On why we keep what we keep, being generous or frugal with our “I love yous,” and heartbeats visible on our chests
June 25, 2020,
June 26, 2020
Dear Eva,
Hello on a sunny and steamy Thursday! After a cranky start, this week is shaping up to be a nice one after all. Last night, I took a spontaneous pre-sunset bike ride with a friend, and I came home with mosquito bites and tired legs, but I felt refreshed. This morning I started my day with a brief swim. Just 20 laps, but I was rushing because of time constraints, and my heart was pounding so hard at times I wondered if the beating was visible on my chest. What a difference it can make to move our bodies! How it can give energy, just as it uses it. How it can transport our heads into new mental spaces. I am saying this, in part, to remind myself. I can sometimes find it easy to hunker down in my home office so long that my limbs get achey, as if thinking and writing alone might sustain me. Silly Sarah.
So far, this letter writing has been punctuated by several random “I love yous” from Simon across the hall, and now from the TV room calling up the stairs. He has taken to a marvelous new habit of saying “I love you” whenever he can’t think of anything else to say, whenever he thinks you might be upset with him, or whenever he just wants to reconnect while doing something else. It’s quite a contrast to Jonah, who has been stingy with his “I love yous” for as long as I can remember. (I like [our nanny]; I don’t love her. I only love family, he used to say.) I appreciate the integrity of only saying “I love you” when you really mean it, but I will say that I am enjoying the abundance of love bandied about in our house these days.
Your letter last week was laced with political fire, and it moved me. I, too, am exhausted by the long history of white men grasping for power, taking power, controlling bodies in their quest for power, working together to maintain that power. And I, too, as a white woman, am not absolved. I am particularly inspired by your exploration of how you might leverage your reflective, slower-paced tendencies in the resistance. I am certain that your brilliant ability to see and play the long game is deeply needed in this fight, as is your steadiness, your thoughtfulness, your care. Sometimes it feels like we as individuals are powerless to influence the kind of sweeping changes we are working toward, but then, as you say, we can take steps by even just changing our language. You mentioned having added your preferred pronouns to your email signature, and how it felt significant and maybe even a little scary at first. I think this makes sense. There is a way in which you can imagine someone thinking language changes are symbolic or academic, but in truth, the words we use—particularly the labels—are political, and bucking them is indeed an act of rebellion.
I feel generally perplexed by and impatient with the adherence so many people have to the way things always have been. Whether it is J.K. Rowling going on tirades about what it means to be a woman or white men complaining that “they can’t say anything anymore,” I am tired of it all. Why should they not expect that society should continue to evolve and that they have a moral obligation to be curious about that evolution? Instead, they ask for empathy based on their self-proclaimed “good intentions.” As we have covered in a past letter, my empathy coffers may be lower than average, and certainly so with people who prioritize their own comfort above all else.
It is now Friday around happy hour time, which means my triumphant start to my letter on a Thursday faded out last night. Here I am instead, eager to close out the letter so I can join in the pizza prep before Movie Night. (In case you’re wondering, the Broadway musical Newsies! is the plan for the big screen, while a certain someone watches Frozen 2 on the iPad, periodically calling out “I love you” when he wants to reconnect.)
It is amazing to think that next week we will be writing our letters on the eve of Independence Day. I feel wistful to see the summer flying by. Let’s enjoy this last weekend of June!
