shirt and a bolo tie, which over the year of our friendship, I came to recognize as your public uniform. You dressed up for lunch at the Tam O'Shanter or a visit to the School for the Blind. At home, you wore a cardigan sweater and sometimes slippers.

On sunny days, you moved a white, plastic lawn chair from your front stoop to the grass beneath your lemon tree. You'd sit in this chair, blinking in the sun like a cat. Cat like, you would often succumb to the warmth and nap.

You were in this chair on the day we landscaped our front yard. My friend Libby and I crawled around on the ground, digging holes for tiny sprigs of Dyamondia and you looked over from time to time and smiled.

"I'm really proud of you girls," you said.

We lugged five gallon pots and hauled wheelbarrows full of soil. We wiped our dirty faces and stood, gripping the handles of our shovels.

"It's going to be beautiful," you said.

And it is. Just a year later, Kangaroo Paws reach out velvety fingers, the Dyamondia has made a shaggy carpet between the pavers and has begun to offer bright yellow flowers to the spring sky.

You always took the time to ask after our children. You told us we were wonderful parents. At the holidays, you called and asked my husband to come pick up a gigantic fruit basket, a gift so large, it was impossible for you to deliver yourself.

I baked apple muffins and sent my kids over with plates of cookies or fresh latkes still warm from the stove. You complimented my cooking and praised the manners of my daughter and son.

When I look back on this year of knowing you, there is not a single exchange between us that was not filled with kindness and good will.

I know from my conversations with your wife that your life was extraordinary. You travelled to wonderful places, met amazing people and used your energies to make the world a better place. You loved and were loved so well.

My husband went out yesterday when we saw the ambulance. I stayed inside to keep our daughter busy. While she spread purple glitter across a sheet of paper, I saw my husband wrap his arm around your wife. I saw the paramedics move you carefully down the drive.

You didn't come home.

I feel lucky, fellow New Mexican, to have known you.

Safe travels, dear neighbor. I miss you already.

Nineteen

2010-02-10T09:23:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

When I think of you, the scent of beeswax candles is the first thing that comes to mind. Your house was built without electricity and so most of the light came from these candles. Of course there were flashlights and the big kerosene powered Coleman lantern, but flashlights shine too often in the eyes and the Coleman's light was accompanied by the roar of the burning fuel. The candles were silent and flickering and their warm light seemed to boost the efforts of the pokey fire in the wood stove.

You were a teacher. First at Cedar Grove, the place I still refer to as "that hippie co-op," and later at San Antonito, the public elementary school where I started in second grade. You wore round, wire rimmed glasses, woven ponchos and tall, brown leather boots. I remember you kneeling in front of me on the playground as you zipped my coat.

My brother and I often spent the night at your house because we were both friends with your son. After school, you'd pack us into your orange Volkswagen Beetle and we'd make the long drive into the San Pedro mountains to your home. The road seemed like little more than a jagged path cut through the rocks. As you maneuvered around boulders, we bounced in the the back seat of the VW, cackling when our heads hit the curved ceiling of the car. I thought that like the tables and chairs in my elementary school, the enormity of these rocks would shrink as I grew, but when I drove your road myself a few years ago, I realized (with great pleasure) that some things do not diminish with time. Those rocks are indeed huge.

In the winter, when the house was so cold we could see our breath in the air, we unrolled our sleeping bags in a loft built in the corner of the living room. Your son slept with a Curious George doll and I usually brought my stuffed hippo, Bernice. My brother traveled with a little metal suitcase filled with Hot Wheels cars and Star Wars figures.

In the summer, we'd sleep on the roof and look for constellations. In the dark sky, the stars were so bright and so plentiful it seemed that we could almost reach out and rearrange them into animals of our own imaginings.

Spring marked your annual egg hunt with a special appearance by the Easter Bunny. Every year a different grown up would zip themselves into the white fleece suit and bounce around in the dust making smart aleck remarks while dolling out chocolate eggs. I wonder now, as I never did as a child, where the suit came from. At seven, eight and nine, I took it for granted that you had a bunny suit in your closet. Why wouldn't I? You had a teepee set up in the woods behind your house and you seemed to understand the meowed language of cats.

Your piece of land was a magical place to play. In a grove of Pinon trees, we braved sticky sap and splinters to fill brown paper bags with pine nuts. You'd roast the nuts in a cast iron skillet on the stovetop until they smelled toasty and sweet and we'd crack them open with our teeth and suck the meat from the tiny shells. The back side of the house was bare of trees, an almost moonscape of jagged limestone and shale, dotted with spiky cholla cactus. On this side, you'd left an old iron bedframe. We would take turns bouncing on the rusty springs. With our hands gripping the iron headboard and the wide expanse of the canyon in front of us, this bouncing was almost like flying.

Now I get updates on your life from my Mom. You are an energy healer and have taught Mom how to "zip up" to keep good energy in and bad out. You make brightly colored felted wool hats and add tiny faces and hands to turn pine cones, seed pods and bent sticks into fanciful woodland creatures. When your last cat died, she gave a little mew of good-bye and curled herself under a painting of my father's. You swear the painting glows with life -- even in the dark.

I can hear your laugh; can hear the way your Midwestern upbringing still flattens your vowels despite years and years spent in the mountains of New Mexico. I can just as easily imagine you in your long, patchwork skirt and bandanna, presiding over the annual egghunt as I can trolling the aisles of a thrift store with Mom on "senior discount day." You are a thread (a particularly bright and vibrant strand) that weaves through the whole of my life.

See you soon.

Love,

Eighteen

2010-02-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

You told me this joke:

After a plane crash, a man washes up on a desert island and he is alone for many days. One day, he sees someone swimming in the water and he jumps in and swims out to find that it is a woman. And not just any woman, but Cindy Crawford. She is nearly drowned. He pulls her to safety and when she has coughed up a lot of sea water, she gratefully kisses him. One thing leads to another and they become lovers. Days go by and the man is happier than he's ever been, but there is one thing missing. Cindy can sense this and so one day she asks how she can make him happy. He asks her to dress in his clothes and go around to the other side of the island. It seems weird, but because he saved her life, she's willing to do it. She dresses in his clothes and heads off to the other side of the island.

The man waits for half and hour and then, he, too, heads around to the other side of the island and there he finds Cindy dressed as a man. They sit down and he turns to her and says, "You'll never guess who I'm fucking."

