Dead Letter Department #14

(did you miss dead letter department #13? catch up here!)

There was a brief surfacing earlier this summer when things started to seem a little better. I made tentative plans, even if they were only in my head, about what the mile markers would need to be for travel, visits, crowds. Maybe even airplanes. Then the Delta variation rounded the corner. Hospitalizations and deaths soared again and we rocked backwards into another wave of the pandemic.

Usually I’m excited about fall: rain, pearl grey days, a wave of color rolling down the coast, geese overheard talking about Mary Oliver. This year it’s hard to accomodate myself to the growing darkness. My seasonal affective lamp is already out of the garage, sitting on the bookshelf by my desk with the slightly aggrieved expression of someone who’s waiting to start a shift at work. I have to find things to look forward to & I’m not at all sure how.

I was on my way back from Portland the other day (turns out you can make that drive with only a gas stop and not use a restroom anywhere as long as you carefully dehydrate beforehand), about halfway through the snarl of traffic & weirdly aggressive drivers that is downtown Seattle, when my car started to shake. At first I thought it was the pavement, or maybe a tire, having gotten an enormous bolt embedded in the rubber pretty recently. Then the check engine light started flickering on and off again, flashing onto the dash for a second, just long enough for me to glance down, and then disappearing.

There are a lot of bad places to break down, of course: a hundred miles out into the desert, someplace with no cell reception. As a country mouse, downtown Seattle isn’t great, especially not when you’re snared in highway traffic & have no idea what exit might provide a suitable parking space to limp into. It seemed better to keep going as long as I possibly could, since every mile I could go farther north was one less I’d have to ask someone to drive if I did need to call for help. The car shook off & on, sometimes violently, usually when I hit the gas. I started trying to calculate whether it would be better to get into the express lane that goes under the highway to make better time but also risk getting stranded on the dark underpass bridge with traffic whipping by me. I held on to the steering wheel way too hard and tried to remember how wide the shoulder is, whether I’d be able to inch my way onto it.

I did make it back, obviously. I am not sending this to you from my new home on the highway, having set up a wifi hotspot for various correspondence needs.

When I called my mechanic to get an appointment a couple days later, the service tech put me on hold. “Where are you?” he asked when he got back on the line, sounding urgent.

“Oh, I made it home,” I said, a little over-jauntily. I hadn’t realized he thought I was still pulled over somewhere, stranded. “I made it all the way back. I can probably drive out to you.”

It wasn’t until then that I really registered it had been an emergency, not an almost-emergency, that just because I hadn’t actually ended up broken down didn’t mean it wasn’t worthy of someone’s attention.

neighborhood gossip

My best bro & this newsletter’s Gift Giving Correspondent gave me the absolutely perfect fortieth birthday present, which is of course a artisanal seasonal pickle subscription. I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in: artisanal pickles, delivered to my very own personal house, for me to eat. Nothing could be better. But because they go beyond even gift-giving perfection, they also got me a subscription to a very cool storytelling project, a series of letters between two strangers falling in love during World War II: Dear Jack, Dear Louise.

I love mail & I love eavesdropping so this was really the best of both worlds, giving me a little taste of the story every week for a couple of months. I saved all of it, of course, including the envelopes & telegrams & beautiful period stamps, so I could offer it up on my neighborhood Buy Nothing group for someone else to enjoy. The packet was such a hot commodity I believe it is now circulating between various epistolary-minded people, rivaling only the sailor pet outfit which is constantly being exchanged among various households, used to dress outraged cats and small dogs & then forwarded on.

I’m very fortunate in my immediate neighbors in that they are largely friendly & even the ones who are master gardeners don’t seem to turn up their noises at my ramshackle approach to mowing & mulching. My favorite neighbor lives right across the street & is in possession of a very small, very wiggly dog named Rudy. Ever since my dog died a couple years ago she periodically pops out onto her porch & shouts across the street at me, “Do you want to see Rudy Tootie?!”

My answer is, without fail, some version of “Yes, immediately, thank god you offered.” I shimmy on over into her yard & she lets me hold Rudy for a few minutes & tell him how perfect (very) and small (extremely) he is.

I don’t know how she knows when it’s time to offer, but she’s always right.

reading room

I tried the Hunter Biden memoir & didn’t find myself sufficiently gripped so I’m back with Michelle Tea & her tarot teachings, have got Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals on deck & Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be A List of Further Possibilities waiting for when I have the emotional wherewithal to read poetry. I also subscribe to Matthew Ogle’s Pome, short modern poetry to your inbox, which is a lovely thing to have appearing among the account statements & obligations.

I’d like to be reading more fiction but the problem I’m running into is so simple it sounds stupid: I just don’t want to be any more sad or worried than I am. It doesn’t feel cathartic right now, it just feels like too much, & this is very limiting when it comes to experiencing fiction or art of any kind. I’m assuming this particular weather system will pass before long & I’ll once again be able to dive in with abandon.

one good thing

It’s been a stressful & stupid couple of weeks. All sorts of things have broken down & gone wrong & been miscommunicated, to the point where I started vaguely scanning social media for the word ‘retrograde,’ not that I’m entirely sure what that means. My saving grace has been pumpkin cream cold brew: delicious cold brew with a wallop of pumpkin spice cream smacked on top of it so it drifts down into the coffee. I’ve been sitting at the new park in town & looking at the grey waves washing in while I drink it. Get one for yourself immediately & find whatever your equivalent is for grey waves.

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 again soon & in the meantime I hope your car doesn’t flash any warning lights at you at all, not even little ones.