Personal Connections Through the US Postal Service: A Year of the Tesseract Post (among other stuff)
It's gotten to the point where, if you happen to be my LiveJournal Friend, you can't click on the blog without my entire first page being "My Tweets" imports. I try to Friendslock those posts as soon as I catch them, not because they're meant to be friends-only (you can just read my Twitter if you wanted to read what was in those posts, AND MORE, because you could read my witty replies to people too! I mean "witty" in a hopeful, probably figurative sense), but because I figure most Friends are reading on Friends pages rather than directly, so this way the posts aren't cluttering up the page for people who Just Popped By (and yet I still have record!). But my POINT is, it's time for me to POST something REAL again, obviously.
I've been planning to post something about music and mood, and how they interact particularly in MY life, but first I wanted to finish the playlist I was working on so I could use it as an example. Only I kept getting distracted LISTENING to the songs, and then one song would get in my head and make me unable to write about another song, and so on in a long series of brain confusion of this sort... and THEN I got "It's All Too Much" in my head and realized that certainly NO music-and-mood discussion would be complete without mentioning George Harrison, who wrote what is always the most COMFORTING music to me-- the sad songs are hopeful, the happy songs a little wistful, joy bubbles up in your heart listening to his musical prayers (the ones that are literal prayers as well as the ones that just ARE), and anyway I started reading this entry from last fall, about the fan letter I never sent him, and I noticed this line:
"Madeleine L'Engle's [letter] made it off safely to Farrar Strauss and Giroux and eventually into the hands of the-woman-I-was-to-name-my-daughter-after herself, who then even wrote BACK to me (which I will tell you all about sometime next year during my Year of the Tesseract celebrations)"
RIGHT! It's long since time for another Year of the Tesseract post! And what's funny is it ties into something I've been obsessing over for the past few days-- getting Real Mail.
There's just something about Real Mail, isn't there? It's so easy to send an electronic message: you see a note on the side of Facebook saying "Today is SoandSo's Birthday" and you click on over to SoandSo's profile and type "Happy Birthday, SoandSo!" which may be the only thing you have SAID to SoandSo since, well, perhaps their LAST birthday. Or you could send MASS messages out to EVERYONE. That's what most Internet posting is. A message to whomever wants to read it.
One of the teens in this library stuck a Post-it on the desk here that says "Hey from your favorite person." This amuses me, because it's so fill-in-the-blank. WHOEVER YOU, the person sitting at this desk, think is your FAVORITE PERSON, they say Hey. It could be ANYBODY! You could CHANGE who's saying hey every time you sit DOWN! How PRACTICAL!
But of course it's even less real than a Happy Birthday on Facebook. The thing about a Real Paper Letter in the Real Snail Mail is that SOMEBODY WROTE THAT JUST FOR YOU. Someone was thinking of you SO much that they TOOK the time out of their busy lives to sit down with a real pen and paper and shape the words with their own hands, TO YOU, writing your name at the top, signing their name at the bottom. They folded the paper and slipped it into an envelope, possibly even sealing the envelope with their OWN SALIVA, carefully printing out YOUR ADDRESS on the front, spending 45 of their own cents on the stamp they've stuck on the corner, walking it to the mailbox and sending it off TO YOU. Email and other electronic communication is handy, but THIS? This is personal.
Of course, if you're a public figure, you probably don't have TIME to send many such communications, certainly not to your many fans who have sent you stuff. After all, you have to, um, DO THE JOB your fans are so impressed with in the first place, on top of, you know, having a life, and there are oh so MANY fans writing to you, how could you possibly write back to ALL of them? This is why many such public figures resort to The Form Letter.
And Madeleine L'Engle was no different. But hey, I wasn't really expecting a response at ALL, and this came about ten months after I'd sent my letter (luckily a month BEFORE I moved out of that particular apartment), and the return address from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City did not (off the top of my head) give me any clues.
Inside the envelope were two pages. The first was a generic printout about Madeleine L'Engle, biography on one side, bibliography on the other, a picture in there as well. The second page was also, in the middle, a form letter, but a more specific one. I had written to her specifically about A Wrinkle in Time, how much it had inspired me, comforted me, and given me courage throughout my life. This form letter talked about the Deep Questions, how writing Wrinkle had been her way of reaching for answers, and how important it is to keep asking the Deep Questions. "There really aren't any easy answers to the very difficult questions... but we have to keep asking them, knowing that it's alright not to have the answers. Trust yourself." I suspected she had several basic form letters discussing the most common aspects of her books that people wrote to her about, and my letter fit best with this one.
But that wasn't all of it. On the top, in black felt-tip, in her handwriting, it said "Amy--" and on the bottom, in the same black felt-tip, her signature. But she also wrote in one more line, one sentence just for me: "I am also gaining courage from the stories..."
One little sentence, one little personal connection between me and a woman who'd unwittingly changed my life, the woman I would name my daughter after. I am also gaining courage from the stories.... It was a small confidence, a small bit of herself she'd chosen to share with me. She knew what I was feeling. She, who had WRITTEN these stories, still needed to be reminded sometimes of the Truth behind them. And she wanted me to know that.
I framed that page. It hung beside my desk for a long time, and then when the office became the New Madeleine's bedroom, I left it there for awhile seeing as it was from her own inspiring namesake. But then she started pulling everything down off the walls and throwing them about, and the frame broke, so I've since rescued the letter and it's now hiding again on my desk, but not displayed because there isn't a place for it. Maybe once Maddie stops violently redecorating, she can have it back up there.