You told me a lot of jokes and most of them had the word "fucking" in them, but this one is the only one I can remember in its entirety.

You called me "babe," and once told me I was more of a "dame" than a "lady."

When we worked together, you bought me lunch nearly every day until you realized that in a week's worth of lunch amounted to the price of a bike for your daughter. After that, I mostly brought my lunch or we went Dutch. No matter who paid, we always spent the first few minutes at a restaurant scanning the menu for typos, racing to see who could come up with the first mistake and then challenging each other to come up with more.

We spent a little time working and a lot of time looking for things. We looked for awnings for your house, English antiques and toasters. We spent a lot of time admiring the Dualit toaster, which was over $200. You really liked toast. We once drove way out into the Valley to look at a Porsche. We looked for just the right kind of paper on which to print a mocked up certificate of "Jewishness" for an office mate who'd recently converted. You called this kind of aimless comparison shopping "berbering" a verb you made up after the extended period you and your wife spent searching for just the right berber carpet.

Once we went to the zoo. You had a membership card because sometimes you took your daughter. It was a nice day, but the zoo was empty. We bought popcorn and walked around. We looked at the giraffe and stuck our heads up into the plastic viewing bubbles in the prairie dog enclosure.

You often remarked that you were around the same age as my own father. You often remarked that it was strange that I could have a father your age and you could have a daughter who was not yet in elementary school. It was all about timing, I guess.

Your timing was a little off, I think. You were a great writer. You were very, very funny. You were writing shows about nuclear families and dogs that could talk, but people wanted to see shows about young people living together and sorting out their love lives.

Now, it's changing again. I read in the paper that "old is the new young." There are mature people on television again. Meryl Streep is a leading lady at 60. It all timing.

Your daughter must be in high school now. She may even be waiting for college acceptance letters. I wonder if the two of you berber for things on the weekends. If she shares your love of old movie musiclas. I wonder if she's inherited your sense of humor. I wonder if she and I would be friends.

A couple of years ago, I read a piece you'd written for the LA Times magazine. It was a story I knew well and you'd written it almost exactly as I'd heard you tell it. You had a dozen or more stories that you told often. These stories distilled your life into amusing bites, each one carefully crafted to generate the most laughter; each one a little time capsule. These stories stay with me, each one as vivid as a slide projected on a screen.

I tell my own stories. You are starring in this one.

There is one typo in this piece. Can you find it?

Seventeen

2010-01-06T07:09:00.001-08:00

Dearest You,

I am writing this though I recently tried to contact you. Truthfully, I didn't try that hard, but it's been a long time and I haven't kept track of all of the various phone numbers and e-mail addresses you have had. In fact, I've let it slide. Our whole relationship. I've let it slide.

A day or two into the new year a friend asked if I planned to see you. I was half-hearted. I told her I was burnt out. I told her I didn't really know if I had it in me.

She said, "It's always up to the woman to make the first call. Men will never do it. Even men who are mostly women."

Truthfully, I felt some guilt then. Maybe it is my job to call and call and call. Maybe it is my job to keep better contact. And I think I used to do that. But now I have kids to keep track of and a husband and friends who call to check in on me.

In third grade you wore striped shirts like the kids on "Zoom." Your glasses were big and square and your head as round as Charlie Brown's. I was in second grade and reading "The Hobbit." You were impressed by that and I was impressed by your drawings. I invited you over to make salt-dough ornaments or to bake pretzels in the oven (both projects selected from the "Zoom Do" book.) We loaned each other books and though we lived less than a mile apart, you walked the hill up to my house more than I ever made the trek to yours.

For your birthday one year, you had an ice cream party and your father sang the birthday song in a deep baritone. Every head in the restaurant turned and your face reddened. Your father sang often. At parties he wore crossed ammo belts like Pancho Villa. In place of shotgun shells, there were tiny bottles of whiskey. He would say "If you start having fun, do it real slow until you get used to it." He said this a lot.

When your father died, you called me. By then, we were grown and I was living in Los Angeles in a run down apartment where I had painted the wood floors turquoise blue. It was a full moon on the night you called and I had been sitting at my kitchen table working on a little watercolor painting. His death had been a long time coming but it was still a surprise. It wasn't until I was caught off guard by the death of my own father after five year's of Alzheimer's that I really understood your sadness. You knew for sure there was no chance to change. No more conversations. No more songs.

The next time I saw you we met for lunch and you were wearing the softest black coat. On the back of this coat, you'd made a constellation of little metal stars. I remember hugging you and feeling those stars under my fingers. You smelled of incense and your body was warm. The waitress wondered if you were my boyfriend and we both smiled.

The place where you finally came out to me was the Obama headquarters in Albuquerque during the election and now it's sitting empty. Twenty-five years ago, when we perched on little stools and sipped Italian soda, it was called "Notes." Pink and black and green, the little espresso bar was a first in our home town. I imagine that the Smiths were playing in the background. I know I was wearing a black dress and oversized white shirt, a wide belt low on my hips. Black rubber bracelets and metallic bangles were stacked on my wrists. I'd dressed carefully because even though I knew what you were going to say, the crush that started in second grade had never completely burned out.

When you went to college in the East, we wrote letters. We'd written letters for years, retrieving them from the post office that marked the halfway point between our houses. I keep these missives in a box in the closet. Your handwriting changes, grows more spidery, more elegant. Your drawings become darker and your language more flowery. You are a good writer. You are poetic and funny and have a good eye for detail. Of course you can write. Because you are gifted in all things.

I am sometimes naive. It was easy for you to keep parts of your life a secret from me because the paths you chose were not even on my map.

There are a lot of reasons I haven't called. Sometimes I think it's because I don't have the vocabulary I need to talk to you about what's really happening in your life. We skirt around the reasons you moved to Los Angeles and the reasons you moved back. Because I don't really understand the mechanics of the thing, I avoid questions that would clear it up. Needles? Powders? Pills? How does it feel? Does it feel?

When we do talk, you revert time and time again to the past, but my son is now as old as I was at our first meeting and I have a need to talk about the present.

I watch my son with his friends and I wonder if they will stay with him for all of his life the way you have stayed with me. I wonder if their paths will diverge and twine together in the way ours have.

