A letter from 1987

The thing about reinventing your life is that it only takes a few steps to undo years of unwanted decay. The thing about reinventing yourself is that people rarely do it and the few that prove successful are often criticized instead of praised.

On Thursday, I ran into an old friend I had grown up with. I had not seen him for at least fifteen years, maybe longer. I am 25 years old. This old friend looked a lot like my childhood-- only he was grown. From the passenger window of my car, past his arm propped against the door his wife stood smiling with a piece of lunch meat in her hand. They were a nice couple, preoccupied at the moment with trying to catch a loose animal, and while I am not sure what kind of animal it was, I like to imagine it was a dog; A golden retriever--something cuddly, soft, and cute. I liked to think that they were trying to catch something that didn't remind me of age or change; the kind of animal that will always make you feel young and give even the most geriatric of legs the itch to run.

I came home and told my mother I could not move to her neighborhood. That husband and I had to relocate, so that my young daughter (not yet born) will not grow up down the street from the young children (not yet born) of the person that so resembles my childhood. And on that note, she handed me a letter from 1987.

It was not addressed to me, and it did not look 22 years old. "Dear Roger and Sally", it began subtly in courier new font. It proceeded to tell me, in eight to ten paragraphs, about a man I have always known but never understood. They were the words of my father, no doubt written for him through transcription and by typewriter, courtesy of the woman he was dating at the time, a woman who had red hair and let me sleep between them at night.
There were only a handful of errors in the whole letter but they were atrocious misspellings-- the kind that remind you that spell check is still a young tool. The man that dictated that letter was the proud, loving father of a four year old me, a girl he described as being "not the type to sit in the corner and sip lemonade while wearing a frilly dress." What was most astounding was how he spoke of me, of Jenny, so proudly, so purposely. He does not speak now.

My goal for this blog is not necessarily to share, especially not right away and certainly not completely publicly. Instead, it is to practice creating my life through words, on paper, in a way that intrigues and speaks truths and makes transparent the mysteries of the world. I hope this becomes habit, like a good glass of wine. I hope that it becomes art.