Dead Letter Department #34

(did you miss Dead Letter Department #33? read about protests & sidewalk cafes here!)

weather report

Once you see the geoducks, they’re everywhere. I’ve been trying to go low-tide exploring as often as I can, now that the water’s getting warm enough to go at least knee deep. Say what you will about crocs & their aesthetic-busting ugliness, they are the ultimate beach shoes—thick enough to protect from shell shards but open enough to feel the cool wash of salt water on your toes.  I hide my sneakers & coffee up behind the driftwood & go all the way out to the edge, jumping out of the way when the clams jet angry water streams a couple of feet into the air.

Last time I met a guy who collects stones & makes them into jewelry. “I retired six months ago, & knew I didn’t just want to sit around doing puzzles, so I got a book on rocks,” he explained, showing me what he’d already scooped up. “There’s jasper, and jade, and even prize-winning agates, if you know how to look, but people don’t know, they just walk over it without seeing.”

“The only thing I found today was this,” I told him, holding out a little nub of light blue sea glass, about the size of two jelly beans.

“Oh, but that’s a good one,” he said, very kindly. “You don’t see that color very much.”

I’m a regular under my new name for the first time. Actually, it’s the first time I’ve been a regular anywhere except the grocery store since the before-times. The old queer coffee shop in town closed a few months ago, folded under the pandemic pressure & rising costs of doing business in my town, & I miss it, but there’s a nice new place the next neighborhood over from mine. They have by far the best coffee in town, a lavender mocha that tastes like decadence, & a big outside seating area where my friend & I meet for work dates.

We tried to work there yesterday but unfortunately there was a couple sitting behind us who were having a bunch of online meetings at a surprisingly high volume. It’s weird, if they’d just been talking to each other I think I could have tuned it out, but since I could only hear half the conversation it was driving me absolutely wild.

“It’s because your brain keeps having to fill in the other half,” C said, and she’s right. I think it’s also the feeling of being in a space with someone who’s only half there, & perhaps not keeping quite as much of a handle on their projection as they would otherwise.

Back in the days when I used to call people on the phone without the current era’s careful multi-text confirmations setting up a time to talk, I used to leave a lot of voicemails. We were all always running around, & after a while you sort of dry up your store of things to say in a voicemail, so I started just reading a little bit of whatever was handy—a paragraph or a stanza. I loved when people would do it back, just grab something off their desk & read to me for a minute when they couldn’t reach me, & I’ve been thinking of starting it up again as postcards. It’s so nice to get mail (“Like a real person!” my friend N always says), an actual physical object that someone touched while thinking of you. If that sounds like something you’d like to receive in your actual mailbox, a little break from the irrelevant advertising & bills, email me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & maybe you’ll get a postcard with a snippet of something.

reading room

Ada Limón has been cracking my heart open for a long time—I follow her on Twitter, where she is beloved & frequently posted, but it finally occurred to me that she actually publishes real books too so I’ve spent the last couple months with The Carrying whenever I’ve had the emotional fortitude for poetry. I’m trying to make it a habit again—I listened to an interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats once where he talked about a time in his life when he was reading tons of poetry & how it impacted his song writing, which is obviously goals, but in these parlous days it’s been hard to grasp things with sharp edges.

I also just finished Alexandeer Chee’s The Queen of the Night, which I’ll write a whole thing about for you once I’ve had a chance to metabolize it a little bit.

one good thing

Do you remember the Disappointed House in the Emily books? If I remember correctly (I can’t stop to look it up or I’ll spend the whole morning reading L.M. Montgomery instead of working), it was a house near New Moon that had been built but never lived in. Emily, of course, thinks that the house mourns the life it never got to have, standing empty when it should be occupied & loved. My neighborhood had its own Disappointed House, a small, sad & ramshackle place sitting among the other well-coiffed houses, with a rotting roof & a increasingly shabby row of dried out arbor vitae. Someone’s been working on it for a long time in strange fits & starts that left it looking half-abandoned most of the time, & it’s been going on for so many years that I thought it might be headed for a teardown instead of coming back to life. Just last week I drove by & it has new everything: a lovely new bright white paint job with shiny black details, a new roof, restored siding, the whole bit. Even the hedges are looking more alert. I think it’s about to not be disappointed anymore.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime may you get only voicemails with good news.