I remember standing next to you once at a fair. We must have been about ten or eleven and without thinking, I slid my hand into yours. I was startled that my hand moved to yours even though that's what I longed to do. I turned away quickly, self-conscious in my need to connect.

It's been a long time since we shared a meal or traded books or wrote a letter. Too long to let more time pass. I'm reaching out a hand.

Love,

Sixteen

2009-12-17T15:31:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

We had braces on our teeth at the same time. We both liked roller skating and cats and shirts with rainbows reaching across our flat chests from one elbow to the other. Your hair was fine and blonde and mine fine and dark. We both spent long hours in front of the mirror coaxing these fine strands around the hot barrel of a curling iron. We longed for wings. Not the wings of an angel, but the wings of Farrah Fawcett.

Your older sister liked The Police and some band called Oingo Boingo, but we always shouted at her to close her door, leaning closer to the radio to listen to a station that billed itself as "the music of your life." We waited to hear Nat King Cole sing "Dance, Ballerina, Dance."

In typing class, we typed notes to each other and later went home and typed more notes. I remember sitting in front of the pink manual typewriter my mother used in high school writing a letter to you one line at a time. I cut the whole thing into strips, rolled each strip into a tiny tube and securing each tube with one of the rubber bands I was given by my orthodontist. When I was finished, I dumped all the little tiny parcels into a big envelope and slipped it to you before school. It must have taken you forever to piece the letter back together, but you did.

We spent hours and hours on the floor of my bedroom with the radio on, drawing paper dolls. All the dolls had fabulous names like Viveca, Amber, Violet and Tiffany. They had teeny, tiny waists and huge social schedules. We drew ball gowns and riding habits, feathered headdresses and elegant beaded pantsuits that Carol Burnett might wear.

Every Christmas your parents would invite me over to decorate the tree. Your family always had a big tree in the living room and you got to have your own, smaller tree in your bedroom. Your personal tree was covered with ornaments you had been given every year by your grandparents and your parents. It was a tradition.

Your mom was the fire chief and sometimes when I'd spend the night at your house, the phone would ring and we'd hear her car crunch over the gravel in the driveway. Every year, you and your dad would shovel this driveway. It was also a tradition.

You had a checkbook in sixth grade and decided to play the French horn because it was the hardest instrument to learn. You read Moby Dick before ninth grade and could play Fur Elise on the piano. (That always impressed me. ) By our senior year of high school, you were at the top of our class. You spoke French and Russian.

I gave up clarinet (one of the easiest instrument to learn,) skipped all the whaling chapters, and know only enough French to get coffee and a croissant.

When we graduated from high school, you asked your parents to buy you a strand of pearls instead of a Hopi squash blossom necklace. You went to college back east and now you live back east. You knew who you were.

I missed your first wedding with the big dress and the Cinderella carriage, but I imagine it a little like the ones we planned for our paper dolls. I made the trip to celebrate your second marriage. Children from your Sunday school class sat in the balcony of church and watched you walk down the aisle.

You have your own children now and I like to imagine what the holiday is like for the two of them. Do they each have their own tree? It's a tradition. Thank you for sharing it with me.

Hoping that our trips home to the Land of Enchantment will overlap soon.

Much love,

Fourteen

2009-12-14T16:56:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

In a photo of my sixth birthday, you are there in the background. You are sitting on the edge of our back porch, your knees bent, your mouth open in laughter. Your hair is wavy and blonde and your teeth are big and white. In this photo, I am wearing a yellow dress and a big floppy hat covered with roses. I am surrounded by torn wrapping paper and my six-year-old friends. We are oblivious to the row of smiling adults on the back porch. We are unaware that we are being watched. It warms me now, to look at this photo and know I was held in such a loving gaze.

I remember many afternoons spent at your house working on projects. Some days, we'd weed your garden, or set out plants, stopping now and again to sip mint tea poured from a big jar. You'd run your fingers over the velvety leaves of scented geraniums and hold them under my nose so I could guess. Rose. Lemon. Chocolate.

Other days, you'd melt a big chunk of beeswax in a small aluminum pan saved just for this purpose and we'd make batik paintings. We'd work our way from the lightest to the darkest colors, always ending up with purple hands. With the damp paintings hung on the line to dry, we'd eat cookies or visit with your dogs. I'd throw sticks for Ralph, the floppy black mix with the sweet eyes, while being careful to avoid Tina, the white German shepherd. When our batiks were dry and stiff, we'd sandwich them in newsprint and flatten them with a hot iron until the wax melted away. I drew hippos and cats and birds and took them home to my parents while you painted birds and fruit and flowers and sold them in arts and crafts fairs around town.

For a time, you drove my school bus and I always sat in the front seat just behind yours feeling important because I knew you.

Your pale yellow VW station wagon was named Tulip and you kept an Ouija board under your coffee table. I remember once coming to your house with my Mom to eat a pot of chili and watch a wildlife special on hyenas. We turned out all the lights and sat close to your small television. Every so often you'd adjust the wire hanger to improve reception. We all gasped when the hyenas devoured an antelope.

You built your own house, first one room, then another. A doll house with a loft for a bed and a pull up bar across the back door. With the cookstove loaded with logs, the house warmed so much the windows wept moisture on cold winter days and nights. At Christmas, you served posole from this stove and opened a tin of cookies sent by a friend.

"Butter," you said. "It's the secret. It's the best."

When we visited your house at night, I'd try not to drink too much, try to hold my pee because I was afraid to make the trip to the outhouse. It wasn't until you'd lived in the little house for twenty years that you built a bathroom. By that time, I'd conquered my fear of the dark, but I was glad to avoid the cold wooden seat.

When my Dad was ill, you invited me for breakfast and made BLTs with lettuce and tomato from your garden. We sat at your sunny table and looked out across your yard. When your mother died, you planted a rose garden. I remember knowing that day that my father would die and I wondered what I would do. You are one of the people I looked to for answers. You are one of the people who had been there and could show me the way.

At Dad's funeral, you held my week old son and looked at me with tears in your eyes.

"Can you believe you were ever this small?" You said.

You are my Godmother -- chosen for me by parents who didn't really share a conventional relationship with God. I think they saw a way to give you a name, a place of prominence. They were choosing their family, deciding who should be in that watchful and loving circle. They chose well.

