ON STANDING AT THE STARTING LINE, THE PRECIPICE THAT IS SECOND GRADE, AND LOSING OURSELVES IN A LETTER
Wednesday February 12 2020
Dear Sarah,
I'm starting my letter to you this week from an airplane, in the air between Minneapolis and San Francisco. After our recent trip to Michigan for our friend's funeral, I wasn't sure about heading back to the airport so soon, but as last week wound down and this week started I felt better, a bit fresher and ready to see friends we haven't seen in more than a year. M and I are not seated together (the small trials of Basic Economy) but we played a seatback word-jumble kind of game together from our respective seats and it had a particular charm to it. We found that in the game interface we could change the label attached to our seat location, and eventually we used the limited text field — it would accept 10 letters, which I learned by trying to enter an 11-letter short phrase — to communicate in brief with each other at a distance.
Having just re-read your letter of last week, somehow this reminds me of the tidbit you mentioned toward your close, about David Roberts's Twitter thread about people who love to talk about the nuance of a thing. I read and re-read this, somehow couldn't quite make it click in my head. But now it is clicking, and I think it ties together with what I folded into my letter of last week, from my Anni Albers reading — the idea that to be in a space of education, perhaps either in school or in academia, is to be preparing for the thing, endlessly hashing out the possibilities, while in other ways perpetually standing and scuffing one's feet at the starting line. Yes and no, I think.
The idea of battling it out on the ground, in the muck — when is this a truth, and when is it a wish for a simpler time? I still lean toward agreeing that it’s not that simple! I think nuance serves us best when it is wielded in order to try to better understand each other; it is best used kindly and generously, but it can also be applied as a mirror or a shield, a method of deflection. Most things are not that simple and are weighted with nuance, and still we each plod or charge through our days, and (certain, some) things get done. So, as usual, perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between, not on either end of the pendulum swing but in the shared space of every swing to and fro.
When do we find ourselves saying, It's not that simple? Is it when we are misunderstood or misinterpreted, when we hear an idea that we know or believe to be untrue, and find ourselves taking a deep breath to start explaining our side, hoping our conversational partner will listen without eyes glazing over, will eventually agree wholeheartedly with our well-formed point? If we were in complete agreement, neither of us would bother to say it's not that simple, because together we would have settled into the simplicity of the shared understanding we had forged.
I do find that I can occasionally lose myself in this kind of letter, an exploration of nuance and language, rather than trying to light a match that will draw our eyes, that will spark and surprise us both. Sometimes it just feels good to get nitpicky, to roll around in a small idea rather than to wrestle something bigger. Anni Albers might have said, Put the muscles you built in your small wrestling matches to use on something bigger. Might this be where we are headed? Where do we go next?
I’m here in San Francisco for a week, a little bit for business and mostly for pleasure, reconnecting with friends and with this place where M and I lived for more than a decade. I was pleased to find that less had changed than I might have imagined, reinforcing my sense of object permanence: San Francisco is real, and I know these things about the city, and the things I know about the city remain true, for now.
I miss you and wonder how you are this week! It’ll be a minute until we catch up again. How much will have changed? I am, as ever,
Your friend,
Eva
February 14, 2020
Dear Eva,
Happy Valentine's Day! I remember you once teasing me for being a touch wistful about missing Valentine’s Day for an out-of-town work meeting, only to discover during said work meeting that you and M sent each other Valentines when the holiday rolled around that week. Bill and I do no such [adorable] thing, but I have warm memories of waking up on every Valentine’s Day to a smattering of white chocolate and a card from my parents when I was a kid. Those fond feelings linger, so I still kind of like this silly Hallmark day. I went to Jonah’s Friendship Party at school today and experienced just under an hour of the sugar-fueled Valentine’s glee of a second grade class this afternoon.
I am pretty convinced that second grade is a miraculous time of life. I remember my own second grade teacher quite vividly. Mrs. Thompson used to let us place the class silkworms on our bare arms to crawl around our skin while we practiced writing, just the kind of harmless but unexpected adventure that makes a permanent imprint on a 7 year old. Jonah seems to be thriving in this time of life, too. He eats up every day like it is a cupcake to be devoured, excited about most everything that comprises his day, right down to the 5 minutes of homework he gets once each week. It is inspiring to observe another human relishing life in this way. I can see, too, how tempting it is—addictive almost—to want to keep piling on the joy as a parent, proposing new fun things to do on Saturday, coming up with other tastes / activities / experiences that you know would elicit more anticipation and zest for life. But I am trying to remain aware that part of my job is to let him fall, to ever-so-slowly draw the curtain open to reveal the full complexity of human life, which is just as dark as it is light. This might be why second grade feels almost like a precipice—the point where innocence and maturity meet at their highest mutual peak. I will be ready for what comes next, but I am trying to savor this time while it lasts.
I appreciated your description in last week’s letter of feeling blue. Sadness of this kind isn’t just an emotion that you feel, it is a fragrance that seeps into your skin and alters the way you experience the environments you find yourself in throughout the day. It does not surprise me to know you feel tired. Grief is heavy. I hope you are giving your body and mind the rest it calls for.
The excerpts you included in your letter were enthralling and I’ve reread them several times since. This idea of “shaping out of the shapeless” seems to me to be everything. There is a trust, a leap, a sense of making something out of nothing that is required for just about any doing. Artists take this leap when they set out to create a new work from a blank canvas, trusting a process to put piece by piece together until something takes shape, something worth putting out into the world for new eyes to see or read, or new ears to hear. But this same trust—albeit in smaller doses—is necessary when you stand in front of a room of people and hear the words coming out of your mouth and wonder if they are stringing together in a way that conveys a thought worth listening to, or when you hold a sobbing baby close to your chest and sing a lullaby that you are making up as you go, trying to trust that you will be able to lull the babe to a quiet sleep. We may feel safer as spectators, but we have to apply what we absorb to our work of the moment. The time to try is now, fumble as we might. Knowing for later is not knowing at all.
I feel lately like I am standing at my own precipice—a new decade, a different sense of the world and who I might be in it. You, too, seem to be entering a new phase of your life, one you are constructing day by day on your own terms. What might we shape out of the shapeless? Indeed, the time to try is now!
Your friend,
Sarah