Dead Letter Department # 13

(did you miss dead letter department #12? catch up here!)

balloons ahead

I just had a milestone birthday, and despite the half-conscious habit I’ve developed in the past couple of years of anticipating my new age by a few months (it somehow makes the moment when the clock finally ticks over a little bit easier, don’t ask why) this was a tough one. Time moves so strangely these days. My already fractured memory seems to have given up entirely on any sort of organizing principle. I had coffee with an old friend recently, someone I worked with for years and years, and when we were diving into the heady froth of company gossip I couldn’t string things together at all. Did she tell me about that the last time I saw her? Was it five years ago when that happened or eight or a hundred? Who can say, at this point?

There are things I thought would be steady compass points even when I was too far out to see the shore and now I can’t catch sight of them at all. Forty would feel like a big deal regardless, I think, but stranded here in the almost-summer of what people were up to a couple months ago calling post-pandemic it got even bigger. I was driving home a few days before my actual birthday when I saw a gold glint, somewhere way high up above the highway. For a second I thought it was a sky diver but I was miles away from where I usually see them drifting down to one of the big open fields south of Chuckanut. I kept glancing up, busily worrying about whoever had misjudged badly enough to come down that close to the traffic when the mystery suddenly rearranged itself right above me. It was two of those enormous golden balloons, the kind people put out at anniversary parties, buffeting against each other before briefly revealing their shapes: a 3 and a 9. I don’t always believe in signs & portents but holy shit did that seem like a pretty obvious one. There they go, my thirties, sailing away across the horizon, already completely out of reach.

beloved stranger of the week

This week it’s someone I didn’t actually get to meet. The Lutheran church near my house had a pierogi bake sale: truly three words to bring joy to my heart. We got there right as they were supposed to open at nine AM and were met by a flock of teenagers carrying Starbucks cups accompanied by a tremendously friendly man who apologized over and over for the wait on the actual sale. “The lady who makes them works nights,” he explained. “She came off her shift and straight here to make the pierogis.”

I bought everything: ricotta filled cookies and little cakes shaped like peaches with a tiny tuft of mint between the two halves to make a perfect stem, and of course all the kinds of pierogis I thought it was plausible I would eat. All of it was perfect. I hope some of the Starbucks was for her.

TV lounge

Sometimes television is just too high stakes and I want to watch something objectively bad. I want to watch something that does not immediately engage my sympathies to the point where I worry about the characters. Specifically, I want to watch Real Housewives, but I have caveats! The ones where everyone has a bunch of small children are way too stressful because I keep imagining what it will be like for those poor little guys to see their childhood smashed all over the viewing public for the rest of their lives. Vanderpump Rules was perfect because there is not a single sympathetic character and none of them have kids, at least in any of the eight (eight!) seasons I’ve seen so far.

Real Housewives of Salt Lake City comes close to meeting the criteria because the children are only lightly featured & it has the tremendous advantage of an extremely wild & not entirely expected layer of religious discussion. Bonding activities include group Botox, skiing, fighting, sitting in cast iron tubs fed by a hot spring, the dissection of Mormon culture vs Mormon religion, more fighting, couples snowmobiling (honestly this looked super fun) and drunk fighting. If this kind of thing is your jam, which you will know by how your facial muscles felt when you read the words “Real Housewives,” I strongly recommend watching it & then immediately telling me every single opinion you have about Lisa & Meredith.

reading room

I just finished Unraveled by Courtney Milan, whose work I brushed up against briefly a couple years ago when our Romance Writing Correspondent recommended her. I suspect I was just waiting for the right moment for her work to become a full-fledged obsession & this book was the one to do it. It’s a sharply written historical romance with what is so often for me the key to interesting love stories: busted-up weirdos who find each other and try to figure out how to stay. I’m going to scramble over to the library & get all the other ones in the series as soon as I’m done with Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Also on deck is Michelle Tea’s Modern Tarot, which hopefully will take my tarot practice a little farther from vague internet searches and slightly panicked early morning contemplation towards something that more deserves the word ‘practice.’

one good thing

I miss having a dog so much that it has apparently started to actually radiate out from my person and inspire pity in those around me. I’ve had like four people recently offer to bring their dog over for me to pet BEFORE I could even even ask, which is obviously great because it means I met a corgi and a poodle with a fluffy head and a boxer/husky puppy mix who was an absolute dream while I was telling her how perfect she is but immediately bit her person on the face when he picked her up to carry her back to his table. “She’s so good with everyone else,” he told me. “And she’s so rude with us.”

Since I cannot actually convey to your precious fingertips the incredible texture of an eight-week-old boxer/husky’s fur, I offer you instead my favorite internet dog, Toby. He’s a livestock guardian dog on a farm in Vermont, and the videos he features in bring me disproportionate joy. Toby's best friend is a barn cat named Pablo & his job is to take care of ducks.

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department soon & in the meantime I hope you have at least one moment of feeling as though an enormous, very soft Great Pyrenees is watching over you & keeping all of the predators away.