With love,

Fifteen

2009-12-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

It started with a road trip. You in the truck with your Dad's construction company logo on the door. You with the bulge of cash tucked inside the pocket of your jean jacket. Your dog looked like a coyote. You had a kooky laugh and a fondness for waffles. We drove from Chicago to Albuquerque, stopping only for coffee and all you can eat breakfast buffets. And ice cream. Soft serve. Always a cone for the dog.

I'm not sure my parents knew what to think when we arrived: dirty, tired and smelling of caffeine and fried foods. But they were happy to see us. We visited new age bookstores in Albuquerque and bought Bach flower remedies guaranteed to rescue us. From what? Confusion. Longing. Sorrow. (We might have gotten the same relief by hurling all the oft played tapes of Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell out the window of your truck.)

My dad showed you how to draw without lifting your pen from the page. "Trust in the form," he said. "Just let yourself go."

In my old bedroom, you asked if I'd ever kissed a girl.

The drive back to Chicago seemed to take forever. The downside of spontaneous road trips is that after the excitement has burned down, there's always a long ride home. Now there were only nerves and the unanswered question.

You were quiet and smoked a lot while I drove. We spent a night in Colorado with a cowboy poet you knew from somewhere. We slept beside each other in sleeping bags, curled like quotation marks, but not touching.

The next day, you stopped in front of my apartment and it took me a long time to open the door of the truck. One of us or both of us admitted to wanting to cry. Eventually, I shifted my bag onto my shoulder and climbed the stairs to my apartment.

I talked to friends about you. I made you a mix tape. You baked me a pie.

The thing about answering one question is that it just brings about more questions.

After graduation, we went to a party and you cried in the bathroom. I tried to comfort you and somehow, as if we were in a movie, my Dad walked in. He saw the way we leaned together.

"I'll leave you to it," he said.

Much, much later, when you had gone in one direction and I had gone in another, Dad and I shared a couple of beers and he asked after you.

"I could tell there was something," he said.

Something.

Years later, I sat at the singles table at your wedding and years after that, you came to my wedding, your unborn son just a little bump under your dress.

More than writing this letter, I'd like to pick up the phone. I'd like to hear your kooky laugh and get the update on your gorgeous family. I want to hear about your latest craft project and how you're going about saving the world a little at a time. Are you off wheat? Off sugar? Baking cinnamon buns by the trayful? You've got a new dog and though it's icy cold in your neck of the woods this time of year, you still refer to your house as sunny.

What in the world am I waiting for?

Love,

Thirteen

2009-12-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

You claim that people say you're pretty because you say everything with a smile. I think they say you're pretty because you are. (But you also smile a lot.)

"Good times," you say, when your kids are running in opposite directions or crying hysterically or pounding each other with sticks. "Good times," you say, when there's an attack of strep or flu or lice. And somehow (is it because when you say this, you're smiling?) the times do seem good.

Your hair is the color of apricots or leaves in autumn and your skin is so pale it seems like you might be able to glow in the dark. It's a kind of devastating combination -- and one you play up by wearing crisp, white shirts and pink sweaters.

You are perpetually prepared. Skinned knee? You've got a bandage. Hunger? There's some kind of bar or cracker in your bag. You perpetually carry a little zippered case filled with essentials. Bee sting? You've got ointment. Sunburn? Aloe. Headache? Aspirin. Errant raspberry seed? You've got floss in individual packets.

I sometimes strive to be this prepared. I grab a handful of Band-aids and toss them in my bag. I fill a little container with raisins or tiny crackers. But inevitably, I run out of supplies and when the cries from the back seat reach their peak, all I come up with are a few linty mints and a broken pencil.

Here is the other thing about you. You are strong. Physically strong. In your yoga class, you push up into a handstand or arm balance and out on our mats, we can hear your breath, hear your effort. I like the fact that you do not make these poses look effortless, but rather that you revel in the effort. You marvel at yourself every time you get it right. You open up the possibility that we might all marvel at ourselves because there is "right" in whatever we do.

At the end of class, we all lay on our backs and close our eyes and you walk quietly across the room, stopping briefly to rub our heads. It's a wonderful moment and one so filled with kindness on your part. Your hands are scented with lavender and you take time with each of us to just hold our heads, stretch our necks or bestow a little ear rub.

With your various lists and matrices and file folders, you seem to move your life, but your open heart often lets it move you. Like anyone, sometimes your balance goes off, but then you seem to revel in the work of regaining stability.

It's inspiring to watch you work.

Love,

Twelve

2009-12-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

"I'd be a Brit," you said. "But I was born a Valley girl. The next best is to marry a Brit."

The corkboard behind your desk was covered with postcards and photos: Big Ben, the guards at Buckingham Palace, Mick Jagger, the Union Jack.

In the office kitchen, instead of coffee, you poured tea.

Your skin was very pale, your eyes very blue. You wore your long black hair pulled up in the manner of an E.M. Forster heroine. To keep from being overly girly, though, you wore tattered jeans, black leather jackets and square toed motorcycle boots.

Every day for lunch, you ate a boiled chicken breast and a tiny portion of steamed spinach.

"Got to save some calories for alcohol," you claimed. "Don't want my face to blow up."

You seemed impossibly tiny to me. Like a doll with your big hair and big eyes. Enchanting, but fragile.

The license plate on your black BMW read "MS PHIT." I always assumed that it was meant to be read as "Miss Fit," because you seemed always to be having little fits. You were an excellent pouter. You could get really, really angry about almost nothing at all. But your anger blew over quickly and you were never angry with me.

Not even when you corrected me about the license plate.

"It's MISFIT," you said.

You were the assistant to a producer. And I was working for a lawyer. Your job was much more glamorous, but my boss was nicer and I had less to do.

Once, we went out to a pub in Hollywood called The Cat and the Fiddle on a search for Englishmen. We sat on barstools for about an hour while I drank a pint and you nursed a cosmopolitan. At some point, you waved your hands over your glass and asked the universe to send you a Brit.

Not five minute later, two English guys sat next to us and bought our next round of drinks. This wasn't so unusual given the fact that we were in a bar filled with English ex-pats, but I was still impressed by your powers.

We spent the rest of the night with these guys and though I can't remember their names, I remember that we paired up according to size with me taking the taller of the two. He claimed to have played drums with some band and the shorter one had a deal going with a production company.

