I know you’ve been wondering when I would hurry up and write to you! though you probably didn’t think it would take this long…?!?
It’s been a strange time actually, these years, since leaving there and returning here, mostly good, but even that which wasn’t, was essential.
I think about you all the time. Although I rarely read the BCH, I stumble across it now and then and that’s how I found out that Lily got married! Oh my god. I would love to hear all about it. And Raven, too, of course. Hopefully you can fill me in on all your news before too long.
So, yes, I think about you, your girls, your wolves, that boyfriend you had for awhile, just all the stuff, and it makes me miss you. I wish we could have been closer.
I don’t think, though, that those mountains over there are conducive to fostering much love and intimacy between people at all, and women, I believe, seem to suffer more that way. Loneliness. And such awful isolation.
Do you remember the first time we ran into each other again, after I’d come back to Baker from Camp Pendleton? Well, it was at that gas station at the south end of town, a Chevron, I think, and I was working there, pumping gas, it was the job I got to get the water turned back on at my house though I ended up keeping it until February. You pulled in in your old Blazer with Bubba in the back and that other dog, a tall, lanky one, and maybe a third, I don’t remember. (I think the tall and lanky one was the same breed Pam Houston wrote about in “Sighthound.” I hope you’ve read it. If not, I will send it along).
You’d intended, some time before I left, to go visit the wolves in Idaho or Montana. Did you ever get to go? How are your wolves? I wonder how many you have still. There’d been a new one, I think, a few years ago not long after I left, and if I recall right, you’d brought him into town to live instead of up in the kennels.
I caught some news about Bella since Bill Clinton stopped by her place for coffee. Whatever news it was it was something about her getting fined by the city for drawing with chalk on the sidewalk in front of her store to advertise for Miners’ Jubilee. Lord. They pulled that crap on me all the time. They are such crazy fuckers.
Who do you know around town? I saw that the woman who taught pottery at the art center died. She was young! I taught her daughters piano for awhile. Nice girls. Lacy, I think one was named. Who was that other woman who taught there, she hung out at Goose Creek (a little too often) and she was talented and smart, had children, and had a husband who got arrested for videotaping their daughter unknowingly while she was doing all the things girls do in their bedrooms. I remember the day it happened – she came by and told me – and the way she found out was she stuck the tape in the player for the kids when they came home from school, not knowing what was on it until it started to play.
Do you know the Herizas? Well, you do because one of them (Claire?) was Raven’s doctor I think, but what about Kelly and Mae? They aren’t real Herizas actually, just married to them. I’d started making friends with Kelly before I left – and she left too, for Montana I think – and Mae had just bought a building downtown to start a bakery. Kelly’s amazing. She doesn’t even possess a weak spot. She couldn’t pass the Oregon bar so she shrugged it off and went elsewhere. I was teaching her guitar which is how we became friends. She was all hip to the Hobson family from being in the Heriza clan and it was always nice to be around people who didn’t need the whole story explained to understand. She brought me the Lucinda Williams cd one afternoon, the car wheels on a gravel road one, and I think the buena vista social club too.
It was you, though, who turned me onto to emmylou’s newest one, at least back then, with red dirt girl on it. I remember the day Raven asked you if that was a true story or not.
I saw also, that Mrs. Levinger died. I took care of her flower gardens for several years. She was really, really nice.
This will crack you up: I’m in a Neil Young Cover Band. NYCB for short. Right now it’s just three of us. We do all Neil Young songs. Sometimes it makes me think of you when I’m playing them because you and Tim (that boyfriend you had) went over to Boise to see him, and I remember you telling me how cool it was when he played Rockin’ in the Free World. I saw his Greendale tour a few years back which was one of the top five shows I’ve ever seen out of probably three hundred. I saw Lucinda too which didn’t impress me much but I also saw the Pretenders which impressed me a very great deal. Chrissy Hynde. She’s the best.
I don’t go out to see music much actually. Busy, broke. I just work, mainly. But I did see Steve Earle two of the three times he’s been here; the last one I didn’t go to because I was feeling sorry for myself. I’m thinking I’ll be up for the next one though.
Speaking of cowboys, you see Joe around? I used to call every few months and check in on his dad. Considering he was one of the most racist, misogynistic old men I’ve ever met I still sort of liked him. He lives up Auburn. I used to go up and visit him and sit with him in his basement den and watch the weather channel or the hunting channel or the rodeos. I kid you not. He’d cook me “brizgit” and canned corn and white bread with gravy on top. Real gravy he made himself in a cast iron skillet. It was so good. He bought a lot of flowers from me. He brought his geraniums inside, like I did, each fall, and some of them were like small trees. The last time I called over there, probably a year ago, he was laid up with the flu and the woman who answered said she was his wife, that they’d gotten married some months before. I was surprised because his girlfriend died not too long before that – she’d gotten sick with cancer right before I left. So he didn’t pussy-foot around being single very long. And his wife had died just a few months before he took up with the girlfriend so apparently Mr. Bullard does not like to be a man alone.
All of them, the Bullards, are from west Texas. One of the older boys got a job over in Haines or Union somewhere, working on a ranch, and moved his family up and the whole rest of the Bullards followed, Mr. and Mrs. before she died, and their four sons and families and daughter and her son. That’s a lot of people! I have to admit it was a rather perverse fascination I had with them; for the most part they freaked me out with their talk of niggers and beating their kids and drop kicking their dogs and back handing their wives. Maybe I thought it would be good material someday but I doubt now that that’s ever going to happen. All those Bastard Out of Carolina type stories have lost their appeal to me. Pretty much just makes me sick now.
I could tell you a story about a murder down there in west Texas that happened when they all still lived there. It involved a mixed up kid who snuck into someone’s trailer one night while she was at work, dressed up in her undies and then fell asleep on her bed. I think he was retarded, actually, and not just mixed up. But like I said, that sort of stuff makes me sick now so I won’t tell it except just this: nobody went to jail because, as the storytellers assured me: nobody deserved to. She shot him in self defense.
Anyway, that’s how I know Joe’s still alive which amazes me actually. Well, at least he was the last time I called Mr. Bullard. Cowboy Joe possessed a certain wily charm but man oh man is he nothing but trouble.
You always managed living over there much better than I and I was always awed by that. Such strength and self-sufficiency and grace. Well, you are a ballerina! I hope it’s still a good place for you. What are your plans? Will you stay over there even after Raven leaves? I can picture it, in a way, in your pretty little house; the town absorbed you easier than me, more sympathetic. Maybe that’s because you were more sympathetic to them, I don’t know. I tried! They’re all just such a handful. Did you ever know Louis? the guy who had the tomato farm down a few blocks from me? He’s the one who got me started in the nursery business. I worked for him one summer, mixing soil and transplanting. He showed me the holes in his gut where his first wife had shot him or stabbed him, I don’t know. Said he deserved it thoroughly. I mean, good lord! His present wife was Doris and she worked in his greenhouses too. He was mean to her, always spoke sharply, rough. She kept her head down, you know what I mean. They were both in their 70s then. One day he sent me into his house for something. Doris didn’t see me coming, and that’s how I accidentally caught her sitting on the couch crying. Just way too much sorrow over there for me. I guess that’s what it was.
I met Louis through Jamie, his granddaughter, who was my guitar student. She left Baker after high school, got married and moved to Portland and had a baby. She kept in touch for quite awhile. She was playing over here in some garage bands; I lost track of her when her phone number changed.
And I still keep up with Cassie Morrissey – she was the daughter of the Morrisseys out the Richland highway; her mom taught the Head Start program I think…? Her dad didn’t do a damn thing other than smoke pot every day for 40+ years. She had a twin brother – Collin. Were they in Lily’s class? Anyway, Cass took off to K. Falls after high school but was back in Baker all the time and stayed with me sometimes. So she married a guy and became a stepmom – he’s quite a bit older than her I think – and now she has a two year old and a baby as well. She was always good pals with Chris, two, three years older than him. I got an SOS email from her just awhile ago, she was having a meltdown over their finances, their mortgage, they run a small ISP business and I think it wasn’t doing very well, and she was telling me they just wanted to sell their house and move into their RV and pay off all their bills and start over again except her parents were freaking out telling her she was a loser and such. Bah. Crazy fuckers. I saw on her MySpace page a bit ago that she was rushing around packing so I guess they got it sold. Cassie was such a cool kid. I only taught her piano for a year before she was past anything I had any inkling about. But she still came by each week anyway, and later, more like every day. Her twin didn’t share much of her DNA though; in all those years of living there, without ever locking my doors (there never even was a key for the front one) leaving my nursery open all night, nothing was ever stolen except for ONE TIME when Collin Morrissey stole my Nirvana cd. Ticked me off.
I don’t tell many of these stories over here. First of all, Portlanders think Bend is eastern Oregon and if they’ve actually been, it’s generally passing through on the 84 or maybe a trip up to the Wallowas. Usually someone’s had a bad experience with some ignorant SOB at a gas station or restaurant along the way, or they know someone who has (which isn’t hard to believe at all) and that’s the extent of it. But it’s something more than that too; nobody really gets why somebody would leave here for there, and then stay. In your case it’d come across as even stranger, this tall gorgeous immensely gifted Jewish woman from Long Island throwing it all away by living there. It’s weird but it almost feels like it taints me, saying I lived there; it’s like people shake their heads and think I must be a little off.
