On big meaty questions, psychological salves, and the one splendid week of the year
March 26, 2021
Dear Eva,
There is a big bush outside of our back door that is some bland combination of green and brown for 51 weeks of the year. We are nearing the one splendid week of the year when it will blossom into its full glory, popping with white flowers on every branch. When Bill, Jonah, and I set out on one of our brisk routine walks during a break from online school this morning, Jonah suggested we take a picture of the bush once it blossoms to capture this fleeting beauty. This is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it got me thinking about how much we all have an instinct to want to freeze / record / archive, to turn the present into something we can carry with us and hold in the palm of our sweaty little hands. Last week you wrote that you felt a tinge of sadness when you realized you accidentally deleted the record of our string of Monday chats. The calendar as an archive is not something I think of often, though I have occasionally used it as such. At various points along the way, letting experiences fade without chronicling them has been a source of anxiety for me—am I taking enough photos, saving enough mementos, writing enough memories down that I will have something to return to when the present is the past? At this particular moment, I am fairly comfortable with the mix I have going between presence and archiving (given our finite time and energy, I do think the two are in a bit of opposition with one another), thanks in no small part to these letters! Anyway, I raise this not to make any particular point, just to say that I am forever intrigued and perplexed about the dilemma of how much emphasis to put on the act of documenting life as I go.
This week I have been thinking quite a bit about another project we have brewing, our experimental advice column with our friend J. When we first conceived of this project, I mentioned how I have never been drawn to advice columns. With a little unpacking, another friend helped me realize maybe it is the one-dimensional aspect of written advice that repels me. How can someone give advice to another someone they don’t know based on a single, often brief, explanation of their question and its context? I am much more interested in hearing a conversation, a back and forth where one person helps unspool what is behind an opening question, giving bits of insight along the way but doing it in a more probing, interactive way. And yet, here we are giving little missives of advice based on 2-3 sentence questions from anonymous advice-seekers! And so far I am finding the experience really eye-opening. Among other things, it feels like it requires me to flex my muscle of taking an angle on something and seeing it through. Writing always requires this in a way, but the form affects how many ideas you can weave in, how much nuance can be inserted, how declaratory you must be. Trying to hold myself to a few hundred words in answer to big meaty questions requires me to make some decisions up-front. What way into this issue will I take? Did I understand exactly what the person was asking? Does it matter? I am enjoying the experience of having to pick an approach and follow it through, rather than stopping at the point of loosely mulling all the ways into a given topic. Long story short, I am happy we are doing this and I can see that I am already learning and growing from the experience just like any other.
You wrote last week’s letter in a list format (I almost wrote “listicle” but I decided that sounded derisive, which is the opposite of what I mean to convey!). There was a shimmery perfection in the fragments you included. I truly somehow felt a bit tipsy reading them despite reading them while sober, you managed to perfectly encapsulate that silly serenity that can come when drinking sparkling wine on a Friday evening with a belly full of ragu. I love every letter you write, but it was a special treat!
I am rolling into this weekend with a hearty dose of unwarranted glee—maybe that is what a Friday off from work will do! Bill is downstairs prepping the sourdough crust, and I hear shouts of joy through the windows as the kids play outside with the neighbor. To harken back to where I started, these are the kinds of moments I want to bottle up for future reference. And I suppose by writing them here, I just did. Voilà!
Happy weekend to you and yours!
All the best,
Sarah
Friday March 26 2021
Dear Sarah!
My brain is very worn down this evening, not the best brain to put to my letter! I am trying to listen quietly to see what might bubble up, but my brain itself is quiet, sleepy, getting ready for Star Trek TNG. (What shenanigans will Data get up to this evening? I have the vague sense that Data irritated me when I was younger, or at least puzzled me, but he is the star of the show these days!)
My weeks have been busy lately! It feels so boring to keep saying it, to say that I’m busy and that I’m tired, but it’s how things have been going. I think that means that generally, things are good, though I think the unbroken series of busy days and busy weeks is a product of the pandemic — an extended time without the usual occasional travel or simple local activities to draw me away and out into the world so that my busyness is punctuated with other activity. It’s hard to be just the right amount of busy and not to tip over into the just-a-little-too-busy realm. I was almost just the right amount of busy this week, ticking off items on my to-do list; then something fresh popped up that required a bit of schedule rejiggering, and suddenly I was back to just a little too busy.
I may have mentioned this to you verbally in the past week or two, but I have been having success these days with a to-do list I’ve labeled NOW, LATER, and DONE. Here I have been tracking everything I have to do, reviewing the NOW and LATER lists periodically, adding things to either list as needed, moving things between the two lists, reordering tasks if it’s useful, and then striking through NOWs and moving them to the DONE list. I think the DONE list is providing me with a bit of a psychological salve these days, as I see the list of struck-through items grow even as I continue to have things to do day by day. We’ve talked at length about lists and our feelings of joy or ambivalence at getting things done; at this moment, perhaps in contradiction to what I’ve expressed in the past — please call up for me what I have said in the past! — it is a treasure to have my NOW, LATER, and DONE list, and to be able to check things off as I do them. I’ve been spending all my time with words lately, as I’ve been ticking off items on the NOW list, and tonight the words are flowing a little less freely! I am thinking about all kinds of things but the thoughts are not congealing into bits I can dissect with you here. Maybe next week?
Last week you spoke of families and poetry, and said, There is a way in which literalism constricts the range of experiences available to us in our lifetimes. I have been turning this over in my mind; in fact, I think your words met me precisely at the point of an unformed feeling to that effect, a wondering. And your father’s words coming back to both of us: If you have something you want to say, why not just say it clearly in a way that people can understand? Thinking about poetry: do we know, sometimes, if we have something to say? Perhaps we want to take a softer line than the spirit of “I have something to say!” — instead of a shout or even a loud voice, perhaps we want to speak something quietly, guardedly; to refract and fracture the light of our thoughts and words away from their origin and to scatter them in all directions. If only I, and the general we, all knew so clearly if we had something to say in the first place; and then to be able to say it clearly in a way that people could understand! If only to understand something could look the same for each one of us.
I love to chip away at these kinds of ideas over time, the way our letters let us do, circling back under a new sun angle or carb-fueled mood. Speaking of which… I’m getting lost again in sneaker shopping on this late evening — has my favorite brand simply stopped making new colors in the shoe that I like? Is it being discontinued? — so I think it’s time to focus. I’ve eaten a rich dinner of ribs and jerk chicken mac-and-cheese, and I’ve had a Manhattan (my stomach may not thank me overnight) but all carbs and liquids are conspiring to tell me that it is Friday night and time to step away from the glow of the computer! Still, I look forward to basking in the glow of this week’s words from you in just a moment now!
Next week most Minnesotans, including yours truly, become eligible for vaccination, and even though I think it’ll take a while to get an appointment, I look forward to getting vaccinated and perhaps planning a trip to see you sometime soon! I CAN’T WAIT!
Until next week!
Yours,
Eva