They were housesitting for a friend in the hills and at some point, we followed them in your car up a winding road to a huge house. The place was nearly empty of furniture and our footsteps echoed inside, but outdoors, on the patio we could see the lights of Hollywood and we sat in deck chairs, sharing the last of your cigarettes.

It must have been nearly dawn when we left. My guy walked me out and as he leaned in to kiss me goodnight, I looked over his shoulder and saw a child's seat in the back of his shabby little car. I kissed him anyway because we'd had some good laughs.

"He was a drummer, your guy," you said on the drive down the hill. "A musician."

"I guess," I said.

"Are you going to see him again?"

"Doubtful," I said. "You gonna see yours?"

"Doubtful," you said. "Not the one."

We laughed then. You could always conjure up another.

Hope you found the one.

Fondly,

Eleven

2009-11-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

If you weren't going away this year, you'd have a really good holiday party.

You have a really good holiday party every year and every year the first people to arrive help you set up. I have arrived at your house to find boxes of unopened crackers, cheese still in its paper and bags of tiny carrots and nuts in a pile on the counter. To your credit, you usually have a pot of mulled wine going on the stove and the aroma of cinnamon and clove is great company while the assembled mob of the early-to-arrive hustle around the kitchen and set up your party.

One year, you weren't even home. You had gone to get a pedicure, but left the house unlocked.

Someone always takes the job of lining up dozens of tiny tea lights on the built-in ledges of your Craftsman dining room. Someone always slices the salami and puts it on a plate (though now we've all gotten mature enough to call it charcuterie.) Someone takes all the delectable little pastries out of the bakery boxes and lines them carefully on a big white platter. We set out glasses and pour olives from their deli containers into your nice white bowls.

While we get things organized, you put the finishing touches on your outfit. Periodically, you waft in from the bathroom, offering direction; a nudge; an order. You give kisses that leave a stain bright and shiny as holiday ribbon. You always look fabulous. Opulent. In the beginning, there was lots of leg, lots of bosom, but lately, you've taken a more elegant approach. You look like you should have a group of people helping you in the kitchen. You wear this role casually, but comfortably, the way you might toss a fur coat over your shoulders -- more for beauty than for warmth.

And then the party begins. There is no beer (your rule,) but plenty of booze and the food is always good. There is a fire in the fireplace and the with the tea lights finally lit and the overhead lights turned down, your home takes on the kind of glow that is nice to see from the street. Yours is a nice party to walk into. It's close and a little loud. Always warmer than you think it will be and always that lovely spicy wine smell twisting through the scent of Christmas tree branches, perfume and bourbon.

Happy holidays, you, dearest you. Happy travels.

Love,

Ten

2009-11-04T13:42:00.000-08:00

Dearest You,

I got the news of your birth when I was working at the public library in Evanston, Illinois.

"She's here!" My mother said, her excitement vibrating over the phone lines. "She's here!"

You were given a name that makes you automatically sound royal. And so you were with your olive skin and serious eyes.

Because I saw you only on vacations and visits home, you seemed to grow quickly. Moving from mewling cub to sprinting toddler in a blink. I have a photo of you sitting on my lap in the back yard of our grandmother's house. Your legs barely reach the bend of my knee. In another photo, we take the same pose and your legs are longer, slimmer, your baby teeth like seed pearls in your shy smile.

I thought of you as a baby for a long time. I scooped you up in my arms or pulled you into my lap for years. You were a little girl at my wedding with a mouth full of braces and flowers in your hair, but your poise at the microphone as you read a toast hinted at the woman you would become.

Now, nearly ten years later, you are grown. Your olive skin is stretched over strong arms and legs and your brown eyes are wise beyond their years. I look forward to the times that our visits home intersect, to the break in my family life that lines up with your college life.

My kids ask for you, wonder when they'll see you. They love you because though you are now able to buy wine in the grocery store, you are still willing to bounce for hours on the trampoline or behave like a chicken in an impromptu performance at a family barbecue.

You speak French and can take apart and clean a rifle. Your laugh is more of a giggle and because you are just twenty-one, when you bounce on that trampoline nothing on you bounces back. (I try not to hold this against you.) You impress me with your poise, your kindness and your open heart.

With love and excitement for your future.

Nine

2009-10-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

At your interview you told me you lived in Malibu. You had a new wife and a couple of dogs and you could walk to the ocean. You had been working as a freelance personal trainer. You were tan and your hair was sunstreaked. You seemed kind of floppy and content. Like a golden retriever.

I told you that the job would mean long hours. Your days would be spent sitting at a desk. Your meals would be eaten out of styrofoam boxes.

You were excited. You wanted to learn. You were like that golden retriever and truth be told, I didn't think you were very smart. But you were a friend of the star and it was a given that I would hire you. This "interview" was just an exercise.

Just before we started production, you and your new wife moved away from the ocean and into the heat and smog of the valley. You gave up your fitness clients and sharpened your pencils and met the writers in the "room."

Almost immediately I realized I had been wrong about you. You were smart. And funny. And outspoken. You treated the writers the way you might treat a new puppy. You established boundaries and encouraged them to behave.

"Give a man a fish," you said, while showing a producer how to work his printer, "and he eats for a day."

You found a place right around the corner from our office where I could get a green chile cheeseburger that was almost as good as the ones in my hometown. You discovered the family-owned sub sandwich joint at the foot of the Angeles forest. One day, we took a long lunch and drove up the winding road, the Rolling Stones blasting out of your speakers, until we found open space and cool air. We pulled off at the scenic overlook and sat in the dust to eat our sandwiches in silence before heading back to work for another late night.

One night after taping the show we headed out to an Irish bar to get a beer and found a live band. Three pints in, there were ballads sung and jigs danced. Three beers in, you called me a "dame," and you meant it in the best gumshoe novel kind of way. I could drink and smoke and joke just like a guy, you meant. We were solid friends.

One morning, you popped your head over the shared wall of our cubicle.

"We're pregnant," you said, beaming.

When I asked how far along, you said not very. But you had a feeling.

You were right.

You and your family introduced me to trails in the Angeles forest and convinced me to drive from Silverlake to Malibu to drink Starbuck's coffee. When I had my first child, your wife gave me a box of baby wipes and told me to be prepared for the mess.

"We use them for everything," she said. "You can get a lot of cleaning done. No lie."

