Dead Letter Department #104

weather report

Implausible as it still seems, we are past the very darkest days of the year. There were Maxfield Parrish colors streaking the sky when I sat down to work this morning, and when we were out last night, my friend N. gesticulated at the windows, & said, “It’s past 5:30! And it’s not dark yet!” We had a couple of beers & one of those really lovely wide-ranging conversations, passing easily from why I shaved my head to the baffling teen years to whether we should be writing for posterity.

I hadn’t been sure I’d make it out yesterday at all. The weather threatened anywhere between 3 and 7 inches of snow for days on end, and every time flakes began to drift slowly down from the ominous grey above, I was convinced the storm was about to descend, but it somehow never did, passing over my neighborhood with a light dusting, while only half a mile away there were inches and inches, and up in Lynden my friend C. said they got an entire foot. So I wasn’t sure, as I chipped ice off my car & tentatively pulled out, how the roads were going to be: dry and clear, it turned out, & I felt a bit ridiculous for my various little storm preps.

Then again, one wind current or whatever (my understanding of weather is about as sophisticated as shaking a snow globe—sometimes things fall from the sky, sometimes they do not), and this part of town would have gotten an entrapping blanket, and somewhere else our powdered sugar lawn.

It made me think of how often people skate by a disaster, minor or major, & then call themselves blessed. We slipped past the traffic accident by the width of our tires, or narrowly avoided some other terrible hammer of fate falling; aren’t we blessed? The unpleasant corollary is the ones who didn’t—are they cursed? Sometimes in my social media wanderings, I see this in comments: oh, you must be such a good person, God had his hand over you, which only makes me wonder—are we saying the people who weren’t so fortunate are bad people, that God looked down and then, with awesome deliberateness, pulled his hand away? Won’t your day come eventually, when that hand draws back? I understand that about as well as I do the weather, which is to say not at all, even when it’s happening.

Also largely beyond my comprehension—the news. I’ll feel like I’ve got some sort of grasp on it, and then check the feed again to be presented with another bristling pile of terrifying executive orders, truly insane overreaches, and an absolutely limp-spined, toothless response by the people who are meant to be opposition. There were warnings going out this week that ICE was going to be at my doctor’s office—my fucking doctor’s office, the low income clinic, which takes both Medicaid & offers a sliding scale, one of the only ones in town, with a waiting room constantly packed with working people & sick kids, where the receptionists routinely sit and fill out paperwork with people who can’t do it themselves. I keep imagining what it would be like knowing that my baby is sick and keeping them home anyway, because risking deportation & separation is even worse.

reading room

If you’re a Joan Didion head, Griffin Dunne’s new book, The Friday Afternoon Club, is a frothy, celebrity-laced family memoir that made me want to read some of the Dunne brothers’ books, dive deeper into the literary legacy. I think Dunne writes very well about both Hollywood and New York, about being a young man convinced he’s on the gleaming steps to stardom, and an older one, who sees more of the peeling paint. His stories about Carrie Fisher, as a very young person & then a very famous woman, practically glowed with longstanding, deep-rooted friendship, the kind I think you can’t even really see until you’re old enough to understand how precious someone who bridges those decades with you truly is.

Also, the gentleness he expended on his father Dominick Dunne’s tumultuous relationship with his sexuality was very moving: Griffin doesn’t abstain from what it was like to be raised by someone so mired in secrets & complications, including hiding a lover under the implausible title of his valet, but he manages to touch down into a place of compassionate understanding & humor.

The standout novel for me so far this year, though, is Quarterlife, by Devika Rege, which I am now busily trying to convince the writers in my life to read, because it was absolutely mesmerizing. It’s hard to summarize effectively—a former expatriate, burned out on the false promises of American success & Wall Street moves home to India; his younger brother falls in with the young men of the Hindu Nationalist party, a New Englander clumsily attempts to find herself by working for a school in a slum (profoundly refreshing take on this old story). Each narrator is so crisply, fully imagined that I found myself completely swayed by their views until I turned the page and took up with the next.

If you read it, please email me immediately at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & tell me what you thought.

in the kitchen

One of my small disciplines has been trying to feed myself better. When I was going to memory care to visit my dad every other day, I fell into some necessary habits: grocery store sandwiches, sliced in half, so I had something for lunch & dinner, with no extra energy to expend on figuring either out; little bags of things I would normally eat rarely, because I felt starved for small pleasures. More takeout than I could really afford or digest, but keeping myself fed was difficult enough, & I had no ability to fuss over the mechanism delivering the calories.

The past couple of weeks I actually managed to spend Sunday night cooking, which is actually a nice way to start stepping back into the week, and leaves leftovers that make work-week me feel like maybe weekend-me isn’t just a lazy roustabout after all. This Sunday I browned chicken thighs, whisked up a garlic lemon cream sauce, and then shoved leeks & mushrooms & onions & baby bok choy into it, topped with some green olives fried in anchovy oil, and poured over Israeli couscous. I’ve still got a couple of nights of it, & it reheats beautifully.

Thank you, as always, for reading the Dead Letter Department. More soon, & in the meantime, may you find that your weekend-self has swept away some little obstruction for your weekday-self, leaving you a clear runway.