ON TINY DANGEROUS SPECKS, THE CALL OF THE UNCHECKED TODO, AND THE LETTERS AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE
Saturday August 3 2024
Dear Sarah,
I started this letter on the plane today from Detroit to LA and at that time last week’s letter felt like it happened a million years ago. This evening I am back in my temporary place in LA and last week’s letter feels closer to me. I need to know how the tick situation has unfolded since your Monday adventures in figuring out if any other attention is needed. I have made my peace somewhat with the general presence of insects and arachnids — I despise mosquitos; am not so concerned with sharing space with spiders as I once was, unless they are moving very fast or jumping — but ticks strike a certain fear in my heart. They are small and powerful, an evil combination. I hate tiny dangerous specks!
In my notes from reading your letter last week — I chuckled about the idea that two (now three!) Saturday letters versus Friday means we’re winding down. I’ll say on my own behalf that it’s been a busy time and I too am aware that I am trying to squeeze too many things into finite stretches of time. We started this new wave of the letters in January-February — actually, we started on February 2 — and I love talking about it now, at the start of August, six months later. This is a perfect timeline. We’re in line with the cross-quarter days; perhaps you feel this kind of turning of the seasons at their midpoints. I have noticed these days in the calendar to be turning points for me in the past few years. The beginning of February is the midpoint between winter and spring; the beginning of August is the halfway point between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox; it is the beginning of the harvest period, the first fruits of the harvest. We planted seeds in February; they have been germinating and growing; what are we beginning to harvest now? You are stepping into a significant life change, a new chapter; I have some shifts happening with my writing, work, life, that are in progress on some deeper level. No huge immediate answers for me at the moment but I can feel change in the air and in myself, and am trying to listen to it and let it guide me. At the turn of the season perhaps the shift in momentum is palpable; I think again of a tossed ball at its peak changing direction and returning to earth, or perhaps being caught and sent back up into the air. A turn, in one way or another.
At the moment I’m still into the letters — I don’t have a specific sense of when to wrap or yet wanting to wrap, but I am very open to talking about wrapping. When I think back to February I think about the way we were calling the letters back into our lives. I’m not yet sure I know precisely why we called them up, not that we need to know why, but perhaps the changes that are happening in your life are part of the reason you called them up. The letters are an agent of change.
It feels good to be connected in this way again. I am still feeling sparked and excited to read your words. A Friday or Saturday cadence is not so different to me. I think the letters now are different from what they once were, and I am fascinated by that. Perhaps in the first round we were building muscles in a particular way that we now know more clearly how to activate. We know that the letters will always be here for us — we know that our friendship can weather the change of stepping away, and we know that we can return — so it is for us to decide if we still want and need them at this moment. Our friendship and the letter project really is a relationship, and subject to each of our reflections about what we are looking for. Maybe what we’re looking for doesn’t need to be hyper-specifically articulated, but it feels important to listen to the signals we might be getting about timing and when to wind down. It is interesting to me that last time I suggested a possible ending of the letters when you were not expecting it, and now the roles are reversed! To think of closing the letters once again feels like a subconscious energy shift, or a desire for an energy shift. The letters are like a flywheel that have generated a particular power that perhaps we each want to think about putting elsewhere. It becomes a moment for me to ask myself, what am I holding onto, and why? In your letter last week you asked my advice on how to navigate your commitments when ones that you consider important are remaining unaccomplished, and honestly, the only way to do it is to end some things in favor of others! Simply said, less simply done.
This week I was in Michigan to help my mother move apartments. She is now in an apartment in a senior community in the downtown area of the city where I grew up. She is pleased and I am thrilled for her. Her apartment is cozy and with a nice view; it is quiet inside and social outside, with people often passing in the hallway or gathering in pockets here and there outside or on the main floor. On the day she was moving in there was a barbecue picnic for all the residents and she and I shared a heaping plate of fried chicken and beans and potato salad. My mother had been in the same apartment since I was eight years old — the apartment where I spent the better part of my youth — and this new place is much better suited for her. The move was one of the more physically challenging things I've done in some time, and there was some stress involved as I worried that my mother's belongings wouldn't quite fit into her new place. In the end we squeezed in — I used a moving company called College Hunks and a team of three hunks and I spent close to seven hours over two days first emptying her old apartment and then packing into the new. I saw objects I haven't seen in years, meaningful objects from my own youth, and I objects more generally that I haven't seen in decades. My mom and I had a few conversations about how it can be difficult to release an object once it comes into your possession. This is difficult for her, and I have inherited this quality. At this moment in my life I'm working harder to think about what comes into my life because I know once it is in my personal space I do have a hard time letting it go. A kind of vampirism; once the object is in over the threshold it may be difficult to get rid of it; but if I am thoughtful on the front end about what I bring in, then the challenge is lessened. I still have many things of my own to go through later this year, and I think I am better equipped to see them again and look at them coolly after all that has transpired in the last almost-two years. My mother and I sent onward to the Salvation Army a couple of baskets (among many, many other things) that had been in the basement for ages; when I asked my mother if she wanted them, she said her father had told her never to get rid of them; her father has been dead for perhaps fifty years at this point. I said, Do you want the baskets? And she said, No, I don't! And we donated them. I looked them up just now to see what they are called — they were flat baskets with a curve to them — and I see that they are called flat gathering baskets; appropriate to the seasonal turn as we move into the harvest. Harvesting a capacity for release.