For one reason and another, our view of you and your family has grown to be a distant one. We keep in touch with holiday letters and cards. Every year, I look forward to opening the envelope that will reveal your oldest girl, the one you knew was on the way.

She has your smile.

Fondly,

Eight

2009-09-28T20:15:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

You were a vegetarian and so was I. You'd stopped eating meat because you felt like it was the healthy thing to do. I'd stopped eating meat because my college boyfriend was a vegetarian.

Somehow, we both wound up working in a burger joint. All day long, every day, we carried thick, white porcelain plates laden with ground, grilled beef to tables of happy customers. We brought ketchup and mustard and little ramekins of barbecue sauce. We supplied extra napkins to wipe the savory juices.

The scent of beef permeated our clothes, the sound of sizzle buzzed in our ears.

One day you said, "Would it be so bad?"

I said, "I'm not in college anymore."

You said, "We could split one."

And we did.

And it was delicious.

Yum.

Seven

2009-09-24T17:27:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

I've been writing a lot of letters to people I feel warmly about. The letters I've been writing recently have ended on a high note. Yours may not end this way. But it's not that you aren't worth writing to.

Here's how it started. I am about twenty. You are a little older, but not much. We are both young. We are doing summer theater. I am acting and you are running the lights. You are tall and brown and lean. You wear mirrored sunglasses and your hair is cut short like Tom Cruise in "Top Gun."

It's funny, but you didn't really notice me until we were well into our run. You didn't notice me until that girl - the one who'd been doing wardrobe, the one with the cute blonde hair -- you didn't notice me until she'd left town. (I couldn't help but notice that her ankles were thick.)

You asked me to dance. There was a band playing in the bar where we gathered after the show and you took my hand and led me across the wooden plank floor. You were a good dancer. You said that your mother taught you. I rested my hand lightly on your bare arm.

Later, we walked out into the darkness behind the bar and looked at the stars. We sat on the steps of an old steam locomotive and talked. I don't remember much of our conversation except that eventually you asked how many lovers I'd had. You called them "lovers," and I thought this was romantic, but then we'd already established that you could waltz.

I wanted to seem more experienced than I was and so I upped my list by one. "Three," I said.

"Then I'll be number four," you said. And then you leaned in to kiss me.

We didn't sleep together that night because it was Sunday and I had to return my parents' Volvo. But the next Friday, when I prepared to head up to the theater, I packed my pajamas and my toothbrush in my big, white leather satchel. I did this in front of my stepmother in what I hoped was a nonchalant way. My dad gave me a wink and wished me a good weekend. My stepmother urged me to be careful.

It all unfolded the way I thought it would. (Like "Dirty Dancing," except instead of a gorgeous resort in upstate New York, it took place in a former coal mining town, turned hippie refuge, turned artsy-craftsy haven. My parents didn't seem nearly as worried as Baby's and though we knew you could dance, we never actually performed together.)

I started spending the whole weekend with you, sharing the house you were borrowing from the woman who was spending her weekends with the theater director. We drank beers together in the Mine Shaft Tavern and passed a bottle of tequila back and forth in the bleacher seats of the old baseball field. You pointed out the juniper trees on the hillside which sheltered stealthily planted marijuana. Holding hands, we climbed a slippery incline covered with tailings from the coal mine until we came upon an abandoned shack. Inside, we found dozens of bats hanging from the ceiling. No longer than my fingers, they were velvety and smooth with snub noses and delicately folded wings.

The end of the summer came as it does in New Mexico with afternoon thunderstorms leading into cool evenings. Just before our last performance, we all gathered back stage. The director congratulated us on a great run. He asked us to do it one more time. "Go fuck 'em in the hearts," he said.

That night, after the show, we had a party. The director mixed mint juleps and kissed all the actresses. You had to leave early. You said you had to do something for your mom, but you promised you would visit me at my parents' house the next day. I was leaving to go back to college and you promised you would say goodbye.

The next morning, my anticipation woke me from sleep. I dressed carefully, though in a way I hoped would appear casual. I packed the rest of my things and posed for photos in the driveway.

"She's off," my Dad said. "Off into the great beyond."

And I waited. When you were half an hour late I grew nervous. An hour later, I started to cry. My dad held me and stroked my hair and my tears made dark spots on the front of his purple cowboy shirt.

"Men," dad said. "They are weird ones. He has no idea what he's missing."

I called your house and the phone rang and rang and still, I had hope.

Late that night, I finally climbed into bed, still straining my ears for the sound of tires on our gravel driveway.

I didn't see you again and we spoke only once. I sat on the floor of my dorm room back in Chicago and pressed the phone into my ear. You said you'd been a coward. You said it was too hard for you to say goodbye. You said you might have been in love.

I would like to erase that last conversation. I would like to undo my subsequent trip to the Student Health Clinic and the week of antibiotics. I would like to instead imagine that we said goodbye on the steps of that antique locomotive where we shared our first kiss. I would like to imagine that as the train wheels began to roll you jumped on board and rode back to your world, a world so very different than my own, but one I was glad to visit for just a summer.

Six

2009-09-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

I admired your freckles and your straight, dark hair. Your bangs, cut blunt across your forehead, hung perfectly, like synthetic hair on a doll. You were happy to spend an afternoon digging through my costume truck, trying on satin dresses and floppy hats. You were happy to stage photo shoots on the front porch of our house. A few of those photos still exist. In one you are wearing a pale blue dress and too large shoes. You are sitting on a stool my dad made from an old tractor seat and you hold a paper parasol over your head. Despite the tractor seat and the gravel driveway and the rattle-trap pick-up truck parked behind you, you look elegant.

In the photo that you took of me, my eyes are shut against a bright sun that lights my paper parasol with an almost nuclear fury. My hair is long and stringy, my buck-toothed smile prominent.

I'm glad I have these photos. Glad they exist in their stiff, round cornered way. Glad that they are not lost on some hard drive somewhere and glad, too, that we did not have the luxury of taking dozens of shots on a disposable camera that surely my mother would have deleted as I do the hundreds of photos taken by my own children. Two photos out of a roll of twenty-four. That's all we took.

Your dad owned a drug store with an actual soda fountain. He would let us sit at the counter and think of crazy flavors for sundaes, shakes and delectable egg creams. When he was too busy to talk, he would let us choose a toy from the shelves and take it to the apartment above the store where he stayed part time. This apartment was dimly lit and sparsely furnished. Really just a place to drop off to sleep at the place where one day ended and another began. This place wasn't really your father's home so we could imagine it was our own.

