Dead Letter Department #75

weather report

The first album I ever bought for myself was Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman, on tape, out of a giant bargain bin, & I would play it for my Barbies, who had intricate storylines for every song, but mostly Delta Dawn. I was convinced, despite our household’s irreligiousity, that the song was about Jesus, who was somehow also the narrator’s missing lover who she was hoping, all those years later, would still take her to his mansion in the sky.

I learned how to listen to music on the enormous record player in the wardrobe of my parents’ house: my dad taught me to how to handle the records carefully, polish them with a block of soft fabric, set them on the machine and drop the needle down. I sat in the living room, my legs all tangled up with my crush on the couch, listening to early Tom Waits & Janis Joplin, and when tapes came in I’d sit for hours in front of the stereo making mixes. My first car had a tape deck, so I rattled around with a big black box full of dozens of tapes, most of them copies, and would shove it at people to make them pick our soundtrack. The car could seat five, plus me, and looked like something a soccer mom would drive, even full of college students all screaming along to Ani DiFranco.

Napster came along when I was about half way through Bennington, so my friend Nicholas came over & put hundreds of hours of free music onto my computer for me—mostly Modest Mouse, if I remember correctly. I think I still have that laptop somewhere, & if I could get it to run, I could go back & listen to those playlists now.

Now I play a massive library through a little speaker in my kitchen, put the songs directly into my headphones when I walk around the block, although I am still graced with the occasional mix CD from a penpal in New Jersey, & they remain one of my favorite things to listen to: someone else’s choosing, but for me.

We had, first, when I was little, a rotary phone on the wall—I remember putting my finger in the hole to turn the dial, the long spin around for the numbers—and then phones with cords, and finally when I entered into the age of wanting to talk to my friends constantly, a portable that I could take anywhere in the house, out onto the deck for long conversations, but the college phones were old school, huge blocks of tan plastic that you rented for some nominal amount. If you didn’t know the extension, you could call the security booth & ask an actual human being, who would connect you through. I had the switchboard number memorized for ages, years after I graduated, and I think it may still be written down in my address book now. Susie scribbled everyone’s extensions on her phone with permanent marker, a record of all the important people in her life for one semester and then another.

You had to know where people would be, learn their schedules, make actual plans, and all of us had little notebooks hung on our dorm doors where our friends could write when we were away. “Going to the Downstairs Cafe,” we’d scribble, or “Meet you at Commons.” I kept the notebooks too, sealed up in some archival envelope in the garage, & I miss that, coming back to see what people had written on my door when I was out.

There was only one girl with a cell phone—someone quite wealthy, who also kept a Pomeranian named muffin hidden in her dorm room for at least once a semester—and I’d see her walking around the campus holding a giant block of black plastic to the side of her face, talking to her friends in New York.

My first cell phone flipped open, and kept me company on the long drive across the country, cradled between my shoulder and cheek as I flew over endless miles, talking to the friends I’d left behind. I kept the habit of a landline for one more house, and never again after that, all my communications filtered through the little box in my pocket.

Now if I accidentally leave the house without my phone, I feel briefly panicked, unexpectedly naked, and then suddenly relieved: no news, no phone calls, no obsessively checking my email when I should be paying attention to what’s around me.

This isn’t nostalgia, exactly: I don’t want to go back, I just remember. I left so many voicemails, before the age of text messages, that I ran completely out of things to say & would just pick up a book & read a little bit of whatever was closest, part of a poem, half a paragraph, something for my friend to listen to for minute.

There were printed MapQuest directions instead of GPS, and giant atlases with tangled city freeways pulled out into convenient diagrams, and once when I stopped for directions in Vermont, the guy at the counter actually laughed, & said, “You can’t get there from here,” and then confessed he was kidding & set me carefully on my way again.

I wrote letters all the time, to friends back home, new friends from school, my parents, & I think that’s what got me thinking about all of this, getting a letter, a proper one, with news & questions & a little drawing, from an old friend. It’s part of what keeps me writing these, as close as I can get to a letter to you without having your address, sticking on the stamp: still letters, though, something for you, arriving in your inbox, that isn’t a bill or an ad or an obligation.

one good thing

I hadn’t been up to Semiahmoo in weeks, having either been stuck in town or completely out of it, but I took myself there yesterday & the sky was wildly expansive above me, that beautiful late fall color, when you want to suck all the fading sunshine right down into your skin & keep it.

It turns out there’s a little boardwalk path all around the spit, so you pass the marina, with its keypad doors & expensive boats, and then the derelict ferry terminal, covered in seagulls, who had clearly managed to abscond with someone’s pumpkin and scatter pieces of it all over the deck. The trail loops around the resort itself, taking you past huge glass walls where you can glimpse all the people eating breakfast and finally back down onto the beach again, where I saw a man holding a giant fishing rod he didn’t seem to know what to do with, accompanied by a woman in leather pants who was doing her best to be game about the morning’s activities, even if they did involve fish. I sat on a log for a while & watched hundreds of seabirds going about their noisy business, and let the wind blow everything out of my skull for a while, nothing but the rattle of the pebbles in the waves & a bunch of shouty children farther down the beach.

Thank you, as always, for reading. 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 have at least one moment where your mind empties out & you get to just look for a while.