Nobody would ever believe your stories, either, like when you drove Raven to California for her liver transplant and waited alone at the hospital until a donor was found while she kept getting sicker. I don’t remember the exact details, only the gist of it; like how you knew something was wrong with her even though your doctor husband said no, and how finally, when you couldn’t deny her skin was turning yellow, how you took her to another doctor anyway. Something like that. Something crazy.
I remember when you told me the story later, after I’d moved back from Eugene. And there was some part about how Lily lived while you were away, wasn’t she basically staying home alone, with people checking in now and then? Something along those lines. I remember stifling my impulse to say jesus Debbie wasn’t there anybody who could step in and help out? because that isn’t how things work there, and it’s not out of cruelty or neglect, it’s just because it takes all day to merely survive and people can only share a sliver of time and resources.
That incident, and others like it, marked me. I thought of it recently. I had to leave a place I’d been living, and I should have left earlier because it had gotten funky but I didn’t, I stayed, and when I finally couldn’t deal with it anymore I had to ask some friends for help and it was upsetting to them that I hadn’t said anything earlier. And on one level I see their point: it does get ridiculous to always take so much crap. But I was realizing the past few days while thinking about you and working on this letter, that that’s the kind of women we are, you and me, and all the rest. You just get up in the morning and do what you have to do. It’s always the kids. We’d be different without our children. And it made me realize also, that I have this very stubborn loyalty to the way I was, to the ways we had to live over there. We had to be rather fierce to make it, and don’t you think it’s almost a code of honor of sorts? I don’t know. No one ever really talked about things on that level. It’s as if we admitted to the depth of it, the enormous amount of energy and focus it took to live, we’d fall apart completely. I remember sensing it and feeling it when we’d meet each others’ eyes, as if the truth was just there below the surface. But nobody ever put it on the table. At least not that I ever heard.
But everybody has it, everybody who’s not truly crazy, or dead. Babette does. Even she’s got it. I got to know her because she shopped at Goose Creek, bought lots of flowers from me, and paintings, later, too. In fact she and Diana Brown were the first people to buy my paintings – I had them stacked in a corner in the greenhouse, trying to ignore what seemed at the time a nutty impulse to paint on old glass windows. It is true that the initial thing Babette will tell you is that she was the first Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. She is definitely a diva. Later she might tell you about dating Mick Jaggar, about her career as a model, about being discovered on a beach in Florida when she was a teenager, a recent immigrant from Germany. And then she has some other stories, pretty nasty dark ones, involving escapes and hiding and running and being followed and being scared that she may or may not tell, I don’t know. I’m thinking she doesn’t very often so I won’t repeat them here.
And then she’ll tell you how she owns Pine Valley Lodge and the rest of those buildings up in Halfway and if you go up and visit it’s fucking amazing what she’s done up there. It’s an incredible feat, all that renovation and decorating, the restaurant and the rooms to rent. And even though she finally married Dale and it’s true he’s a fine artist and hard worker himself, she’s the one whose vision got it done.
I went to her wedding, actually. It was up on a hill she owns outside of town where Dale was going to build her house. Then, though, she had teepees set up. There were maybe twenty of us there, all of whom had traipsed up the hill on foot in the near-dark to get to the top. She and Dale said their vows just as the full moon rose.
But after you’ve known Babette for awhile you start noticing things. Like the varicose veins on her legs that bulge out and cause her a lot of pain. But she’s still up each day before dawn and in her bakery working. And even though nowadays she has her cool, rich friends flying in from Florida (that’s where she met Dale – she was living in the swamp in a travel trailer after her escape and he lived on a houseboat and sold his cool art. Is that just so romantic or what?) to stay at her B&Bs, that first winter she and Dale were there they lived in the Love Shack, pre-renovation, on a dirt floor with only a woodstove to cook on. She had the same experience the rest of us do, falling in love with the country in summer and fall, only to realize the severity of our miscalculation after we’re already snowed in for the winter. So, Babette’s got it too, I think anyway, that fierceness that comes from living through a certain amount of danger and then, never really shaking it entirely, and, thereby, never being able to quite accurately calculate when you’re drifted too far from shore. (Dylan).
I loved those mountains though, and the desert, and the big fat bolts of lightning striking right in the middle of town. I loved the way the temperature could drop fifty degrees during one summer night so you’d need a blanket by morning and I loved even more when a Chinook blew in late winter in the middle of the night. Do you ever think, on nights like that, that absolutely everybody must be awake, stepping outside for a minute to feel how 32 degrees feels like t-shirt weather after eighteen below? I used to rouse my boys when the Chinook blew in. I’ll have to ask them one of these days if they remember that.
I had visions over there, and saw ghosts, and heard singing in languages unfamiliar. One night while sleeping I was visited by a buffalo woman. Another night I awoke and my room was packed with spirits of people who had died. Packed! with no elbow room left over! The city prompts other sorts of awakenings and now I’ll probably always stay, but I really did love that land. I’ll forever carry it around.
Presently, I’m living alone in a big old house, for the time being, and doing some painting, walls and trim, to earn my keep. It’s up for sale so I won’t be here long. After this, after Christmas, I’m moving into the upstairs of a house owned by a hip, sweet woman so I’ll probably stay there awhile. Before this I lived on a refuge for macaws (I thought of you often, on one of your trips up to Alaska with those damn birds of yours. Did you take both of your daughters that time or was Raven not even born yet? And how many dogs? Had you already brought your first wolf back? And didn’t you like meet some women along the way, at some roadside attraction, who offered to take care of the birds until you passed back through since they’d proven not the types to travel well? God Debbie. I hope you’re working on your book) where I was a caretaker. There’s something like eighty macaws living there in an outdoor flight. There were goats and chickens and a donkey and a horse, and dogs and cats and lizards. I was there for two years.
My days here aren’t much different than they were over there; I get up at six, work until eight or so at night and lately I’ve started watching Charlie Rose until nine, read for awhile, crash, get up and do it again. I still teach, guitar and piano, I house sit, dog sit and occasionally keep an eye on kids; I have one gig where I walk a dog each day, her name’s Lulu and she’s some sort of Aussie/Black Lab mix for which I get paid $13. Can you believe it? When I keep a dog overnight at my place it’s $20 and when I stay at theirs it’s $25. Hard to believe a person would get paid for that hunh?
But always, I write. I need to be finding myself a career, and I’m making a stab at one producing digital stories, but every minute of every day is about writing. I won’t even date, haven’t in over three years, because it’s pointless; I won’t get married again or ever settle down with someone and since dating really isn’t much fun, why bother. The only time I’m not working or writing is when I’m hanging with my family or playing music with the NYCB. It’s true, I worry about money and I worry that I’m a flake and I worry that I’ll look back someday and say good god why didn’t you have more fun but I think it’s such an integral part of my identity now, being a mother and a writer, that I wouldn’t want to live without those things, wouldn’t know how.
On the home front, my boys are so incredibly good. Both are married, and Chris and Amy have Jefry (no, I didn’t misspell it ;) age 3, and are living in Boise but moving to Portland when their house sells. Josh and Melissa moved last year from Los Angeles to Tacoma and are expecting their first baby on April 18th. We’re still thick as thieves and I see them a lot and talk to them several times a week. They’re all very hard workers and are loyal and kind. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have them; we all weathered the storms and came through better people.
I wasn’t sure until recently that I’d really stay here in Portland. When Chris and Amy told me a few weeks ago that they intend to move here once their house sells, that was the end of the limbo. It made me realize how tentatively I’d been living, kind of one foot in and one out, not able to fully commit to making a home here until I knew where the boys would finally settle. I’ll always live close by them.
I’m sending along a copy of one of my latest projects, a cd of some stories I wrote which I narrated over some songs that I also wrote. I’m sure you’ll recognize your influence on me, your spirit and heart, as much as you’ll recognize the women, the babies and the children, the crow and the cougar, the rocks and sage, the streets and bars and houses, but, most of all, the land.
Hope all is well. Here’s how to find me:
Love,
PS: K.D., the mother of all cow dogs, died a couple of weeks ago. Chris went along on the trip to take her up in the mountains. He said the coyotes were watching when they were leaving.
obsidian letters
letters that accompany the story
Dear Erin,
Dang girl I miss you so much. I think about you all the time.
I probably don’t have to tell you how fast time goes by, how six years can seemingly just disappear – I know you have little ones (3?) so you know how that goes well enough – but I really don’t know how it’s been this long since I last talked to you.
Crazy.
I left those mountains and have lived here in Portland since ’02. It’s where I grew up and it’s very nice to be home. Gradually I’ve started carving out a niche for myself, though that’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would. I think it would have gone differently and more quickly in a place not so familiar; I spent too much time trying to reconnect with old friends instead of making new ones. But a lot of that was about me trying to reconnect with my old self too, needing to remember who that twenty four year old was who left here for the mountains in the first place.