For my birthday, you presented me with a big, shiny green box tied with satin ribbon. Inside was a stuffed hippopotamus wearing a pink polka-dot skirt. I named the hippo, Bernice, and took to sleeping with her in the crook of my arm. When you left for another school just before the beginning of fifth grade, I cried.

"We'll still see each other," you said. And we did. But not very often.

And then you moved away.

I think of you now and wonder if grey has begun to thread through your dark hair the way it has in mine. Do you powder over your freckles? Did you inherit the powder blue Mercedes driven by your parents or do you pilot a mini-van filled with your own family?

I still have Bernice. She is missing an ear and her skirt is faded. Once, just after my parents divorced, I accidentally left her in a hotel in Florida. Two hundred miles later, when I realized my mistake, I couldn't stop crying. My Dad called the hotel from a pay phone and returned to the car, victorious.

"They knew she was special," he said. "She's sitting on the front desk right now, ready to come home."

I was trying to figure out why, after all this time, I still think about you. We knew each other so briefly. And then I thought about my current circle of women friends and how precious each of them is to me. I thought about how hard it is to make a solid connection with another person and how a shared homeroom or Mommy and Me class isn't often enough to ignite the spark of real friendship. You and I looked into each other and saw something familiar. That was the first time I felt that kind of girlfriend connection.

I watch my children now, as they make friends. They are transitioning from the early friends of convenience to friends of choice. You and I chose each other.

While our friendship didn't survive distance and time, my ability to seek a kindred spirit did and I owe that, in part, to you.

Fondly,

Five

2009-09-20T12:02:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

I remember the day we were stretched across your bed in the basement of your parent's house and you gave me a pair of wire rim glasses.

"These are for when you play Annie Sullivan," you said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. I knew our school was teaming up with another high school to do partner productions of "The Miracle Worker" and "Monday after the Miracle," but it was summer and there had been no casting sessions, no drama class gossip, nothing.

"Of course, you'll do it," you said. "Who else is there?"

Once for Christmas, you gave me journal, blank save for the corner of a page here and there where you had copied in your careful, even script bits and pieces of letters I had written. That you cared enough about my voice to re-write it verbatim still amazes me. How nice it is now, to page through and find myself at fifteen, seventeen, twenty...

We fought once in high school, though now I'm not really sure why, but I remember after several days of no communication, you left a package with my father before jumping in your little grey car and speeding out of our driveway. Inside the package was a flannel shirt in a neon cowboy print. You'd admitted to hating the shirt, when we saw it in the shop, but you bought it for me anyway.

One summer during college we lived together and felt free to indulge in our mutual love of Cool Whip and Boggle. When I think of that summer now, I remember mostly sitting outside on our small patio in the rain-cooled late afternoon watching your hand write lists of words. Your hands were "without bones," a friend said once, with skin soft and unwrinkled, knuckles almost invisible. Not like my chunky, banged up hands with their torn cuticles and bulky joints.

When I married, you made me a quilt, stitching the whole thing by hand in a gorgeous kaleidoscope of colors. You stayed with us just after the wedding and I would come home to find you covered by this quilt, carefully moving your needle up and through. The television would be on, an odd sound in the daytime in my house, though one I know you find to be comforting. It was nice to see you there, settled in a chair, your hands at work. That was the summer that you disappeared now and again and for a time, I didn't understand why. When you explained everything, I saw that in moving your hands over the quilt you had been working to stitch yourself into the world more securely.

You have done this. You keep doing this.

You always talk about my writing as my "work," and I am finally beginning to understand that it is work. When I sit to write this today, I am imagining your handwriting, the sure way you move a pen across the page. It is work to keep yourself stitched into the world, work to be so open. It is work to share with others in a way that invites them to share with you. It is good work.

My children know you and love you. I do not think it is surprising that you gave my daughter the stuffed animal that reigns over all the others. The frog she has named Celina, may not be the toy she plays with every day, but Celina is the toy she always returns to. According to my daughter, Celina knows everything.

Thank you for your careful nature; for your seriousness and for your vulnerability. Thank you for your certainty, your silly voices and your warm tortillas and for the continued faith you have in me.

I have faith in you, too.

Love,

Four

2009-09-18T14:08:00.001-07:00

Dearest You,

You often wear this simple string of red beads and those beads seem to epitomize you. The beads are rough cut, almost as if they had been tubes of pasta sawed into short sections. They are irregular, but they fit together somehow, jostled into place by the swift movement of your body through space. These beads are the perfect compliment to your many carefully curated ensembles. You are always elegant, but also, impossibly, playground friendly. It's a style that many have imitated and, I think, few have pulled off with your effortless grace.

You encouraged me to start letting my children go their own way when my daughter was still in my womb. You invited my son into school though he was not quite two.

"He needs a place of his own," you said.

When I asked you why my son was so violent, when I wondered if maybe his hitting would be a problem later on, you answered, "Boys kill."

It was simple and, I think, true. "Let him run a little," you said. "He has a good heart. He'll be fine."

At that time, your blunt advice was a consolation. Another time, it seemed tactless and unthinking. But I reminded myself that you had a good heart. That you would -- that we would -- be fine. And we were. You even, still occasionally mention this time as if to remind me of the long past we have shared. It's true. We have history. We have shared the whole of my daughter's life and nearly all of the life of my son. This history has held me like a magnet, securing me in our community.

When you eat, you eat whole grains. Bread, avocado, beans and rice. You eschew sweets. Except that time when you ran your fingers over a plate that held brownies and licked them clean. Except when you decide sweets are good.

You are one of my fans. I return that favor.

Happy new year, you.

Tanya

The third

2009-09-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

When you came to interview, you were wearing a perfume that almost kept me from hiring you. I have a thing about scents. For me, an awful lot of things wind up in the "smells bad" column -- even things that might hit the "smells good" column for someone else. You smelled floral like my grandmother's bathroom cabinet. Plus, you seemed shy. And I'm shy. And if we were both shy, how, I wondered would we ever communicate?

It was important that we communicate because you would be helping me to care for my children. The woman who helped us before you was a super communicator (maybe she even over did it from time to time.) She was a big gust of wind and you seemed just a breeze. I thought I would like that, but me, with two kids still in diapers, me with milk leaking out of my breasts, me with the messy kitchen counters and the bare refrigerator, what did I even know?

