On fast learning, real weeks, and clear waters
August 30, 2019
Dear Eva,
I am writing you from my happy place, or I should say, from one of my happy places. I’m in the cafe at Prairie Lights Bookshop in Iowa City, sipping iced tea at a small table in the center of the room, surrounded by chatty young adults and intensely-focused older adults. I adore the energy in spaces like these; some mix of curiosity, rigor, and reflection is in the air, and I am absorbing it eagerly. The loud white noise of chatter and milk-steaming is like music to my ears. (Sidenote: “music to my ears” is an expression I have used now three times in 48 hours after a lifetime of never using it before. Strange!)
I had lunch with my 20-year-old niece today. She is a college student, just finishing up her first week back at class after the summer. It was a rare chance to talk one-on-one with her — to hear about friend travails, to discuss family dynamics, to share laughs. It’s always interesting to stop to realize just how little I really get to talk to my relatives in any deeper sense than dinner party conversation. I loved it. I want more! Sometimes I think I could talk one-on-one with people all day if I had the opportunity. I’m trying to square that with my previously held belief that I’m an introvert. Funny how these labels we give ourselves hold weight somehow, even though they might be the result of some online quiz taken years ago. But as we have written about in letters before, the narratives we have about ourselves quite literally shape our lives since they dictate what jobs we take, what expectations we have, what goals we choose to pursue.
But back to conversation. I am interested in deconstructing what it is that makes it so enjoyable to me these days. I think I get energized by the process of taking what someone says and bouncing off from there, seeing where it leads us. It feels similar to the collage idea we have discussed previously, or the ways we have described this letter writing adventure. Rather than a blank page or a silent space, we have sparks that are generated by each other, even by ourselves but then turned into something bigger and better through the process of conversation, in person and/or on the page.
I remember there was a time that “I hate small talk” was something I would often say. This seems curious to me now. I rarely find myself feeling like I am on the surface of a conversation in an artificial way. Which is not to say I get deep with the grocery store clerk! Just that I take a friendly exchange for what it is — a small acknowledgement of shared humanity, nothing more, nothing less. When I talk to someone thoughtful, it feels warm and comforting, even if it is brief. As I write this letter, I am coming to the realization that I think I may just be a little bit lonely. God dammit, remote work! How you torment me, just as you bring me great luxuries. Haha!
With that, I think I must close this letter and start the drive back home to my family who awaits. I am happy to report that we have plans to go out for dinner and drinks with some delightful old friends this evening. Lonely, no more! I hope your weekend up north is filled with scenic spaces and campfires, without too many mosquito encounters. I like imagining you there, gazing at the remarkably clear waters of Lake Superior with awe like I was just a few weeks ago. I look forward to hearing about it next week.
Yours,
Sarah
Thursday August 29 and Friday August 30 2019
Dear Sarah,
It's letter week 48 and I can hardly believe almost a year has passed. I still have a crisp mental image of myself sitting in my new apartment in Minneapolis, writing the first of many letters to you. It was impossible in that moment to know where the letters would go! And look how they've gone. Time has passed, and we've stuck to the plan, and each week we've spun (or eked) our thoughts out, and I can confidently say it's been a better year because of our letters. They're grounding and head-in-the-clouds both at the same time. The double act of my moving back to the midwest, where the seasons mark the movement of time so clearly, and marking the weeks with our letters, has yielded a year that I have very much felt. Writing our letters is one way of making the time real.
Your letter last week filled me with emotions. It was bittersweet to hear you call Pancakes simple and small — even though I don’t exactly agree, I think I know what you mean. I was thinking about your letter across the week and I just kept thinking you were brave to have written and shared it in the first place. When I think about what’s held me up in writing and sharing more of my writing, I think it’s been a fear of that feeling of smallness — the sense that it will be small even if it is big, even if it feels final. But there is no progress without doing, marking something as done, giving it time to rest, doing other things, and then, perhaps, looking back at the thing again — and thinking again about what is next to do. More and more I’ve come around to the idea of the sheer importance of writing, the way that writings that feel like final iterations are perhaps always drafts, or some version of a draft, up until your last moments.
Today I’m kicking off the first full day of a long-weekend vacation, and M and I took a day-long pasta-making class at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota, along the North Shore of Lake Superior. We learned how to make fettuccine and ravioli, and cavatelli, and gnocchi, and spaetzle! We made four different doughs over the course of the day (you make fettuccine and ravioli using the same dough) and shaped all those bits of pasta, and helped cook them, and then we ate them up in a grand finale with a variety of delightful sauces and accoutrements the teacher had prepared while we made our pastas. This isn’t how I usually cook! Whether I am cooking a new type of food or making something again for the second or third or tenth time, I make a batch of a thing — and then the learning dissipates a bit (it helps to keep some notes about how it went). Today, in the space of eight hours, making pasta after pasta and dough after dough — feeling how your basic pasta dough is supposed to be a bit firm and springy, and your spaetzle more wet like a batter, and your gnocchi bonded but not too firm — it was learning in a different way and at a different pace, with my learnings compounded as I went along. You make some pasta and it’s all right, and then you make another batch right away and you can tweak it a bit and see what might work better, and then you start a new dough and carry forward what you learned from the other doughs you just made moments ago. I liked this kind of learning — every batch of pasta is not perfect but you make enough to see what makes a decent pasta and what makes a better pasta and what makes a delicious pasta.
I may have said this in a recent letter — please pardon me as my head is swimming right now in a five-pasta carbohydrate blast (plus a bonus batch of chocolate pasta that another student made and we ate at the close of the day with a vanilla sauce!) — but the act of writing these letters over the course of the year has in fact changed my year, the year itself. The act of writing to you each week, turning over the week’s activities, and thinking about your letter to me, has made each week real in a way that I think many of my weeks in prior years have not been felt in quite the same way. Those weeks were real too — I’m here, now, and I moved through those weeks to get here — but they weren’t reflected on, processed back and forth in the chewy space of weekly writings with an honest and thoughtful friend, with YOU.
You wrote in your letter of last week about “unpacking memories, feelings, thoughts; things most of us go our entire lives without ever touching.” I think what’s been so important about the pace of our letters is this turnover of change, the way we’ve been able to grow and change at a visible pace. I’ve thought before of the process of changing jobs as a moment to coalesce learnings, to “defrag” them, to condense what I learned in a place, in combination and in contrast with what was learned at prior places of work, and to roll all of that learning forward in a conscious way into what comes next. Think about the pace at which the two of us have changed jobs — chunks of years here and there — and think about the pace of our parents changing jobs; my father worked the bulk of his working life, 33 years, at the same company. When change comes so infrequently (which is not to say the only change in one’s life is work-related, by any means) then perhaps the reflection and analysis comes less frequently as well? With our weekly letters we’ve created a place for weekly reflection, weekly turn-over of ideas, weekly growth. It’s like exercise — the more you do it, the better you get at it, the more you start to see results, and the better it feels.
I think what I’m saying is — thank you for writing Pancakes, thank you for sharing it, thank you for reflecting on it, thank you for all your writing and thinking, and I can’t wait to read what comes next! Write and release and write and release; perhaps there is no such thing as a magnum opus, and instead only a series of (final?) drafts!
Until next week, XOXO,
Your friend,
Eva