Then, one day, a few months back, I finally saw her. I was driving down 47th Street past Providence hospital, and she was pushing an empty stroller towards the Montessori school, to pick up her little boy and take him home. Car must have been broken down again, or maybe she doesn’t have one presently. And even though I knew she paid more in tuition for her child’s care than she did her rent, and even though I knew she was a finger-snap away from falling apart any minute, I sure couldn’t tell by watching her walking down the street. It was one of those spring afternoons when people who survive long rainy winters are foolishly friendly and cheerful, and there was that in her stride, but something more too. I could tell she sure does love that little boy, and even though the future’s as clear as that day’s sky, and she can plainly see the years of pain ahead of her, she’s trucking along anyway.
I was surprised by her grit. How had I forgotten that? Is it because my story gets real convoluted when I have to explain how that spirit got destroyed that fast and hard? It is, actually. That’s still the hardest part there is.
But it was a kick to see her. Nice kid.
A couple of years ago when my niece and nephew were nine, I nannied for them one summer while my sister-in-law finished school. One week I gave them a tour of their daddy’s hood. First we went to the Ramona Beezley park, then to visit a childhood friend, an older woman who had a swimming pool so we loved her dearly and it delighted her to see the children, then to my brother’s high school and finally past the house where we grew up. Ironically, that very day, the wrecking ball was demolishing our grade school. At the time I thought that’s what made the whole neighborhood seem strangely surreal, the houses shabby and small, no sidewalks, unimproved side streets, a weird dull pallor I contributed to the dust from the demolition.
When my brother came to get his kids the first thing Sara said to him was, “Daddy! You never told us you grew up so poor!” Marty said well we didn’t have much that’s for sure and it blew my mind. Poor? Hunh? It was the first time I’d seen my world that way at all. (Not that I necessarily agree; we were just a regular working family like anybody else).
I’ve been doing a lot of that these years, seeing my world through different eyes. In doing so, sometimes it’s so unbelievably distorted I don’t know how to absorb the shock and I have to look away. I have though, at least, arrived at the place where I can admit to the distortion without a truck load of shame attached. That makes it easier to go about the task of making myself whole again. It’s quite the journey.
I sure did get lucky with my boys though. It’s funny, while they were growing up, and you probably know this from your own mothering, you work so dang hard to give them as many good things as you can, all the while perched on this tiny slab of thin ice that you’re sure could break at any moment, and drown you most certainly would because it seems as equally likely that some ulterior incident will completely ruin them for good, and there’s not a single moment when you consider it to be luck. It’s all your constant and obsessive attention to them, all the bargaining you do that keeps it all in balance.
If it was luck, hell. How fair would that be?
Now, however, I think it was mostly a whole lot of luck. Not to say I don’t honor the contribution I did make as a good mom, but from this distance I see it’s much more precarious than I could accept at the time.
They’re the nicest guys all grown up. Josh and Melissa moved from Los Angeles to Tacoma a few months ago, bought a house and their first baby is due April 18th. They met while working at Symantec, geeks both. Josh landed in Los Angeles after returning to Portland from Okinawa a couple of weeks after I got here, winter ’02, with a Marine Corps regulation ruined knee and the sweetest lab-type dog named Dixie. I like to joke that I got my money’s worth, hiring that guy to take out his knee, but what really happened was he smashed into the side of the mountain climbing some part of Fuji. During the first couple of weeks alone, that the Marines were in Baghdad, Josh lost several comrades. His unit was the first to go in.
Chris and Amy have Baby J who is, currently, insisting that he just be called “J” considering he is now three years old. My god Erin talk about roosting chickens. Jefry (not my misspelling) is carrying so much potent DNA I don’t see how he can walk. Actually he never does. He runs. And talks. And talks. I was always expecting that from spawn of Josh but Chris’ kid got it too. Hmm. Makes you wonder doesn’t it.
These two met at a rave Chris was throwing in Boise eight years ago. They’ve never spent a day apart since. Poor Amy – she didn’t know wtf to do at first. I’m sure she fantasized about Josh and me disappearing from the face of the earth but knew she didn’t want that really, us being Chris’ favorite kin and all. And Chris had such a hard struggle for a few years there, it busted my heart so bad, but man did he pull through. He is so fucking amazing. His integrity is astounding. He, too, like Josh, can’t really walk straight – Chris fell twenty feet off a ladder a couple of years ago trashing his ankle completely for good. Neither of my boys will ever ski, climb tall mountains or jump from airplanes and that’s all a-okay with me. Amy, though, can and does. Parachuted just a few months ago and crashed hard off her horse a few weeks ago, blacked out, then cussed Chris out later for calling the ambulance.
But they’ve all got such big love, compassion, loyalty. And my boys are so good to their wives; you can’t imagine my relief at that.
I spend all my free time with them, every long weekend, holiday. We talk on the phone every few days. We were all together in Tacoma a few weeks ago and C&A told me they’re moving to Portland as soon as their house sells! My mom believes Josh will follow suit one day but I’m not so sure about that though once his baby’s here who knows what new paths he’ll consider. He’s incredibly paternal – he’s been wanting to be a daddy since he was about ten.
Getting on top of my game, though, gets easier each day. Last September, a year ago, I started writing Obsidian and immediately the distortion started to disperse. I slept through the night for the first time in seven or eight years. The nightmares subsided a little also. And I haven’t sat in my car in the parking lot at a grocery store or at the bank or wherever, either, since then, too immobilized by anxiety to get out and go in. I don’t know how many flipping times shit like that happened, and it’s so horrible, scary, and embarrassing, and it hurts really deep to be that afraid. And to be that looney and locked into some weird immobilization that honestly, nobody can understand, except for a shrink on the rare occasion I have the $ to pay for an appointment. I did have an all-out attack last spring but I live in hope; maybe that was the last one.
I’m still pretty nervous about people liking me, making friends with me, but I’ve taken a couple giant steps with that lately. I doubt I’ll ever even date again and I’ll never get married (are you kidding? I’ll get Curtis’ social security if I don’t and don’t you think that’s sooo appropriate?) and I suppose that would be considered a lingering “fear of intimacy” by the pros but, in fact, it may just be my preference.
God, Erin, I think of so many things. Like, “I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky.” I think I sent you the drawings I did of that whole theme. But Jesus man. Us sitting on my back porch at the picnic table reading your novel and the wind caught some of the pages and we scrambled to pick them up. And then climbing over my back fence CLIMBING OVER MY BACK FENCE to avoid having to pass by the front porch to get to the sidewalk. What the holy fuck was that? WTF was it?
Crazy. Just nuts.
And hanging at EMU with Rebecca and Nancy and wasn’t there somebody else? And every single damn morning you would saunter through the door to that 50 minute Lit class, ten minutes late, with your hair wet and your jacket unzipped and your cup of coffee and you never once were a bit embarrassed. And every week of that same Lit class a response paper of mine was read as a “good example” and I swear I was more impressed with your nonchalance than my achievement!
Remember those dreadlocks you found in that loft where you lived?
I might have told you this, I don’t know, but after I returned from Camp Pendleton, after the siege, back to the Baker house, the was a pile of papers in the baby nursery that filled the floor about a foot or so deep. He’d taken everything else from the house, stripped it except for every single piece of paper out of every box our family had collected, report cards, photographs, bills, handmade Christmas ornaments, bank statements, tax returns, letters, LETTERS! all scrambled together in a big jumbled pile. It took me weeks to sort through it. And I’ll never forget how many minutes it took my mind to wrap around one particular letter because it was one I’d written to you, put in an envelope, addressed, stamped and set out for the postman. Except it never did get mailed. But it had been opened. There wasn’t just one letter like that, there was a dozen or so and after I started reading one of them I stopped and put it down. Because things became real clear real fast.
I got so scared that day when I realized that he’d snagged all those letters I’d written to you before the mail got picked up. And it wasn’t like I’d been living without fear before that. But hell, you know what was in those letters? Do you remember that time, what was it, 97, 98? Somewhere in there. You were back in New Paltz for good and subbing I think. I don’t know – you’ll know. But I was planning my whole fucking way out of there. I wrote to you how I had money stashed away, a couple of pre-approved credit cards, Chris’ I.D. and mine in some safe place, wrote you the details of his violence, how it had accelerated even more. I told you how I was getting more scared than I’d ever been, worried that he would figure out my plans to leave and that if he did I would probably pay for it so bad. I wrote down the details, how if we left without a car where we’d go which was different than if we left with a car. And which car. I told you how I had my journals already in a backpack, our clothes and other stuff in another. I wrote to you because I needed to have the plan on paper and because I needed to write because it made me feel better, more proactive, and I wrote to you because I needed somebody else to know.
I remember, a couple of times, wondering why you hadn’t written back or, if you had, why you didn’t say anything about what I’d written to you. I also remember, really clearly, how I would think about those letters and say to myself god he’d kill me if he ever got a hold of one of these.
