When I enter a used bookstore my shoulders automatically lower (even if I thought I felt relaxed on the way in) and I exhale much deeper than the inhale just before it. Paper, stacked sometimes literally to the ceiling, offers the safety of ten thousand silent voices. What others might classify as clutter, I see as a garden.
I love words. Not merely the printed word, but words themselves, and the ability to make them mean something through juxtaposition. Not many things work that way. Tarot cards, sure, but stone fruit, socks, formal flatware, Toyota Prius™es… arrange them all you want. Nothin’.
My favorite collection of words is the handwritten letter, and my favorite time period of letter writing began in 8th grade.
We would face the front of the classroom, pretending to pay attention to the teacher while drafting free association masterpieces between the blue lines of our notebook paper. Then at the end of class, we’d open the binder rings, pull out the sheet, and fold it into a rectangle via an intricate pattern that left a little triangle pull-tab to open it with.
We wrote about just about anything - the class we were currently in, a class we dreaded going to, movies and tv shows, and eventually who we liked and who we “like” liked. If the intended audience was in the same classroom, a dangerous gamble of “passing the note” to that person could be attempted.
That is how I ended up eating a note meant for me because the social studies teacher saw the pass and was notorious for reading such letters aloud in front of the entire class. To spare my friend, I popped the whole thing in my mouth and feverishly started chewing, hoping at least to ruin it enough to render it illegible. But the teacher did not bring the garbage can over; instead he told me that I could either eat the note or go to the principal’s office.
So I kept on chewing and swallowed the whole thing - opening my mouth as proof. I was a teenage boy - I was always hungry.
Unimpressed yet defeated, the teacher slowly returned to the front of the classroom, muttering “probably die from ink poisoning…”. I hadn’t actually considered that, and with no internet to reassure myself as to the chemical composition of BIC™ pen ink, I spent the next few restless nights wondering what symptoms might suddenly occur as my epistolary snack worked its way through my system.
Through high school, college, and eventually after, I kept all my letters in an honest-to-goodness shoebox. When the shoebox fell apart, I spent an afternoon transferring the collection to plastic sleeves in some 3 ring binders I had around. They followed me everywhere, and after we were married, my wife ran into them while looking for something.
“Who are these from?” she asked curiously, casually flipping through the collection.
“I don’t know…anybody who wrote me a letter.”
“Are they all love letters?”
“Nooo. They’re just, like, about what we were doing at the time. Long distance calls were too expensive.”
She slowly nodded in agreement, but then asked, “Do the people who wrote these know that you kept them?”
Well, that was a weird question. I thought about it.
“I don’t know most of those people anymore.”
“So why would you keep the letters?”
“I don’t know… it feels weird to throw them away. Disrespectful or something.”
“You’ve moved all of these pieces of paper across the country. Twice. You know you can’t physically carry the past with you forever.”
She was right. That Sunday I culled the archive. They had each done the job they were meant to do, communicated the information entrusted to them. I filled a recycling bag and put it on the “back porch” of our strange little attic apartment. But as I stood there, I couldn’t help but feel that all these personal artifacts deserved a better sendoff.
The next evening, while walking home from the train in the brisk autumn air, I spied a bright pink leaf at the bottom of the long steep hill we lived on. The blustery weather was making my eyes tear up even with my glasses on, but as I bent down to pick it up I saw ahead of me a turquoise leaf, and another…
and the leaf… seemed to… have my name on it.
Then I looked up the hill.
High in the trees, in the bushes, and scattered on the sidewalk were my letters. Apparently a nosy squirrel had opened the bag they were in, then a windstorm efficiently distributed my letters everywhere.
The past, as installation art.
I picked up the ones I could reach and stuffed them into my pockets as I made my way home. I didn’t want to litter, and it would be easy to figure out who was to blame for all this. Some of the ones up in the trees stayed there for months.
You’re not gonna have that happen when you’re texting. Sure, it’s instant and can go around the world, but our words to each other have gotten smaller, and no matter what font you use, it’s not your handwriting. Pen to paper is heart to hand.
And phones are way too hard to swallow.
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