My mother also had a fishbowl-type glass container, a vase or a jar for showing objects, that I think I'd packed at the top of a large box, or maybe she'd packed at the top, and when she opened the box she found it broken; she said, I never liked that vase, and all it took was one swift move to break it, someone firmly setting another box on top. It feels like a kind of trailing passive relationship to some of these objects; not wanting them, not wanting to part with them; wanting something to happen to them so that they will be removed from her life, wanting not to have to make the choice but really wanting them gone. When you see a certain volume of objects it seems obvious that you might say, What small selection of these objects are actually meaningful to me in some way? But it is hard to part with volumes and volumes of things at once. We shaved away a fair portion of belongings and furniture pieces and there is a new dynamic in her new place, a new sense for her of thinking about what she really wants to hold onto. She let go of a number of nice pieces of furniture that were simply too big for the space she has now — one particular China cabinet and buffet set she said she'd gotten from a neighbor thirty-plus years ago for free when the neighbor was moving — and this time we put the pieces outside and I posted pictures to fb marketplace saying they were available for free, and they were gone within hours to homes with people who were excited to have them (maybe, for some, to resell them, but I am not going to worry about that). There was one piece of furniture I might have taken if I were in a different situation at this time, something my mom was calling a tallboy, with a drawer up top, two doors behind which two more drawers were hidden, and then two lower drawers — it looked different when it was emptied and brought out into the sunlight, more beautiful than I remembered — but I was happy for someone to come and get it and to enjoy it. I know that we could have sold all this furniture, perhaps for a fair amount of money, but I had to choose my battles and be thoughtful about how I spent my time throughout this process in order to maintain my sanity, and so the furniture pieces are gone for free and I hope people will enjoy them.
I thought I would feel a specific kind of relief after the move. I do feel relieved, but it is different than what I expected. I have a memory of a return flight from a work trip some handful of years ago. I was so thrilled to be done with that particular work trip that I was quite genuinely overjoyed. I watched a documentary about the band Duran Duran on the flight home from that trip and it hit just right; I felt that Duran Duran was the best band that had ever lived, with the best songs, and they were the best companions in my time of joy. I expected something like that kind of feeling today as I departed Detroit. I am pleased that this week is over and that the move went smoothly and that I will hopefully not have to do that kind of operation again for quite some time. But it felt different to leave than I expected — not the same level of excitement and pleasure I'd anticipated. I think what has happened is that this transitional process over the past month has somehow integrated my relationship to my mother and to my parents into my life in a different way. I will still be thinking about this for a while, but something is different.
In my letter last week I wrote about my problem with the tail end of deadlines and my inclination to take whatever I've produced or written and to dump it into any available container. As I started this moving week with a final day and a half of packing, I laughed, because that precise skill was exactly what was needed. I scooped every remaining object at hand into a box so it could be moved from point A to point B. Sometimes the boxes ended up as a bit of a mix, but that is what happens when you are dealing with all the straggling odds and ends of your life. Not every object goes into a box filled with objects that occupy the same conceptual category. You might have one or two or a few of a thing that stand alone and don't fill a box. In the case of a move you still want to fill a box to the top so that you can stack the boxes as load-bearing units. This gives you permission to mix and match objects together until the box is full. And perhaps the categories shift. Is it a box full of fragile things, or solid things, or lightweight things, or a mix of heavy and light things, or soft things wrapped around delicate things, with tiny things or loose things tucked in around the edges and corners? The categories of what goes with what begin to shift as what remains in front of you shifts, and as the container stays consistent. The boxes don't have to appear or reappear in your life in any particular order; each box contains its own mix of treasures. I might be thinking now about how to use this experience as I try to untangle the knot of how to turn my hypodermis writing into the next version of itself. The page is fairly consistent as a container, but pages can appear in any order. I am thinking about the writing project you created and mailed to me at the close of the letters the last time around — I have been carrying it with me on my journey. I made many notes on it when I first read it, and then somehow I did not know how to respond. But I want you to know it is with me.
I’m going to wrap this very long letter here, and I look forward to reading your words, hearing what’s on your mind and hearing how everything is going. Tomorrow is a new moon and we are both on the cusp of change. I can’t wait to see all that is ahead for you and for each of us, and I treasure the fact that we have each other to turn to through all these times!