So there were all those letters – not every single one I’d written to you, some he hadn’t intercepted. I know you got some of them because I had the ones you’d written me back. But I was sitting there in the nursery, it was August and hot up in that room, but all of a sudden I got so cold knowing that he’d known all along what I was trying to do, how I was planning to leave him one last time, and it was creepy and alarming and I see now how I started down a whole other road that day, where I began to live as though I would never really get away from him, never. That he’d gone to that extent to return home after I’d left to see if I’d set mail out meant to me that he had it in him to keep me in his sights forever. When he got married last summer, that finally started to go away, a little anyway. Maybe it never will completely. I don’t know.
Other stuff, too, that he’d taken without me knowing. Birthday cards from my parents. So they hadn’t forgotten my birthday for ten years after all. So much of this was easy for him, I understand now, because after those dozen or so years of living far away from my city, first to the one mountains and then further still, to the others, nobody knew what I was up to anymore, didn’t really even know where I was. I tried keeping up at first, I’d drive with my boys back to Portland, visit my parents, see my friends, but life got harder every year. Then I stopped trying.
I met you in Paul Dresman’s survey class you know. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten about him. And Bob was in that class. Remember Bob? Dark haired, older, he sucked up to Dresman so bad. Neither of them had ever had an original thought in their lives. Dresman was such a dog. What a goof. Jesus he trudged through that early American Lit as stiffly as those preachers whose sermons we were studying.
Everything about the university was gold to me. Ralph Salisbury took me in, I worked my butt off for him, trying to find a way to write. He hooked me up with Kittredge up in Missoula, the plan was I’d go study up there, write and workshop, get my MFA, get a job, get a life. They compared me to fucking Carver for godssakes. I wanted it so badly. I wanted it so much. I kept thinking fuck man this is so fucking righteous I can’t believe this is happening I can’t believe this is true. One afternoon I gave Ralph’s wife, the poet Ingrid Wendt, a ride from the U to her house up the hill. “So Ralph tells me,” she said, “that you are quite possibly the best writer he’s ever taught.”
No joke. Me.
But I was right. It wasn’t really true. It wasn’t really going to happen.
1993. Early ’94? You graduated. So did Darryl Brown. Did I tell you about him? Probably not. If I did, though, you’re the only one I ever told about him. Either way, I’ll tell it now.
So I got into Ralph’s advanced fiction writing class. He chose around fifteen of us based on our submissions. I’d slipped mine under his door the last night before winter break. It took me about an hour of working up my nerve, sitting on the stairs of PLC, but finally I had to just do it because I was going to be late getting home.
We went back to Baker for Christmas, that long drive over mountain passes, the Cascades, Ochocos, Strawberries, then the Blues, on the two lane highway slick with snow. My first night back there was the one where I had the dream about Shannon, where she told me I had to write something called Obsidian, and that she hadn’t committed suicide that she’d been killed by her boyfriend when they were both really high.
Back at school, a note was left on the door to my house, and it was from Ralph saying I’d been accepted into his class. We didn’t have a phone then. The first night of class he told me that I’d be workshopping my story first and in fact, he’d already run off copies for everyone. Oh my god. I was so nervous.
So then, as you know, everyone takes turns commenting on “the work” and that’s when I met Darryl Brown for the first time. He was like, whoa this story is so fine and crap like that.
But it was mostly all a blur. I’m shy anyway, but I was so completely shut down during that time, always anxious, always scared, that I had a hard time remembering reading the story out loud at all. Then, a couple of weeks later after class, I heard somebody following me down that long, dark hallway in PLC that goes towards the bus stop where I was headed. Naturally I was sorta freaked out but not that much so I stopped and turned around and it was Darryl Brown. He says, hey, wait, I’ll walk with you.
And so it went. Darryl Brown started showing up to PLC an hour early like I did to read over the stories and Darryl Brown always walked me to the bus stop and if I was on my bicycle that night, Darryl Brown started walking me home.
Now you would say, as anyone would, that it’s pretty obvious Darryl Brown was interested in me. No rocket science there. Except it never once crossed my mind until several years later. Darryl Brown was this so cute guy. He was probably eight or ten years younger than me, finishing up his MBA in computer stuff, he was so smart and young and very cute like I said, so I never even considered he had a crush on me. He kept saying how much he dug my writing and so I figured that’s what it was about.
Then one night Darryl Brown invites me to go hear some music after class. I tell him I can’t. I don’t remind him I’m married because in my mind at least, it’s not that sort of an invitation. Then one night at class he announces that he’s inviting us all over to his house, that he’s making up some food and we’re going to hang out and tell stories and be hip and act like writers. Later, I tell him thanks but I can’t make it and he asks why and I say it’s too far away and I don’t have a car (though I do) and he says well, I’ll pick you up and I think dang, I really should go to this even if I don’t want to because that’s part of the gig, got to make friends and try and least pretend to have some social skills so eventually I agree.
Meeting him on the corner in front of the bookstore wasn’t any more covert behavior than I employed when doing anything outside of my domestic life, but as much as I despised myself for acting that way, it was less traumatic than coming out and telling Curtis where I was going. That just flat out didn’t fly. I probably met up with you in some similar situations (though you did actually venture into my homes, there weren’t many like you). When he showed up I was kind of surprised but never thought, even then, that I was in any territory other than hanging out with friends. Stuff for school. And when we got to his house and it was still early for people to be showing up, he asked me to help him cook and I did and he put music on and poured wine and he was lively and funny and I do remember thinking jeez this guy is really friendly, really nice, but I didn’t take it personally at all.
And so then there was the party and afterwards he took me back to the corner by the bookstore. And then we had another term of creative writing together, and he kept hanging out with me and we really did become good friends. And then he graduated and I didn’t talk to him again for a few years.
Darryl Brown went up to Missoula that next year and started school fall of ’95. I was supposed to be there by then. I never showed. I had no idea he was planning on Missoula, he’d never said so when I talked about wanting to go there myself. I don’t know how long he stayed in school though a few years later I found out from a mutual friend (who gave me his contact info and said, Look him up. He’ll want to hear from you!) that he spent some of his time there house sitting for Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. Trippy. But I could see it, could see him fitting in with them. He really was exceptionally likeable.
I email him from time to time. Once he sent me a compilation cd he’d made, this must have been like late ’99. So I wasn’t yet totally hip to the compilation cd art form and his blew my mind. Even now, all these years later, his still rates in my top 5 of extraordinary comp cds.
Once I got brave and emailed him saying thanks for being a good friend to me. Brought it up even though I still felt like there had been something I should be ashamed about, being friends with him, brought it up even though I was hesitant to open my heart up that much. I wanted to ask him if it was true, if he’d really had a crush on me, but I’m sure I lost my nerve and didn’t do it. It was probably one of those emails that went on too long and got mushy but he wrote back and said that reading it made his day. He’s still a computer guy, and a potter too, living now in Arizona. He still makes comp cds and will send me one as soon as I send him one of mine. I’ve been meaning to but I’ve been busy! Hell, that was three years ago. He likes my paintings a lot and had plans to be in Portland awhile ago to see them in person and to bring along his very lovely wife and two young sons but they didn’t make it up that year. Someday, though, I’ll bet.
So I lost both of you at the same time. You and Darryl Brown. That day you and I met at Guido’s, when we met there so we could say goodbye because you had graduated and were going back to New Paltz, I remember walking home afterwards and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. There’s only been a few other times when I’ve felt loneliness that profoundly, grief that deep. I didn’t really think I’d ever see you again. That you were able to show up at my house in Baker that next summer after listening to Mr. Jones and Me for nearly four hundred miles (and actually getting the Counting Crows finally) was unreal. Such a good time in spite of the crazy, dark-souled men. Those were the best days I ever had living over there.
Well, Erin, how is that French/Polish boy of yours? Man, did you fall hard for him or what? What a love story you’ve got going on. And your children!
I’ve read your work from time to time and it’s really wonderful, really good. I remember when you first started writing for the newspaper. I have not, however, read your book and have no excuse except I keep meaning to put it on hold at my library and haven’t yet done so, obviously, but I will. I did read an article in the NYT when you were covering your mayor up there, and it seems I read a great review of your book too, or maybe it was an interview. Atta girl. You were always so cheeky, so smart. I miss you very much.
Somehow I doubt you’ve yet to make a real conversion to communicating via email though I’ll bet you’re better at it now than a few years ago. Sitting down to this letter here, and the handful of others I’m working on also, is the first letter writing I’ve done in years and years. Well, since I used to write to you, actually. Everything’s email for me. But my contact info’s below so I hope one of the ways works for you. My commitment to this form is because I’m sending Obsidian out by snail-mail and letters seemed appropriate.
All right kiddo, thanks for indulging me by reading through this. Christopher is planning a road trip for us next fall; he has (or is going to get? I can’t keep up with him…) a RV and our destination is NYC. All I know is we’re hitting New Orleans on the way there and Minnesota on the way back. He has very definite ideas so I’m leaving it all up to him. My brother and family is living on a sailboat in Virginia so there’s that stop, and a favorite friend moved to NY from Portland a few weeks ago so I’m hoping to see all of you then.
Hope to hear your news soon,
L.