Your friend,
Sarah
Thursday June 25 and Friday June 26 2020
Dear Sarah,
Another Friday, another set of camp relays around the corner, I hope? Last week I laughed about your foosball table populated with smiling faces from your alumni magazine, and I laughed again when we talked this week and you told me, not even a full week later, that you had some regret that you hadn’t photographed the foosball setup before you threw it away. I can hardly believe you threw it away so soon, let alone at all! This is another way in which we are different. I understand that the foosball table was a dimensional piece, and thus more complicated to store and save, but I thought it might have at least lasted a week! There is a way in which I admire the kind of rigor you employ with the ephemeral objects and pieces that come through your life. I realized as I wrote ephemera that that is one of the things I love best — keeping the things that catch my attention that are not meant to be kept at all, the pages and the lists and the notes and the catalogs. The foosball courts! Upon reflection, I am fairly certain I keep more things than I throw away, an odd thing to recognize. Though can it be true? I get rid of beverage cans and (some) cardboard boxes and (some) yogurt containers and (most) junk mail…
I come from hoarder types even if they are not officially living among stacks of newspapers (perhaps only because they hadn’t subscribed to any newspapers, perhaps as a preventative measure?). The duelling-on-the-same-side spirits of I just might need this [insert object description] and I don’t know exactly what to do with this or how to handle this piece of information are always present in my mind. The answers usually lie in a few regular directions for me: I will file this thing away neatly; I will add this thing to a stack to await some future moment when I will file it neatly; I will put this thing near me but not so near as to crowd me, until I feel like I know what to do about it; and ooo, that thing is interesting, I don’t know what to do with it but I just like to look at it. And yet, somehow, I can navigate my spaces. I have a number of plastic snap-top bins filled with this and that, things I “need” only infrequently if at all — and still there would seem to be no pressing reason to get rid of the bins or their contents. Once objects make it into the bins, I think about the situation in terms of space. The bins full of ephemera do not currently take up so much space that I am weighed down by their presence, or that they are crowding out other objects. If I needed some space, I could consider clearing out some of those boxes. But a box, a foot wide by a foot and a half or so, seems to take up so little space, that to spend the time to clear it out for such a small reclamation of square footage seems like a frittering away of time. This is why, I suppose, it is good to get rid of things on the front end! As I mentioned when we chatted, I have trouble with keeping things once they are in my possession. Better never to have touched it in the first place! But even if you threw away your alumni faces foosball table, you preserved it in writing, which is in some ways better than a photograph. It is perfect in my mind. I, too, love your thought about these accomplished alumni: We never know, do we, where we might end up? ...in places that we can never even imagine, and will never know.
I have, in fact, been thinking about your reading habits on and off since you first described them in more detail. Mostly I am just a little bit stumped by your usual penchant for thinking of reading books like to-do lists. I am still chuckling over the idea that your brain might atrophy if you removed reading from your goal list. Last week you shared an update on your commitment to seeing reading more as an experience than as a goal. It’s possible I could use a bit more of reading-as-goal in my life, as there are many foundational-seeming texts I would actually like to read in my lifetime, but that I sense may slip away from me as I peruse the other books of stories and essays and poems circulating on my shelves. The pandemic has reminded me — as somehow the visual presence of my books didn’t always remind me — that I’ve got a real library of my own at my fingertips, one that it would appear I’ve built for just this purpose, full of long reads and short reads and poetry and even a book of poems I could have finished in one sitting earlier this week but made myself split into two, like a pint of ice cream — no real need to consume it all at once, and why not enjoy it over (at least!) two sittings? I think that, in a way that is somewhat similar to how you like to finish a project knowing what your next project will be, I sometimes like to stretch out the last little bit of a book (or even the whole of a book!). I don’t think I’ve actually finished Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, even though I was enjoying reading it. Leaving a little bit means there is always something good waiting on the horizon. (Of course, it occasionally means that I lost interest!) Ten pages daily, you say. I try to make sure I am reading every day, and I sometimes slip a book into my hands to insert reading time into what I would previously have thought of as my “filler minutes,” minutes when I might have been standing in lines, waiting for water to boil, sitting with a smidge of time between meetings. But there are no such things as filler minutes, particularly not these days. There is little betweenness, much continuousness. All the minutes are filler minutes, and then I must remind myself that how I spend my filler minutes is how I spend my days. Treat your filler minutes like you want all your minutes to be treated!
Happy Friday as we wind down this month of June! Thursday marked Minnesota’s latest sunset of the year. Tonight I shall enjoy one of our second-latest sunsets, savoring it particularly, even though we’re yet a while away from winter.
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva