What follows are photos and a live writing transcript in response to Letter 1, series 2.
I am so struck in reading this letter, perhaps for the first time in reading any of these letters, by the difference between what they are doing and what we are able to do right now.
It has never struck me as remarkable to be preparing for family from out of town to visit, or to plan a car pool back from university.
The Sharon my grandmother is taking about in this letter is Sharon, Connecticut. It's where her mother's family came from. We went there once when I was a child and vacationing in the Berkshires. There's a photo of me and my parents in an album somewhere, standing in front of a pine tree in Sharon.
I never met any of that family. I only knew my grandmother and her brother Willard.
She's included this blank half sheet of paper to separate the pages, which she has numbered using Roman numerals.
I love this decision, these decisions. These little rituals of letters writing. Roman, not Latin numerals, the extra sheet of paper. The materiality and personal specificity of it all.
Are our own issues of curation similar? This emoji, that font - somehow it feels less than, or am just being pathetically nostalgic and glorifying the past.
This tendency that Debra's noting - that we are more in contact with our loved ones than usual, due to the pandemic - this question of frequency of letters.
She's writing to him on a Wednesday, she's going to see him on Friday and she'll try to write again - and that's before anything happens. He's just in the next town over. Well, about four towns over. About 45 minutes.
The guidance here in the Czech Republic is not hug or kiss people, to reduce risk of transmission. I read an article in the Guardian about alternative methods of showing loved ones affection - notes were mentioned. Drawings placed on trays of food, notes slipped under doors. There is a lovely tactility to them. I touched it and now you can. A mediated caress.
Only not by media. Paper. Pen.
I said at the beginning of the reading that I was going to choose a letter at random.
It amazes me that I chose this one.
(BTW - 45mins by what? Did she have access to a car? Or public transport?)
She was usually carpooling. There was also a bus. The bus would have taken longer than 45 minutes. In another letter, she makes sure to send Jack (my grandfather) a bus schedule. In case he needs. And I don't know what the speed limits were in the 1940s. It would take you 40/45 minutes to drive it today. I don't think there is a bus anymore either.
Of all the letters, this one contains the line that has struck me most strongly: "And after promising myself not to emote, too!”
She tosses it off, like it's funny, but it feels deeply sad to me.
It gets to the heart of why I wanted to read these letters, to sit with them in this way. When I knew my grandparents, my grandfather was always more "fun" - he wore plaid trousers at Christmas, liked a Manhattan. He was quite dashing. I identified with him quite strongly - I felt like yes, this is the kind of person I am too. I am not a quiet person, I am not in constant need of reassurance. I am bold. I have opinions.
And I read this and I think, did he ask her not to share too much? Was she told she was too much? Obviously she thought so, tried to tamp it down.
Or felt she ought to.
(Yes, because emotion is so scary and also, 'too feminine'? So is this something else, to sit with the quietly feminine?)
These questions of gender that Debra's raising are interesting. I've thought about gender a lot. It certainly feels like there are normative expectations at play here. Is it about being feminine, or it about being happy? Some of it may also be cultural. I joke (I'm only half joking when I say it) that I left the United States because I wasn't good enough at smiling, or projecting a continuous sense of well-being.
There is a letter I blogged previously where Jack signs off "Be well, be happy, be loved." "Be happy." It's another one of these lines that stays with me. It should be a lovely thing to wish to someone - on one hand, I guess it is - but in the context of our relationships, whenever our happiness in tangled up in someone else's, is the wish for happiness also a wish for a certain kind of ease, a frictionlessness?
It struck in today's reading that Jack is doing a play.
Another thing we're not currently doing.
At least not in the usual way.
But at least we have this. It's something.
We will be writing more 'fore Friday (I love these 1940s abbreviations that we don't really use anymore, like 'fore. And we haven't even addressed pepperpot as a term of endearment - so much more ground to cover). For now, though
"With all my love, as ever --"