I remember you liked the socks. I remember you said you wore them the whole time you were pregnant until they had holes. I still knit socks. I’ll send some along next time.
PS: Chris says to say hi. He says to remind you how you went to Boys Jungle with him one afternoon while I was giving some lessons.
I probably don’t have to tell you how fast time goes by, how six years can seemingly just disappear – I know you have little ones (3?) so you know how that goes well enough – but I really don’t know how it’s been this long since I last talked to you.
Crazy.
I left those mountains and have lived here in Portland since ’02. It’s where I grew up and it’s very nice to be home. Gradually I’ve started carving out a niche for myself, though that’s taken a lot longer than I thought it would. I think it would have gone differently and more quickly in a place not so familiar; I spent too much time trying to reconnect with old friends instead of making new ones. But a lot of that was about me trying to reconnect with my old self too, needing to remember who that twenty four year old was who left here for the mountains in the first place.
Then, one day, a few months back, I finally saw her. I was driving down 47th Street past Providence hospital, and she was pushing an empty stroller towards the Montessori school, to pick up her little boy and take him home. Car must have been broken down again, or maybe she doesn’t have one presently. And even though I knew she paid more in tuition for her child’s care than she did her rent, and even though I knew she was a finger-snap away from falling apart any minute, I sure couldn’t tell by watching her walking down the street. It was one of those spring afternoons when people who survive long rainy winters are foolishly friendly and cheerful, and there was that in her stride, but something more too. I could tell she sure does love that little boy, and even though the future’s as clear as that day’s sky, and she can plainly see the years of pain ahead of her, she’s trucking along anyway.
I was surprised by her grit. How had I forgotten that? Is it because my story gets real convoluted when I have to explain how that spirit got destroyed that fast and hard? It is, actually. That’s still the hardest part there is.
But it was a kick to see her. Nice kid.
A couple of years ago when my niece and nephew were nine, I nannied for them one summer while my sister-in-law finished school. One week I gave them a tour of their daddy’s hood. First we went to the Ramona Beezley park, then to visit a childhood friend, an older woman who had a swimming pool so we loved her dearly and it delighted her to see the children, then to my brother’s high school and finally past the house where we grew up. Ironically, that very day, the wrecking ball was demolishing our grade school. At the time I thought that’s what made the whole neighborhood seem strangely surreal, the houses shabby and small, no sidewalks, unimproved side streets, a weird dull pallor I contributed to the dust from the demolition.
When my brother came to get his kids the first thing Sara said to him was, “Daddy! You never told us you grew up so poor!” Marty said well we didn’t have much that’s for sure and it blew my mind. Poor? Hunh? It was the first time I’d seen my world that way at all. (Not that I necessarily agree; we were just a regular working family like anybody else).
I’ve been doing a lot of that these years, seeing my world through different eyes. In doing so, sometimes it’s so unbelievably distorted I don’t know how to absorb the shock and I have to look away. I have though, at least, arrived at the place where I can admit to the distortion without a truck load of shame attached. That makes it easier to go about the task of making myself whole again. It’s quite the journey.
I sure did get lucky with my boys though. It’s funny, while they were growing up, and you probably know this from your own mothering, you work so dang hard to give them as many good things as you can, all the while perched on this tiny slab of thin ice that you’re sure could break at any moment, and drown you most certainly would because it seems as equally likely that some ulterior incident will completely ruin them for good, and there’s not a single moment when you consider it to be luck. It’s all your constant and obsessive attention to them, all the bargaining you do that keeps it all in balance.
If it was luck, hell. How fair would that be?
Now, however, I think it was mostly a whole lot of luck. Not to say I don’t honor the contribution I did make as a good mom, but from this distance I see it’s much more precarious than I could accept at the time.
They’re the nicest guys all grown up. Josh and Melissa moved from Los Angeles to Tacoma a few months ago, bought a house and their first baby is due April 18th. They met while working at Symantec, geeks both. Josh landed in Los Angeles after returning to Portland from Okinawa a couple of weeks after I got here, winter ’02, with a Marine Corps regulation ruined knee and the sweetest lab-type dog named Dixie. I like to joke that I got my money’s worth, hiring that guy to take out his knee, but what really happened was he smashed into the side of the mountain climbing some part of Fuji. During the first couple of weeks alone, that the Marines were in Baghdad, Josh lost several comrades. His unit was the first to go in.
Chris and Amy have Baby J who is, currently, insisting that he just be called “J” considering he is now three years old. My god Erin talk about roosting chickens. Jefry (not my misspelling) is carrying so much potent DNA I don’t see how he can walk. Actually he never does. He runs. And talks. And talks. I was always expecting that from spawn of Josh but Chris’ kid got it too. Hmm. Makes you wonder doesn’t it.
These two met at a rave Chris was throwing in Boise eight years ago. They’ve never spent a day apart since. Poor Amy – she didn’t know wtf to do at first. I’m sure she fantasized about Josh and me disappearing from the face of the earth but knew she didn’t want that really, us being Chris’ favorite kin and all. And Chris had such a hard struggle for a few years there, it busted my heart so bad, but man did he pull through. He is so fucking amazing. His integrity is astounding. He, too, like Josh, can’t really walk straight – Chris fell twenty feet off a ladder a couple of years ago trashing his ankle completely for good. Neither of my boys will ever ski, climb tall mountains or jump from airplanes and that’s all a-okay with me. Amy, though, can and does. Parachuted just a few months ago and crashed hard off her horse a few weeks ago, blacked out, then cussed Chris out later for calling the ambulance.
But they’ve all got such big love, compassion, loyalty. And my boys are so good to their wives; you can’t imagine my relief at that.
I spend all my free time with them, every long weekend, holiday. We talk on the phone every few days. We were all together in Tacoma a few weeks ago and C&A told me they’re moving to Portland as soon as their house sells! My mom believes Josh will follow suit one day but I’m not so sure about that though once his baby’s here who knows what new paths he’ll consider. He’s incredibly paternal – he’s been wanting to be a daddy since he was about ten.
Getting on top of my game, though, gets easier each day. Last September, a year ago, I started writing Obsidian and immediately the distortion started to disperse. I slept through the night for the first time in seven or eight years. The nightmares subsided a little also. And I haven’t sat in my car in the parking lot at a grocery store or at the bank or wherever, either, since then, too immobilized by anxiety to get out and go in. I don’t know how many flipping times shit like that happened, and it’s so horrible, scary, and embarrassing, and it hurts really deep to be that afraid. And to be that looney and locked into some weird immobilization that honestly, nobody can understand, except for a shrink on the rare occasion I have the $ to pay for an appointment. I did have an all-out attack last spring but I live in hope; maybe that was the last one.
I’m still pretty nervous about people liking me, making friends with me, but I’ve taken a couple giant steps with that lately. I doubt I’ll ever even date again and I’ll never get married (are you kidding? I’ll get Curtis’ social security if I don’t and don’t you think that’s sooo appropriate?) and I suppose that would be considered a lingering “fear of intimacy” by the pros but, in fact, it may just be my preference.
God, Erin, I think of so many things. Like, “I wanna be Bob Dylan, Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky.” I think I sent you the drawings I did of that whole theme. But Jesus man. Us sitting on my back porch at the picnic table reading your novel and the wind caught some of the pages and we scrambled to pick them up. And then climbing over my back fence CLIMBING OVER MY BACK FENCE to avoid having to pass by the front porch to get to the sidewalk. What the holy fuck was that? WTF was it?
Crazy. Just nuts.
And hanging at EMU with Rebecca and Nancy and wasn’t there somebody else? And every single damn morning you would saunter through the door to that 50 minute Lit class, ten minutes late, with your hair wet and your jacket unzipped and your cup of coffee and you never once were a bit embarrassed. And every week of that same Lit class a response paper of mine was read as a “good example” and I swear I was more impressed with your nonchalance than my achievement!
Remember those dreadlocks you found in that loft where you lived?
I might have told you this, I don’t know, but after I returned from Camp Pendleton, after the siege, back to the Baker house, the was a pile of papers in the baby nursery that filled the floor about a foot or so deep. He’d taken everything else from the house, stripped it except for every single piece of paper out of every box our family had collected, report cards, photographs, bills, handmade Christmas ornaments, bank statements, tax returns, letters, LETTERS! all scrambled together in a big jumbled pile. It took me weeks to sort through it. And I’ll never forget how many minutes it took my mind to wrap around one particular letter because it was one I’d written to you, put in an envelope, addressed, stamped and set out for the postman. Except it never did get mailed. But it had been opened. There wasn’t just one letter like that, there was a dozen or so and after I started reading one of them I stopped and put it down. Because things became real clear real fast.