Much love and until soon,
Eva
August 3, 2024
Dear Eva,
You are very right; it is delicious to depart. Isn’t leaving a form of finishing? So maybe we both savor completion more than you think! Over the past couple of weeks, it has been very satisfying to tie up all of the myriad threads I have held at my job. I am down to just 2.5 more days. (I am told that I will lose access to IT systems midday on Wednesday, my last official day of work.) And still, I find myself periodically feeling little urges to stay on to try to help/fix/solve. There is a magnetic element to certain aspects of jobs, at least for me. It’s like the call of the unchecked todo (big or small) pulls me toward it. The allure of being someone who can meet a need by doing a thing is strong! I must resist!
Last week you wrote, I want badly to remove myself from the world of work, of capitalism, of the need to monetize. Same. I wish that a paycheck could be completely taken out of the equation for deciding how I spend my time. I would still do many things that look like work. Making things, particularly working closely with people who challenge me, is something I genuinely love. But there is so much else I want to do, too, and no one is going to pay me for it. (See, e.g., the inventory of unfinished personal projects I recounted last week.)
The other thing I crave is just more open, unstructured time. Time to steep, when I process the happenings of my days. I wonder what it is like to be other people? Do others just need less time to steep, or is most of the population walking around in a watery state like I so often feel?
Enough about what I want, let’s talk about your contrarian views on my kid’s request. Ha! I do not disagree that there are ways in which the request may be unreasonable, at least as an absolute. My positive reaction to it was less about the merits of the specific ask, and more about the fact that he felt a pang and he spoke of it. I think that is not always easy with the people we love.
You are definitely on to something when you write that his feelings may be rooted in a sort of heightening of awareness of the fact that we each become characters in each others’ lives and stories. I also think there is a mildly insidious way in which parents can find ourselves treating our kids’ lives as laboratory experiments to be dissected and discussed. I was certainly not recounting the story that he overheard in a teasing way at all; it was an anecdote I found touching. It truly hadn’t occurred to me that he may not want that tender moment shared in a casual dinner conversation. But of course I would never think the same of a grown human!
It is true that the world passing through you becomes your story to some extent. This brings to light the way in which true privacy is impossible. Every time we interact with another human, we lose some element of control over the story — how we will be perceived, communicated about, treated, reacted to. In other words, to the extent we ever have any control over how any given moment will play out, we have even less whenever it involves someone other than ourselves.
This is a very good segue to a story I want to tell you about last night. As you know, we spent the afternoon and evening at a music festival. It was a sticky summer day/night, but we had a mesmerizing experience swaying and singing along amid throngs of sweaty people in the middle of nowhere. After it ended, those sweaty crowds became less charming. The festival had very little in the way of crowd management, so it was a clusterfuck. After darting our way through crowds to get out, we were pointed in two different directions for the shuttle back to Des Moines. We chose a direction and headed over through the sea of people that were forming into a line. We made our way to try to get to the end of the line and realized there was a fence that prevented us from getting to it. We doubled back and at that point, the line of humans separated to make way for cars at a point near the front where we were walking. We made the fateful decision of using the chance to merge back into the line, along with a dozen or so others who did the same. To be clear, we cut the line. What followed was, and I am not exaggerating, 45 minutes of heckling as we waited for more buses to arrive. For reasons I do not understand, the heckling was directed solely at me. It all came from one woman. She got distracted into other conversations with her friends on and off, but she repeatedly returned to heckling. It got personal, at least to some extent. I am old enough to be her parent. (True) I looked uncomfortable because I felt guilty. (True) I am probably from New Jersey. (False). The experience was pretty miserable. In fact, I can’t recall a time in recent memory when I so strongly wanted to shrink and/or become invisible.
Today, I woke up still covered in the residue, which I suppose is what one would call shame. I got blackballed, Eva! It has been captivating to recognize the strong instinct to rinse the residue in one of two ways: either self-flagellation (I must be really reprehensible to deserve such a public flogging!) or indignation (I am somehow absolved because the heckling was so severe that it somehow negates my shitty behavior). Now, nearly 24 hours after the incident, I think I have emerged with a third way of understanding it. It was indeed not cool of me to cut the line. Let the record show that the heckler was not wrong on the merits! But it is also true that it was fairly mundane as social infractions go, so I am not going to lose any sleep over my actions.
When I do something shitty, I cannot expect to have any control over the way any given human may seek to hold me accountable. But it also is true that I still get to decide how I judge my own actions. This feels somehow like a revelation to me. I think it has to do with the distinction between being reactive and receptive. I always want to strive to be the latter. I want to be porous and open to the inputs of others. But I don’t have to be reactive. I can take them in, let them steep, and sometimes emerge with my moral compass unaltered.
Before I close this letter, I must note that your sentence, I did a weird thing that I want to tell you about, should really be the intro to all communication with true friends, if you ask me. I love it! I guess my remix of that theme for this week’s letter should be, I did a shitty thing that I want to tell you about.
Happy Saturday! Is this our new ritual? I’m into it!
Sending love,
Sarah