These Letters Spell My Name

Dear Creedence Clearwater Revival Cassette Tape Box Set My Dad Ordered from TV in the 80s,

Do you remember if you were played all that much at home when you first came to live with us? Maybe my dad kept you in his car and played you there? I don’t know. He had a weakness for boxed sets being sold on TV or at gas stations. (Did you spend time with the oldies cassettes he bought from the gas stations when you lived with us? THOSE got played a lot, I know that. Oh sorry – no offense meant.)

But do you remember how I found you after his death and I was going off to college? Those were fun times, right? Whenever I hear a CCR song these days (and who are we kidding, these days you’re only ever going to hear “Bad Moon Rising”) I think of that time, how I listened to CCR as if I had freaking discovered them, like I was a band promoter or a record label executive and I was hearing this great new sound and had to share it with the world.

But I really enjoyed the music. And I think my dad would have been pleased by that. I never knew he even liked CCR.

Well, you’re probably dead now. Hope not, but still.

-e.

Dear Bright Yellow “Silk” Shirt with the Multi-Colored Geometric Shapes,

I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I cut you with the scissors. It was an accident (and it was a very, very small cut) but still, I should apologize. Even though I was the one who almost had a heart attack because you were a brand new shirt and I had to tell my mom I had not been careful with you at school like I had promised but had instead used scissors on my lap and sliced into your thin, silky skin as if it were butter.

Thank goodness my grandmother was staying with us. Remember how she fixed you? You could barely see the scar. Hope it didn’t hurt too much.

Anyway, sorry. And thank you for being so beautiful. I felt like a glamour model.

-e.

Dear Night Bus from Oslo to Forde,

Those nights we spent together! Gritty, exhausting, boring, nauseating (the turns in the mountains). I don’t ever want to see you again. Those stops in the middle of the night at those weird mountain truck stops. Raisin buns and chocolate and coffee. Uneasy looks from the other passengers. Wondering if I was going to oversleep and miss my stop and end up in Sweden somewhere.

But I want to tell you something. It was on one of our rides, in the middle of the night, when I had a realization. I was lying down across the seats, my head underneath the window, when I opened my eyes and saw the massive face of a mountain entirely filling the view, towering above your tiny, feeble, trundling form, inside of which I was but an even tinier, feebler body. On the other side of the bus, I knew, the mountain continued to drop down, unfazed by our progress. I had the distinct feeling that the mountain was letting the road exist either because of benevolence (best case scenario) or indifference (worst case scenario) and that at any moment the mountain could become irritated and shake us off its apron. I felt dizzy. And disoriented. And I also felt that I suddenly understood how a landscape shapes a people. Trolls, giants, the uneasy looks of the other passengers – it all made sense. Whether by grace or by luck, we were being allowed to pass. I felt like holding my breath until I was sure our bug-like progress wouldn’t make the mountain itch.

But as you know – you dusty, rattly old thing – we made it.

-e.

Dear Video Game with the Knight Who Goes Inside the Tree,

How many hours, Video Game? How many? You were a drug. I was helpless. Did I ever even rescue that princess? Please tell me I did. I can’t remember. I only remember that part inside the cave and the other part inside the tree and actually now I’m remembering the part where you scale the outside of the castle wall… doesn’t matter. You’ve taken enough of my headspace.

-e.

Dear Blood Sister Coffee Can Buried in My Friend’s Backyard,

I’ve been thinking about my friend a lot lately. She was my first friend, and she was very formative to me, and recently I told my kids that she and I were blood sisters, a concept they had never heard of which is absolutely ridiculous, I thought.

And then I told them about you, Blood Sister Coffee Can, and I told them how you were buried in a spot by my friend’s family’s clothes line and how you had bandaids, Bactine, and a safety pin inside. (A safety pin my friend swore had been recently cleaned on a flame under the supervision of her brother.) And how she and I had crouched in the dirt and pricked our fingers and mingled our blood and then first aided ourselves, and I was laughing a little but you know what? My kids thought I sounded ridiculous.

And maybe I did. But really how can I explain that feeling, that knowledge that I had gained a family member and was now forever bound by blood? It was a moment in time and I am glad you were there.

-e.

Dear Filene’s Basement,

I miss you. You absorbed hours of my time and I paid you for the privilege. You had no windows, and you didn’t smell so hot, and often what I bought was not in reality usable for me, but ours was a great, possibly dysfunctional, love affair.