I hired you because I'm a firm believer in fate. I met your mother-in-law in the Nordstrom shoe department and she seemed nice. She mentioned that she was a nanny and from the way she talked to my daughter, plump and happy in her stroller, I could tell she was a good one. Truthfully, I wanted to hire your mother-in-law, but she was unavailable. So she recommended you and your perfume and timidity were far outweighed by my need for a nap, so we hired you.

My belief in fate was again rewarded because you turned out to be funny and kind and a really good cook. One day you mentioned that you had an aversion to weird smells and I admitted my hesitancy to hire you because of the perfume. You laughed. The perfume had been a gift and you'd worn it only that day before tossing it out.

You were able to get my daughter to take a nap by laying her across your lap and patting her back. My son took to you right away and brought you piles of books to read aloud.

The day that I chopped down the overgrown bushes in our front yard, you said, "Your eyes are so sad. They are like a child's." I explained that I was missing my father. That his death, even after more than two years, left a hole. You said that the intensity of my emotions might mean that my father's spirit was still hanging around. You said he might be missing me, too. You suggested that I leave him a glass of milk. This is what your grandmother believed would comfort the spirits. I thought my dad might find more comfort in a beer, but I took comfort in your kindness.

Your children were beautiful and smart and very, very kind. Your daughters accompanied you when you worked on a rare evening and they showered my children with love. The three of you were so lovely and serene and so filled with love for each other. You brought my kids to your home and cooked them soup, you asked if they could accompany you to the school orchestra concert where your daughter played violin. You and I huddled together, teary eyed, when your oldest girl graduated from eighth grade.

When you told me you would be moving away, I was thrilled for you. Your new house was lovely, the kids would be able to walk to school. But Houston was very far away and that night after you'd gone home, I cried and cried. My husband tried to comfort me. "You're losing a friend," he said. And it was true.

Motherhood is lonely and you were great, great company. In those early years, I was uncertain and you had the answers. All the parenting books talk about "modeling" meaning that kids will learn by watching their parents. But who do parents model? You. We should all model you.

When I was sick with bronchitis you brewed this incredibly strong tea composed of honey and lemon and pepper and you told me to drink it while it was still hot. I did as you said and I was flooded with warmth and well-being. I get that same feeling now as I write.

With love,

You, number 2

2009-09-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

Remember that time I ran into you at the grocery store and you cried? I think I might have been in high school so I was taller than I was when we met, but you still remembered. You looked the same. You were slim in your jeans and yellow down jacket. Your hair was, maybe, a bit more grey, but you still wore it cut short in a style that seemed to say, "hair isn't the most important thing."

You said, "Tanya, my friend, it's so good to see you." You hugged me and when you pulled away, you kept your hand on my arm while we talked.

Your fingers were tapered, but with thick knuckles. Those fingers seemed old to me, though strong, too. You held cigarettes in these fingers, played the piano with them and trailed them along the spines of the books in your library.

Though it belonged to my elementary school, as far as I'm concerned, it was your library. Located in one of the "portables," not a building, but a barrack, the library smelled like paper and dust and linoleum cleaner. The tables with their wood grain formica tops took the center space and the books covered floor to ceiling shelves on every wall. You sat at a small desk just inside the door. On the desk's surface were a ball made of rubber bands, a date stamp and a ceramic mug filled with yellow pencils. From this vantage, you would direct me to different shelves.

"Try reading about Clara Barton," you said and then, "If you liked Clara Barton, you'll love Marie Curie."

When I asked for books about magic, you gave me "The Witches of Worm," and "Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me." When it was cold on the playground, you let me into the library to read.

One day, you let me sit at one of your tables and draw pictures for all the kids in my class. "A rhino," someone would say. And I would draw it. "A giraffe." "A hippo." I moved my crayon over the paper as fast as I could, relishing the rare feeling that I had talent and that I was wanted.

"There is no better company than a book," you said. Thank you for letting me know I would never be alone.

With Love,

You are the first

2009-09-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Dearest You,

When I first met you, you had hair. I mean a lot of hair, slicked back and up in a kind of pompadour. Now that I know you so well, you tell me it was a cool 'do. You ask me if I even know who Jason Priestly is. Your hair was very Melrose Place. And then it was very Roman Gladiator (thanks to George Clooney.) And then your hair was gone. But it didn't matter because by then (or really before then) my love for you had grown to such an alarming extent that even if you'd sprouted a third arm or gotten a tattoo of Tweety Bird on your back, I'd still have found myself in pretty deep.

You used to wear a leather jacket that creaked when you moved and your ears smelled like soap and peanut butter. You bite your nails and have a habit of holding your hand over your mouth when you talk as though you might want to catch a word here and there. I think this made me believe you were shy. But you are not shy. You are not nervous like me. You are confident.

You are the person who worked all the late hours on the job where we met. You let me go home early. You are the one who took me to see a shark exhibit at the Natural History Museum while wearing a brass shark belt buckle. I wanted you to kiss me in the rose garden, but instead you bought me a popsicle that tasted like gazpacho.

When we finally did kiss, it was the night you brought me a whole rum bundt cake. We had just seen the movie "Sling Blade," but somehow the evening was romantic anyway.

Once we kissed, we were inseparable. Remember that night we dragged my little television set into the bathroom so we could watch "Grease" from the bathtub? I think that was the night I told you that I loved you. Before that, I said, "I really, really like you," but you knew what I meant anyway.

For some reason, I broke up with you. I'm not sure why. I'm not really even sure I meant to do it. I think I wanted a little breathing room and you freaked out and came over to return the key to my apartment. I cried hysterically. I called my best friend from high school and he arranged to conference in two other friends and they all listened from different states while I cried. I stopped eating. For the first time in my life, I lost weight while I was sad. Our break up lasted twelve days. Eventually, I called you. I asked if you'd want to see a movie. You agreed. When you came to pick me up, we sat on opposite ends of the couch and talked. After a few minutes, you leaned across the middle cushion and put your head in my lap. I could feel my heart beat so fast as I bent to lay my cheek against yours.

Eventually you asked me to marry you. And you still ask me. Almost every day. Even though we have been married for over eight years. It's the nicest thing.

With love,