I got so scared that day when I realized that he’d snagged all those letters I’d written to you before the mail got picked up. And it wasn’t like I’d been living without fear before that. But hell, you know what was in those letters? Do you remember that time, what was it, 97, 98? Somewhere in there. You were back in New Paltz for good and subbing I think. I don’t know – you’ll know. But I was planning my whole fucking way out of there. I wrote to you how I had money stashed away, a couple of pre-approved credit cards, Chris’ I.D. and mine in some safe place, wrote you the details of his violence, how it had accelerated even more. I told you how I was getting more scared than I’d ever been, worried that he would figure out my plans to leave and that if he did I would probably pay for it so bad. I wrote down the details, how if we left without a car where we’d go which was different than if we left with a car. And which car. I told you how I had my journals already in a backpack, our clothes and other stuff in another. I wrote to you because I needed to have the plan on paper and because I needed to write because it made me feel better, more proactive, and I wrote to you because I needed somebody else to know.
I remember, a couple of times, wondering why you hadn’t written back or, if you had, why you didn’t say anything about what I’d written to you. I also remember, really clearly, how I would think about those letters and say to myself god he’d kill me if he ever got a hold of one of these.
So there were all those letters – not every single one I’d written to you, some he hadn’t intercepted. I know you got some of them because I had the ones you’d written me back. But I was sitting there in the nursery, it was August and hot up in that room, but all of a sudden I got so cold knowing that he’d known all along what I was trying to do, how I was planning to leave him one last time, and it was creepy and alarming and I see now how I started down a whole other road that day, where I began to live as though I would never really get away from him, never. That he’d gone to that extent to return home after I’d left to see if I’d set mail out meant to me that he had it in him to keep me in his sights forever. When he got married last summer, that finally started to go away, a little anyway. Maybe it never will completely. I don’t know.
Other stuff, too, that he’d taken without me knowing. Birthday cards from my parents. So they hadn’t forgotten my birthday for ten years after all. So much of this was easy for him, I understand now, because after those dozen or so years of living far away from my city, first to the one mountains and then further still, to the others, nobody knew what I was up to anymore, didn’t really even know where I was. I tried keeping up at first, I’d drive with my boys back to Portland, visit my parents, see my friends, but life got harder every year. Then I stopped trying.
I met you in Paul Dresman’s survey class you know. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten about him. And Bob was in that class. Remember Bob? Dark haired, older, he sucked up to Dresman so bad. Neither of them had ever had an original thought in their lives. Dresman was such a dog. What a goof. Jesus he trudged through that early American Lit as stiffly as those preachers whose sermons we were studying.
Everything about the university was gold to me. Ralph Salisbury took me in, I worked my butt off for him, trying to find a way to write. He hooked me up with Kittredge up in Missoula, the plan was I’d go study up there, write and workshop, get my MFA, get a job, get a life. They compared me to fucking Carver for godssakes. I wanted it so badly. I wanted it so much. I kept thinking fuck man this is so fucking righteous I can’t believe this is happening I can’t believe this is true. One afternoon I gave Ralph’s wife, the poet Ingrid Wendt, a ride from the U to her house up the hill. “So Ralph tells me,” she said, “that you are quite possibly the best writer he’s ever taught.”
No joke. Me.
But I was right. It wasn’t really true. It wasn’t really going to happen.
1993. Early ’94? You graduated. So did Darryl Brown. Did I tell you about him? Probably not. If I did, though, you’re the only one I ever told about him. Either way, I’ll tell it now.
So I got into Ralph’s advanced fiction writing class. He chose around fifteen of us based on our submissions. I’d slipped mine under his door the last night before winter break. It took me about an hour of working up my nerve, sitting on the stairs of PLC, but finally I had to just do it because I was going to be late getting home.
We went back to Baker for Christmas, that long drive over mountain passes, the Cascades, Ochocos, Strawberries, then the Blues, on the two lane highway slick with snow. My first night back there was the one where I had the dream about Shannon, where she told me I had to write something called Obsidian, and that she hadn’t committed suicide that she’d been killed by her boyfriend when they were both really high.
Back at school, a note was left on the door to my house, and it was from Ralph saying I’d been accepted into his class. We didn’t have a phone then. The first night of class he told me that I’d be workshopping my story first and in fact, he’d already run off copies for everyone. Oh my god. I was so nervous.
So then, as you know, everyone takes turns commenting on “the work” and that’s when I met Darryl Brown for the first time. He was like, whoa this story is so fine and crap like that.
But it was mostly all a blur. I’m shy anyway, but I was so completely shut down during that time, always anxious, always scared, that I had a hard time remembering reading the story out loud at all. Then, a couple of weeks later after class, I heard somebody following me down that long, dark hallway in PLC that goes towards the bus stop where I was headed. Naturally I was sorta freaked out but not that much so I stopped and turned around and it was Darryl Brown. He says, hey, wait, I’ll walk with you.
And so it went. Darryl Brown started showing up to PLC an hour early like I did to read over the stories and Darryl Brown always walked me to the bus stop and if I was on my bicycle that night, Darryl Brown started walking me home.
Now you would say, as anyone would, that it’s pretty obvious Darryl Brown was interested in me. No rocket science there. Except it never once crossed my mind until several years later. Darryl Brown was this so cute guy. He was probably eight or ten years younger than me, finishing up his MBA in computer stuff, he was so smart and young and very cute like I said, so I never even considered he had a crush on me. He kept saying how much he dug my writing and so I figured that’s what it was about.
Then one night Darryl Brown invites me to go hear some music after class. I tell him I can’t. I don’t remind him I’m married because in my mind at least, it’s not that sort of an invitation. Then one night at class he announces that he’s inviting us all over to his house, that he’s making up some food and we’re going to hang out and tell stories and be hip and act like writers. Later, I tell him thanks but I can’t make it and he asks why and I say it’s too far away and I don’t have a car (though I do) and he says well, I’ll pick you up and I think dang, I really should go to this even if I don’t want to because that’s part of the gig, got to make friends and try and least pretend to have some social skills so eventually I agree.
Meeting him on the corner in front of the bookstore wasn’t any more covert behavior than I employed when doing anything outside of my domestic life, but as much as I despised myself for acting that way, it was less traumatic than coming out and telling Curtis where I was going. That just flat out didn’t fly. I probably met up with you in some similar situations (though you did actually venture into my homes, there weren’t many like you). When he showed up I was kind of surprised but never thought, even then, that I was in any territory other than hanging out with friends. Stuff for school. And when we got to his house and it was still early for people to be showing up, he asked me to help him cook and I did and he put music on and poured wine and he was lively and funny and I do remember thinking jeez this guy is really friendly, really nice, but I didn’t take it personally at all.
And so then there was the party and afterwards he took me back to the corner by the bookstore. And then we had another term of creative writing together, and he kept hanging out with me and we really did become good friends. And then he graduated and I didn’t talk to him again for a few years.
Darryl Brown went up to Missoula that next year and started school fall of ’95. I was supposed to be there by then. I never showed. I had no idea he was planning on Missoula, he’d never said so when I talked about wanting to go there myself. I don’t know how long he stayed in school though a few years later I found out from a mutual friend (who gave me his contact info and said, Look him up. He’ll want to hear from you!) that he spent some of his time there house sitting for Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid. Trippy. But I could see it, could see him fitting in with them. He really was exceptionally likeable.
I email him from time to time. Once he sent me a compilation cd he’d made, this must have been like late ’99. So I wasn’t yet totally hip to the compilation cd art form and his blew my mind. Even now, all these years later, his still rates in my top 5 of extraordinary comp cds.
Once I got brave and emailed him saying thanks for being a good friend to me. Brought it up even though I still felt like there had been something I should be ashamed about, being friends with him, brought it up even though I was hesitant to open my heart up that much. I wanted to ask him if it was true, if he’d really had a crush on me, but I’m sure I lost my nerve and didn’t do it. It was probably one of those emails that went on too long and got mushy but he wrote back and said that reading it made his day. He’s still a computer guy, and a potter too, living now in Arizona. He still makes comp cds and will send me one as soon as I send him one of mine. I’ve been meaning to but I’ve been busy! Hell, that was three years ago. He likes my paintings a lot and had plans to be in Portland awhile ago to see them in person and to bring along his very lovely wife and two young sons but they didn’t make it up that year. Someday, though, I’ll bet.
So I lost both of you at the same time. You and Darryl Brown. That day you and I met at Guido’s, when we met there so we could say goodbye because you had graduated and were going back to New Paltz, I remember walking home afterwards and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. There’s only been a few other times when I’ve felt loneliness that profoundly, grief that deep. I didn’t really think I’d ever see you again. That you were able to show up at my house in Baker that next summer after listening to Mr. Jones and Me for nearly four hundred miles (and actually getting the Counting Crows finally) was unreal. Such a good time in spite of the crazy, dark-souled men. Those were the best days I ever had living over there.
Well, Erin, how is that French/Polish boy of yours? Man, did you fall hard for him or what? What a love story you’ve got going on. And your children!
I’ve read your work from time to time and it’s really wonderful, really good. I remember when you first started writing for the newspaper. I have not, however, read your book and have no excuse except I keep meaning to put it on hold at my library and haven’t yet done so, obviously, but I will. I did read an article in the NYT when you were covering your mayor up there, and it seems I read a great review of your book too, or maybe it was an interview. Atta girl. You were always so cheeky, so smart. I miss you very much.
