The History of the Letter

written 1/3/07; recovered 3/21/08.

Dear ____,

My history of the letter:

When I was young, I was assigned a pen pal that lived in Australia. She wrote me once. I never wrote back.

When I was in third grade, my third grade teacher Mr. Littleton—who was a massively overweight man, literally a “little ton”—had us write to celebrities and their fan clubs in a quest for autographs. We’d get glossy black-and-whites back from about half of them. The crown jewels of my collection, sitting on a shelf somewhere in a green binder, are a local weatherwoman; the figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi; the defensive lineman Neil Smith; and an unsigned poster from the New Orleans Hornets NBA cheerleaders. A magnetic schedule for the ‘93-’94 Miami Heat basketball season is still on the side of our fridge. I’ve never watched a complete game of the NBA in my life.

Other than those coerced correspondences, I did not write a letter again until the fall of 2001, when an eighteen-year-old Asa W. wrote me letters from basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia. You remember him: the alcoholic with split personalities. (When we were having breakfast together in St. Louis and I was telling you the story of when he went off the deep end, it gave me the shakes. I needed to get up; I would have sat and talked for much longer otherwise.)

I’m looking at his letters right now. Army Stationary with a gradation of blue around the edges, and the emblem of the eagle clutching wheat, “E Pluribus Unum.” From Many, One. The military’s psychological strategy is to eliminate individuality in basic training by breaking down the soldier. Once his confidence is shattered, they remold him into the Army’s ideal. But I digress. Asa writes in the kind of undisciplined cursive that is the calligraphic equivalent of driving drunk and swerving all over the road. His print is much worse; the letters are blocky and disproportionate with one another, like a seven-year-old’s. In this letter I’m holding Asa talks about how he was one shot away from sniper eligibility, but when the drill was over he realized he had miscounted his rounds and left one in the chamber. He writes that he is a better shot than the drill sergeants. He leaves two plastic pins in the envelope that commemorate his training achievements. At the end he signs “One tough soldier, Asa”—and underneath, in plain block letters, his moniker “DEATH."

We wrote each other until he was out of basic training.

The next sequence of letters is from one Sarah D., who I am having dinner with tonight. I used to send her small care packages every time she went away to camp, which was often, as she became increasingly involved with youth group activities as she got older. In this letter I’m looking at now, she writes an emoticon about the expression on her face when she got my letter—“☺”—and I remember it felt good to make someone smile who was so far away. She writes what she does all day at camp with the YoungLife girls. I won’t go in depth about her; that was a friendship marked by flawless chemistry, and flawed by increasingly divergent paths regarding religion. And perhaps some unfulfilled expectation, with a dash of miscommunication.

I keep these old letters in a hard-to-reach drawer in my room at home for memories; but the most prominent letter in my mind is one I never wrote, to one Hannah T., following camp in the summer of 2002. She was the sweetest girl I had ever met-- truly an astounding woman-- and I somehow already knew that I would never hear from her again. In bed one night, I composed the letter in my head that was never written when I woke in the morning. I ran into someone last year who knew her family, who said Hannah had gone vegetarian, began eating roots she had just dug out of the ground with her bare hands, had gone barefoot, stopped wearing bras, had two children by a drug dealer… it goes on. Where would my letter have ended up? It’s funny how life works sometimes.

But that is my history of the written letter, for better or worse. Not as full of good memories as I would have hoped, or even of harmless pleasantries, but that is the company you’re joining. I personally am glad you’re (hopefully) injecting a little sun into this collection of ghosts—it’s like I’m visiting a museum of extinct species writing about these—but in any case your written history can only be off to a good start, I’m sure; the moment I get your first letter you become the author known as ______, New Years' 2007. And I think that’s something worth finding in an old drawer someday.

Well, unless also you go and shoot somebody too. That would ruin everything for me.

My Best,
Matt