Twenty-Two

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

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

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.

T

Nineteen

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,

T

Eighteen

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?

T

Seventeen

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,

T

Sixteen

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,

T