Because it's a lovely letter, form-letter part of it included. "Stories don't have to be factual in order to be true," it reminds us, concluding, "We can still find hope and beauty in the world and not give up on the journey."
Thank you, ma'am, for taking the time to share with me this little bit of wisdom, this little message, just for me, sealed up and sent through the mail.
I've been planning to post something about music and mood, and how they interact particularly in MY life, but first I wanted to finish the playlist I was working on so I could use it as an example. Only I kept getting distracted LISTENING to the songs, and then one song would get in my head and make me unable to write about another song, and so on in a long series of brain confusion of this sort... and THEN I got "It's All Too Much" in my head and realized that certainly NO music-and-mood discussion would be complete without mentioning George Harrison, who wrote what is always the most COMFORTING music to me-- the sad songs are hopeful, the happy songs a little wistful, joy bubbles up in your heart listening to his musical prayers (the ones that are literal prayers as well as the ones that just ARE), and anyway I started reading this entry from last fall, about the fan letter I never sent him, and I noticed this line:
"Madeleine L'Engle's [letter] made it off safely to Farrar Strauss and Giroux and eventually into the hands of the-woman-I-was-to-name-my-daughter-after herself, who then even wrote BACK to me (which I will tell you all about sometime next year during my Year of the Tesseract celebrations)"
RIGHT! It's long since time for another Year of the Tesseract post! And what's funny is it ties into something I've been obsessing over for the past few days-- getting Real Mail.
There's just something about Real Mail, isn't there? It's so easy to send an electronic message: you see a note on the side of Facebook saying "Today is SoandSo's Birthday" and you click on over to SoandSo's profile and type "Happy Birthday, SoandSo!" which may be the only thing you have SAID to SoandSo since, well, perhaps their LAST birthday. Or you could send MASS messages out to EVERYONE. That's what most Internet posting is. A message to whomever wants to read it.
One of the teens in this library stuck a Post-it on the desk here that says "Hey from your favorite person." This amuses me, because it's so fill-in-the-blank. WHOEVER YOU, the person sitting at this desk, think is your FAVORITE PERSON, they say Hey. It could be ANYBODY! You could CHANGE who's saying hey every time you sit DOWN! How PRACTICAL!
But of course it's even less real than a Happy Birthday on Facebook. The thing about a Real Paper Letter in the Real Snail Mail is that SOMEBODY WROTE THAT JUST FOR YOU. Someone was thinking of you SO much that they TOOK the time out of their busy lives to sit down with a real pen and paper and shape the words with their own hands, TO YOU, writing your name at the top, signing their name at the bottom. They folded the paper and slipped it into an envelope, possibly even sealing the envelope with their OWN SALIVA, carefully printing out YOUR ADDRESS on the front, spending 45 of their own cents on the stamp they've stuck on the corner, walking it to the mailbox and sending it off TO YOU. Email and other electronic communication is handy, but THIS? This is personal.
Of course, if you're a public figure, you probably don't have TIME to send many such communications, certainly not to your many fans who have sent you stuff. After all, you have to, um, DO THE JOB your fans are so impressed with in the first place, on top of, you know, having a life, and there are oh so MANY fans writing to you, how could you possibly write back to ALL of them? This is why many such public figures resort to The Form Letter.
And Madeleine L'Engle was no different. But hey, I wasn't really expecting a response at ALL, and this came about ten months after I'd sent my letter (luckily a month BEFORE I moved out of that particular apartment), and the return address from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City did not (off the top of my head) give me any clues.
Inside the envelope were two pages. The first was a generic printout about Madeleine L'Engle, biography on one side, bibliography on the other, a picture in there as well. The second page was also, in the middle, a form letter, but a more specific one. I had written to her specifically about A Wrinkle in Time, how much it had inspired me, comforted me, and given me courage throughout my life. This form letter talked about the Deep Questions, how writing Wrinkle had been her way of reaching for answers, and how important it is to keep asking the Deep Questions. "There really aren't any easy answers to the very difficult questions... but we have to keep asking them, knowing that it's alright not to have the answers. Trust yourself." I suspected she had several basic form letters discussing the most common aspects of her books that people wrote to her about, and my letter fit best with this one.
But that wasn't all of it. On the top, in black felt-tip, in her handwriting, it said "Amy--" and on the bottom, in the same black felt-tip, her signature. But she also wrote in one more line, one sentence just for me: "I am also gaining courage from the stories..."
One little sentence, one little personal connection between me and a woman who'd unwittingly changed my life, the woman I would name my daughter after. I am also gaining courage from the stories.... It was a small confidence, a small bit of herself she'd chosen to share with me. She knew what I was feeling. She, who had WRITTEN these stories, still needed to be reminded sometimes of the Truth behind them. And she wanted me to know that.
I framed that page. It hung beside my desk for a long time, and then when the office became the New Madeleine's bedroom, I left it there for awhile seeing as it was from her own inspiring namesake. But then she started pulling everything down off the walls and throwing them about, and the frame broke, so I've since rescued the letter and it's now hiding again on my desk, but not displayed because there isn't a place for it. Maybe once Maddie stops violently redecorating, she can have it back up there.
Because it's a lovely letter, form-letter part of it included. "Stories don't have to be factual in order to be true," it reminds us, concluding, "We can still find hope and beauty in the world and not give up on the journey."
Thank you, ma'am, for taking the time to share with me this little bit of wisdom, this little message, just for me, sealed up and sent through the mail.