Somehow I doubt you’ve yet to make a real conversion to communicating via email though I’ll bet you’re better at it now than a few years ago. Sitting down to this letter here, and the handful of others I’m working on also, is the first letter writing I’ve done in years and years. Well, since I used to write to you, actually. Everything’s email for me. But my contact info’s below so I hope one of the ways works for you. My commitment to this form is because I’m sending Obsidian out by snail-mail and letters seemed appropriate.
All right kiddo, thanks for indulging me by reading through this. Christopher is planning a road trip for us next fall; he has (or is going to get? I can’t keep up with him…) a RV and our destination is NYC. All I know is we’re hitting New Orleans on the way there and Minnesota on the way back. He has very definite ideas so I’m leaving it all up to him. My brother and family is living on a sailboat in Virginia so there’s that stop, and a favorite friend moved to NY from Portland a few weeks ago so I’m hoping to see all of you then.
Hope to hear your news soon,
L.
I remember you liked the socks. I remember you said you wore them the whole time you were pregnant until they had holes. I still knit socks. I’ll send some along next time.
PS: Chris says to say hi. He says to remind you how you went to Boys Jungle with him one afternoon while I was giving some lessons.
Dear DB,
I know it’s been a long long time since I promised to send you a cd. Well, here it is! But it’s not a comp cd – even though I have made a few of those they’ve never reached the heights of yours – and now you owe me another one! Actually, I’d also like a copy of that one you gave me years ago – it had Beth Orton and Macy Gray and Moby and Elton John…does that ring a bell?
How are you? Is life still good in Arizona? I think you have a couple of little boys? Isn’t parenting trippy? So consuming! I’m still consumed by it actually. I talk to my sons several times a week and we get together all the time. Josh and his wife Melissa just moved from LA to Tacoma so that makes it much easier to visit them and Chris and Amy live in Boise but are moving to Portland when their house sells. Yippee! Then I’ll be able to fulfill my role as imperial matriarch more easily.
So here’s my latest project, “Obsidian,” eight stories, twenty minutes. Writing is like crawling through cut glass (Dylan). But it wasn’t the writing that was hard, or composing the music or even recording it all, it was the hard drive crashes and the garageband issues and the blown tweeter and just all sorts of electronic mayhem. Plus the fact that it wouldn’t hurt me a bit to take a class in sound engineering so I could learn to do it right. I hope you can listen without going crazy!
Okay, your turn! I hope I don’t have to wait three years.
I’m moving soon but (hint hint) if you’re sending something my way I get mail at a friend’s:
PS I love your guys’ website. So classy!
How are you? Is life still good in Arizona? I think you have a couple of little boys? Isn’t parenting trippy? So consuming! I’m still consumed by it actually. I talk to my sons several times a week and we get together all the time. Josh and his wife Melissa just moved from LA to Tacoma so that makes it much easier to visit them and Chris and Amy live in Boise but are moving to Portland when their house sells. Yippee! Then I’ll be able to fulfill my role as imperial matriarch more easily.
So here’s my latest project, “Obsidian,” eight stories, twenty minutes. Writing is like crawling through cut glass (Dylan). But it wasn’t the writing that was hard, or composing the music or even recording it all, it was the hard drive crashes and the garageband issues and the blown tweeter and just all sorts of electronic mayhem. Plus the fact that it wouldn’t hurt me a bit to take a class in sound engineering so I could learn to do it right. I hope you can listen without going crazy!
Okay, your turn! I hope I don’t have to wait three years.
I’m moving soon but (hint hint) if you’re sending something my way I get mail at a friend’s:
PS I love your guys’ website. So classy!
Dear Cary Tennis,
When I started writing this letter, my intention was to just say howdy, and introduce myself and invite you to listen to the spoken word/music project I produced which was a result of the influence your writing has had on my life. That’s all I had in mind. Even though most people write to you for advice, I didn’t think I needed any, at least at present.
Then, a strange thing happened.
A few weeks ago, I had to leave a place where I’d been living for a couple of years, as a caretaker on a wildlife refuge. I had to leave because it had gotten weird and not very healthy anymore and not really very safe either. And even though I’d known that for a year or so, I hadn’t been able to rouse myself enough to move. And I couldn’t figure out why either. Then, it finally got messed up enough that I got scared, and ultimately had to ask some friends to help me out. That was all okay, except the question came up about why I’d stayed so long and put up with it. Legitimate question. But I didn’t have an answer.
Once I moved, I had some time to think. I’d been trying to find some time to think for six years but it had never worked out. I’d been living in dingy basements or converted garages that flooded all winter or with roommates that broke wine bottles off on the kitchen counter and went after each other. In other words, not environments that did much to foster introspectiveness.
While I was thinking these past few weeks, I felt like I was circling and circling around something, something that might hold the key, so to speak, for what was up with me. I’ve been trying to figure that out for a long time and wasn’t expecting any sure-fired solution.
But I was surprised this time. It was something simple.
I got up one morning after a night of vivid, lucid dreams like always, and just sort of knew I was going to figure it out. And I sat down to work on this letter, like I said, expecting to write something entirely different. All of a sudden I realized, that I needed to tell someone about something that happened, something I’ve never had the courage to tell anyone before because it’s a horrible thing that happened. Then I thought, well tell CT. He gets letters like that all the time. He’s a keeper of secrets. He obviously has somewhere to stash them.
When my older boy came home from the Marines in ’02, all of us, my whole family, met up for a reunion at a big old lodge outside of the city. On one of the evenings when my son and I sat up after everyone else had gone to bed he told me this: One night, fifteen years or so before, while I was at work, my husband, his stepfather, held him by his feet out of the upstairs window. He was about twelve and my younger boy, who saw it, was seven.
I worked evening shifts and that year I think I was waitressing. So I got home around 10 and the boys were in bed like always but maybe, I realize now, not asleep like I would have assumed.
I try and figure out how I missed it, how I didn’t know. Because I never, ever thought he was hurting the children. How does a mother miss something like that?
I asked my boys why they didn’t tell me, and they said it’s because there was nothing I could have done. Or that I would have killed him. Or maybe myself. Or that I would have just gone crazy. And I suppose, in a lot of ways, they’re probably right about that. I don’t know. And then our lives would have undoubtedly been even worse.
There’s some obvious holes in this story. Like why wouldn’t I have called the police, for one. Well, I would have. And they would have come over, and they would have listened to the kids and they would have listened to him and they may or may not have arrested him.
Not too long after I finally did leave him, after the boys were nearly grown, they told me I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off any earlier. They’re adamant about that and from time to time I ask them if they’re still sure and they say absolutely and it helps me feel better to hear it. They surprised me when they first told me this. I hadn’t ever considered it that way, as any sort of triumph. I’d always seen it as the end of years of failing.
It’s complicated.
But this is the tricky part for me. Even though I have to, I can’t leave it there. Instead I think, as intuitive as they are, as close as we are, my boys don’t really know me. Because I would never have stayed, had I known, would never have not called the cops. And while he was in jail, or not, I would have sold my guitar and my grandmother’s quilts for cash and I would have left my best dog with a friend and the other dogs behind, and I would have gone to one of those organizations that helps people like we were and rented a place in a different name in a town he wouldn’t think of finding us in. And I would have gotten us counseling and the kids in new schools while I worked and we would live jittery and looking over our shoulders all the time but eventually enough time would pass and we would start living less scared all the time.
Which is, basically, what did happen. Just not that particular night.
But then this whole thing starts looping and it’s infinite. Because there was a point when the cops did take him to jail. And he was out in hours. And then my best dog disappeared, and somebody picked her up seventy five miles away on the interstate. And the way I realized he’d broken the restraining order was when he slammed open my closet door where he’d been hiding all night and woke me up. There were several rooms in the upstairs of that house that were bad ones to get cornered in because the windows were the only way out and it was a straight drop to the ground. My bedroom was one of them.
Now the loops starts over at the window.
I don’t know which window he hung my son out of. He didn’t say.
And then I’m back to that night again, and I have called the cops and they either took him or they didn’t and if they did he’s already out of jail and maybe there hasn’t been enough time to get the kids in the car or maybe he intercepts us at my friend’s when I’m dropping off the dog, or maybe it’s months later, years. And any of these scenes may or may not involve his .30-06.
It’s not like I go over it and over it in my head. I don’t think about it. I don’t let myself think about. I’d go crazy. But it’s still always there, anyway.
We came through it, though. And I’ve been keeping a close eye on my boys ever since, because even though we are out of that danger I wasn’t sure how they’d process it, whether they’d process it at all. But they did. They’re all right. Their lives are full of love and good people. They’re kind and have integrity.
But me? I would have said, had been saying, that I was doing okay even though I was living with horrible anxiety and panic attacks and nightmares and other weird, subversive obstacles; I was working through it, getting better, I was managing, trying to. Then, when I started writing this letter it all became more clear: I keep trying to pay for that mistake, and for all the others that I assume my sons haven’t told me about yet. Ever since that night we sat up talking and he told me that, it’s like part of me just shut down. And I started living out this, well destiny almost, believing that when anything bad happened, it was because I deserved it, payback I guess. When my stupid roommates got drunk and got in fights I didn’t move because I didn’t value myself enough; my safety wasn’t important because I had failed to keep my children safe.
