Dead Letter Department # 87

weather report

I went to the queer outdoor market this weekend, after seeing the announcement on Facebook & not really having any idea what to expect: a few booths, maybe, of handmade items. It turned out to be massive, taking over the entire block by the parking garage on Commercial Street, & even only a few minutes after it opened, it was absolutely packed. There were dogs in cute little Carhartt vests & throngs of youths pawing through the piles of vintage T-shirts (many of which I recognized from my own days of being a youth), dozens of stands of patches & plushies & art prints & macrame plant holders.

I felt approximately a thousand years old the entire time—not in a bad way, just very conscious of the fact that I am now something of a queer elder myself, at least to the very young, which I don’t think I had entirely absorbed until I had an interaction with a breathless barista a while back who interacted with me the exact same way I recall behaving when I was in my teens & twenties & ran across older queer people: absolute delight & recognition, a little bit of shy flirting that’s really more about wanting to be recognized than anything else, to say, I see you, do you see me? So many of us grow up in exile, have to go looking for what adults like us will be like, for proof that they even exist, because we don’t find it in our families. Now firmly into middle age, I hopped that divide ages ago, & I’m the living proof myself: here we are.

When I was that age, I was fortunate enough to be tied into several communities that really valued intergenerational friendships, which meant I got to know leathermen & butch dykes in their sixties, trans women who’d come out decades ago and gave me useful fashion tips—I still have the silk scarf one woman looped around my neck after a particularly rowdy Fourth of July barbecue, & I think about the dating advice she gave me whenever I run across it in my closet—perhaps if I’d followed it, the whole business would have gone better. I was terribly lucky in that way, getting to have glimpses of possible futures, connecting across the expanse of years.

There are a couple of groups starting here in town to create those same kinds of connections locally, and when I looked at one of the posts about it where they’d asked the younger generation what makes a queer elder, they said anyone who’d managed to live through college counted: that’s how starved they are for actual older people like themselves.

The problem I always have at events like the market is that I look into the eager little faces of the artists who are trying to make a living at what they do & I want to buy everything: the photo print of the abandoned hotel on I-5, looking ghostly in the mist, the glass bowl terrariums inhabited by living plants and clay mushroom people, the lavender patchouli candles with extremely second wave feminist names. My budget does not exactly allow me to be a patron of the arts on the scale I would like, & I had allotted myself ten dollar, which I finally spent on a pretty little jar of garlic & nettle salt, without having any idea what nettle tastes like.

“I grow all the herbs myself,” the proprietor told me, “in Maple Falls. That has a nice mineral quality to it.”

Well, who doesn’t want a nice mineral quality? I carried it around afterwards feeling like I’d purchased a salty little spell for myself, and ceremoniously sprinkled it onto my next salt-requiring foodstuff with great delight. It was delicious.

Yesterday I knew the side gig would be slow enough that it probably wasn’t even worth bothering with, and I’d woken up about five times in the night, fretting over various things I don’t have the slightest bit of control over, so I decided to take the entire day off & actually try to rest. This was a mixed success, but I did spend several soothing hours playing my latest video game obsession, and some time pleasantly immersed in Diana Vreeland’s Memos, which is a collection of her actual missives to the staff at Vogue, typewritten by her secretaries, but many of them hand-edited, with her large, scrawling script underlining for emphasis, or marked with the word ‘vital!’ in big red letters.

The foreword is by her grandson, who tells us that she used to retire to her expansive, luxurious bathroom in the morning, which was adorned with glass vases of unfiltered cigarettes, where she would smoke and dictate all of her letters and memos by phone to her secretaries. She sailed into the office at noon, apparently, with her correspondence already finished.

Vreeland’s language is definitive & her vision absolutely clear: “This look is over,” she tells her staff, about the last season’s proportions, “and please do not depend on it any longer, it will not help you.” It will not help you! What an incredible phrase. To a correspondent who wanted to know her thoughts on fashion for women over 40, 50, 60, she writes: “The greatest vulgarity is any imitation of youth and beauty - this is vital… I believe only in the specific woman herself at any age, and & I believe style carries all…”

I would greedily take an entire second volume like this one of the enormous wall of clipped photos & inspiration Vreeland had in her office, if it could be reproduced, which she references in a long letter to one of her writers:

“In the Sargent picture at the right — and as you know I lived with this picture in the room for several weeks — there is an enormous amount of secret laughter and action within the yellow satin skirt and veiled face… just because the girl is delighted with her world and there is no point in thinking that was a better world it is only that dedicated people believe that it was and today dedicated people now wish to think as the masses do that there is no hope for anything…”

Imagine getting that editorial note back! I wished so strongly as I read it to live with pictures in the room for several weeks. I could not immediately find the painting she refers to, though I would love to see the secret laughter in the girl’s face, so if you know it, do write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com.

Thank you, as always, for reading the the Dead Letter Department. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, I hope what is vital becomes clear to you, with or without an editorial note telling you so.