(Open) Postscript to a friend

It is rare that someone like you and me should even know each other as well as we do. Of course, writers have expressed themselves quite intimately throughout recorded human history. But technology is changing the meaning of distance and time – and cultural rules now allow new possibilities.

We have read some of each other’s thoughts - appropriate and personal (those thoughts), I think. I have been glad to have expressed myself and to have been read, but Emily Dickenson had been turning over in her grave before most of her intimate ideas were revealed.

As a writer – and working at becoming ‘better’ in some undefined sense – I would invite some criticism of what I have written – but still, our face to face friendship matters much more to me. I suppose we shall have to play this part by ear.

Words can be such slippery things. One thing peeks out at me. Both of us use the word ‘you’ in our writing – sometimes being a little  (or a lot) vague about who the ‘you’ really is.

In that poem ‘Spirit in the sky’ that I recorded the other night this much was true:

“Of course, I was thinking of a few young baristas that early morning. I had quite absurdly punched up Greenbaum's song on a device for them the day before. And I would be doing something else besides stopping in at Aimee's on a Sunday afternoon for something to drink and a smile. I was quite literally planning instead to walk among the dead - at a cemetery - while the baristas would likely be dying among the laughing regulars while they did their jobs near the end of their shifts.

But 'you' are many different people. There will be other nights that I will be thinking of you as surely as there are stars and the moon in the sky. And some of you have already passed on.”

This ‘thinking about you’ is all a little like me asking you if I would lie to you. One answer is that  of course I would. Another is that I would never wittingly hurt you. But here is a hard truth. Human beings are unwitting all the time.

One thing that I like about gardening is that I cannot fool myself. I can spread compost, plant tomato plants, hoe and water and pull weeds, but most of the whole process is not up to me. And still I will take some credit. My efforts do matter in small but specific and beautiful and tasty ways.

And now I mean you, Mary, when I say I hope that you and I will get to know each other better. You are one of the stars in my sky. I will have to imagine that the analogy is clear enough, but in some things, words cannot say as well as we can say and mean with the many other ways we have of expressing ourselves as human beings.

But I get a great deal of satisfaction of trying to say some things that matter to me using words. You can ask me some time what I mean when I say that you’re no slouch, either, if you want to. My kingdom for the right emoticon, here.

You, Mary, should see my garden sometime. I think that those words in that sentence mean exactly what they say.

Now I think I’ll listen to Mr. Greenbaum and Mr. Simon one more time, and then see if I can get back to sleep. It’s funny, Norman – perhaps he and Paul won’t mind if I call them by their first names – Norman uses so many words I don’t believe in. And Paul is not really talking exactly about what I’m thinking about in ‘Tenderness.’ But all of that doesn’t really matter. I hear something in their songs that tells me what I mean for myself within the ways that they express themselves – what they have to say.

You gotta wonder what it all means, sometime. ‘Who’ am I talking to? I know that I wonder. But who the ! am I? Maybe you can tell me. ‘Who?’ indeed!

Link back to 'Spirit in the sky'