Maybe now that I’ve realized all of this I’ll stop those things, stop living that way. Maybe now I’ll have an answer when people ask me what (the hell) is wrong with me. People like my brother, my sister-in-law, friends; I’ve felt them shaking their heads for years now, not out of disgust or even a whole lot of frustration I don’t think, just concern. I’d just shrug and say I don’t know. But I can already imagine it, living without dragging this secret around with me everywhere I go.
The other night I helped a friend with a house concert. The musician had her family with her and her youngest son had turned six that day. When she started playing, her little boy walked past me where I was sitting on the stairs and sat at the kitchen table and put his head down in his arms. I think he was probably about to start to cry. I caught the eye of my friend’s son and nodded toward the table and he went over and cheered the kid up right away. I always notice stuff like that. Maybe I believe I can’t afford to ever take my eyes off a kid again. Maybe it’s because I’m hoping it will aid in my redemption.
So that’s the letter I didn’t set out to write you and now the one I did: I read your writing each day because it gives me ideas, it makes me feel better about myself and it gives me courage and hope. “Behold California, the New Jerusalem!” The title to one of my stories is “Banishment” which I snagged directly from something you wrote. I would like to tell you fully how important you’ve been, and I think you’d get it because you’re a writer and you spend time alone and you may have “friends” yourself you’ve never actually met but I can’t. I’ve tried. But every time, it creeps towards sentimentality which is yucky and turns the page all gooey and then my mind gets mushy and I click on The Carpenters and my writing day is ruined. So instead, I hope you’ll believe me: You’ve helped me turn my life around.
I wrote several other letters before this one, to friends, all of whom know me from the life I was living during the time this project was incubating. And while writing those letters, I realized that they are, in some ways, a part of the project also, that the letters ended up being an extension of the story. I’ve included some here.
Thanks Cary.
Then, a strange thing happened.
A few weeks ago, I had to leave a place where I’d been living for a couple of years, as a caretaker on a wildlife refuge. I had to leave because it had gotten weird and not very healthy anymore and not really very safe either. And even though I’d known that for a year or so, I hadn’t been able to rouse myself enough to move. And I couldn’t figure out why either. Then, it finally got messed up enough that I got scared, and ultimately had to ask some friends to help me out. That was all okay, except the question came up about why I’d stayed so long and put up with it. Legitimate question. But I didn’t have an answer.
Once I moved, I had some time to think. I’d been trying to find some time to think for six years but it had never worked out. I’d been living in dingy basements or converted garages that flooded all winter or with roommates that broke wine bottles off on the kitchen counter and went after each other. In other words, not environments that did much to foster introspectiveness.
While I was thinking these past few weeks, I felt like I was circling and circling around something, something that might hold the key, so to speak, for what was up with me. I’ve been trying to figure that out for a long time and wasn’t expecting any sure-fired solution.
But I was surprised this time. It was something simple.
I got up one morning after a night of vivid, lucid dreams like always, and just sort of knew I was going to figure it out. And I sat down to work on this letter, like I said, expecting to write something entirely different. All of a sudden I realized, that I needed to tell someone about something that happened, something I’ve never had the courage to tell anyone before because it’s a horrible thing that happened. Then I thought, well tell CT. He gets letters like that all the time. He’s a keeper of secrets. He obviously has somewhere to stash them.
When my older boy came home from the Marines in ’02, all of us, my whole family, met up for a reunion at a big old lodge outside of the city. On one of the evenings when my son and I sat up after everyone else had gone to bed he told me this: One night, fifteen years or so before, while I was at work, my husband, his stepfather, held him by his feet out of the upstairs window. He was about twelve and my younger boy, who saw it, was seven.
I worked evening shifts and that year I think I was waitressing. So I got home around 10 and the boys were in bed like always but maybe, I realize now, not asleep like I would have assumed.
I try and figure out how I missed it, how I didn’t know. Because I never, ever thought he was hurting the children. How does a mother miss something like that?
I asked my boys why they didn’t tell me, and they said it’s because there was nothing I could have done. Or that I would have killed him. Or maybe myself. Or that I would have just gone crazy. And I suppose, in a lot of ways, they’re probably right about that. I don’t know. And then our lives would have undoubtedly been even worse.
There’s some obvious holes in this story. Like why wouldn’t I have called the police, for one. Well, I would have. And they would have come over, and they would have listened to the kids and they would have listened to him and they may or may not have arrested him.
Not too long after I finally did leave him, after the boys were nearly grown, they told me I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off any earlier. They’re adamant about that and from time to time I ask them if they’re still sure and they say absolutely and it helps me feel better to hear it. They surprised me when they first told me this. I hadn’t ever considered it that way, as any sort of triumph. I’d always seen it as the end of years of failing.
It’s complicated.
But this is the tricky part for me. Even though I have to, I can’t leave it there. Instead I think, as intuitive as they are, as close as we are, my boys don’t really know me. Because I would never have stayed, had I known, would never have not called the cops. And while he was in jail, or not, I would have sold my guitar and my grandmother’s quilts for cash and I would have left my best dog with a friend and the other dogs behind, and I would have gone to one of those organizations that helps people like we were and rented a place in a different name in a town he wouldn’t think of finding us in. And I would have gotten us counseling and the kids in new schools while I worked and we would live jittery and looking over our shoulders all the time but eventually enough time would pass and we would start living less scared all the time.
Which is, basically, what did happen. Just not that particular night.
But then this whole thing starts looping and it’s infinite. Because there was a point when the cops did take him to jail. And he was out in hours. And then my best dog disappeared, and somebody picked her up seventy five miles away on the interstate. And the way I realized he’d broken the restraining order was when he slammed open my closet door where he’d been hiding all night and woke me up. There were several rooms in the upstairs of that house that were bad ones to get cornered in because the windows were the only way out and it was a straight drop to the ground. My bedroom was one of them.
Now the loops starts over at the window.
I don’t know which window he hung my son out of. He didn’t say.
And then I’m back to that night again, and I have called the cops and they either took him or they didn’t and if they did he’s already out of jail and maybe there hasn’t been enough time to get the kids in the car or maybe he intercepts us at my friend’s when I’m dropping off the dog, or maybe it’s months later, years. And any of these scenes may or may not involve his .30-06.
It’s not like I go over it and over it in my head. I don’t think about it. I don’t let myself think about. I’d go crazy. But it’s still always there, anyway.
We came through it, though. And I’ve been keeping a close eye on my boys ever since, because even though we are out of that danger I wasn’t sure how they’d process it, whether they’d process it at all. But they did. They’re all right. Their lives are full of love and good people. They’re kind and have integrity.
But me? I would have said, had been saying, that I was doing okay even though I was living with horrible anxiety and panic attacks and nightmares and other weird, subversive obstacles; I was working through it, getting better, I was managing, trying to. Then, when I started writing this letter it all became more clear: I keep trying to pay for that mistake, and for all the others that I assume my sons haven’t told me about yet. Ever since that night we sat up talking and he told me that, it’s like part of me just shut down. And I started living out this, well destiny almost, believing that when anything bad happened, it was because I deserved it, payback I guess. When my stupid roommates got drunk and got in fights I didn’t move because I didn’t value myself enough; my safety wasn’t important because I had failed to keep my children safe.
Maybe now that I’ve realized all of this I’ll stop those things, stop living that way. Maybe now I’ll have an answer when people ask me what (the hell) is wrong with me. People like my brother, my sister-in-law, friends; I’ve felt them shaking their heads for years now, not out of disgust or even a whole lot of frustration I don’t think, just concern. I’d just shrug and say I don’t know. But I can already imagine it, living without dragging this secret around with me everywhere I go.
The other night I helped a friend with a house concert. The musician had her family with her and her youngest son had turned six that day. When she started playing, her little boy walked past me where I was sitting on the stairs and sat at the kitchen table and put his head down in his arms. I think he was probably about to start to cry. I caught the eye of my friend’s son and nodded toward the table and he went over and cheered the kid up right away. I always notice stuff like that. Maybe I believe I can’t afford to ever take my eyes off a kid again. Maybe it’s because I’m hoping it will aid in my redemption.
So that’s the letter I didn’t set out to write you and now the one I did: I read your writing each day because it gives me ideas, it makes me feel better about myself and it gives me courage and hope. “Behold California, the New Jerusalem!” The title to one of my stories is “Banishment” which I snagged directly from something you wrote. I would like to tell you fully how important you’ve been, and I think you’d get it because you’re a writer and you spend time alone and you may have “friends” yourself you’ve never actually met but I can’t. I’ve tried. But every time, it creeps towards sentimentality which is yucky and turns the page all gooey and then my mind gets mushy and I click on The Carpenters and my writing day is ruined. So instead, I hope you’ll believe me: You’ve helped me turn my life around.
I wrote several other letters before this one, to friends, all of whom know me from the life I was living during the time this project was incubating. And while writing those letters, I realized that they are, in some ways, a part of the project also, that the letters ended up being an extension of the story. I’ve included some here.
Thanks Cary.
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