I often didn’t know on my way home from work whether I was going to stop at Downtown Crossing until it was happening.

I kind of wish I had participated in your gladiator-esque wedding dress sales just for fun. I feel like it would have really capped our time together.

But I moved away, and I heard you closed. It’s better. You weren’t made for this modern world, Filene’s Basement. This world where dirt cheap stuff is available online. You can’t touch anything online. You can’t check the zippers or the label or the feel of the fabric. And there is no smell.

I’ll always remember you and your bins of shoes,

-e.

Dear Couch that We Got from That Couple My Friend Housesat for,

I’m sorry I left you molding in my mother’s basement for so long. I’m sorry for where you ended up.

You were my first piece of furniture, and I didn’t want to ever let you go. And you were free! Wasn’t it cool how you just barely fit into that borrowed Jeep Cherokee? My mother’s scorn for you was puzzling.

It’s been good training for my current position: as a mother whose scorn for her children’s possessions is constant sandpaper on her nerves. I try to empathize. I once loved things that were too old and too stinky to keep. No offense.

Sorry. Thank you.

Love,

-e.

Dear Grey Esprit Sweatshirt with the Tiny Multi-Colored Flecks,

God, you were perfect. The fact that my grandmother picked you out was an astonishment of which I have never seen the equal. How could she have chosen something so cool? How in heck did she decide to spend the money on you when she probably was thinking she could something even better at BJ’s Wholesale Warehouse for a fraction of the cost?

It was the fact that you were Esprit, of course. But it was also the simplicity of the embroidered logo. It was the delicate flecks of color on a perfectly heather grey background (think aged cedar shingles on a beach house). It was the fit – slightly baggy, not too baggy. You hit right at the hip. Is there anything better than a perfect grey sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans (dungarees, my grandma would have said)? Haha, I know what you would say, Grey Esprit.

I saw a picture of you the other day, at my mom’s house. And I realized that in that picture I don’t look as ridiculous as I do in my memory. I’m old enough to see what my parents probably saw in me, why they continued to take pictures of me when my mouth was full of braces and my hair was permed like that. But anyway, I realized as I held the picture in my hand that the jeans I had on were surprisingly similar to the ones I wore in the photo, and that I had been searching for that look for a long long time, and missing a perfect grey sweatshirt since I was 15 years old. And there I was, a middle-aged mother, standing in my mother’s house, remembering what I have lost: a sweatshirt, a chair placed for me by the window so that the light was better for the picture, a place in time where my growth had to be documented, gifts from my grandmother, those braces, that perm.

Missing you a lot today,

-e.

Dear Microscope,

You were wonderful. I still remember the smell of the liquid that you were supposed to drip onto the slide to make the top plate stick. The way those top plates could bend, but only a little. The scrape of the edge of the slide against my thumb and forefinger. That little cardboard box for the slides. I couldn’t BELIEVE I had been gifted real scientific equipment. With real glass.

And then, when I focused you well, a tiny universe of cells. Revealed. Discovered.

Thank you,

-e.

Dear Lightning that Struck in Quincy, MA Sometime in 1989, or 1990,

I guess this letter is actually a little bit hypothetical because… well, I’ll be honest: I don’t know if you exist.

My friend (She was once my best friend, my only friend. She was my very first friend, if you don’t count that kid from my preschool, which I kind of don’t, only because I don’t remember his name.) claimed that you hit her. So you’ve always been a big part of my memory, Lightning, and I always thought of you with wonder and with fear. She was frazzled, that was for sure. She said she had been walking with her umbrella across a bridge (this was much later in our friendship, when we were now “childhood friends” and visited each other only occasionally, and she was old enough to have a part-time job that she walked to and from, in the rain sometimes, apparently) when you struck, pausing her walk home, frizzing her hair, shaking her balance, and scattering her thoughts to the stormy wind. When she arrived at the house she was fussed over, given water, a chair, a chance to tell her story.

You were her story.

The thing is this: was I there or did she tell me about it later? I can’t remember. Did she actually tell me that she had been hit by lightning twice and that the third time a person was hit by lightning it was likely to kill them? Can you weigh in on that theory? And of course, the real thing, the thing I started this letter with, is actually this: did you happen?

I could ask her (we are now only Facebook friends, so it might be weird) but I probably won’t. She was always more grownup than I was – in actual years but also in life years – and I can imagine her response to that question.

Besides, maybe I don’t want to know.

-e.