ANOTHER PROVINCE HEARD FROM
My sweet baby Sis -
I'm enclosing Gardner's infinitely wise article about writing big breath works. I wouldn't send it if you didn't fit it in so many ways. I took great heart from it, and I'm only 100 pages in front of you after 6 more years at work.
I wish to hell I was home. I'd love to rock in the swing and stare at you, listen to Eric trash himself in every way, and spend good time with Mom. I just made my incense rounds, putting a lighted stick in each room of the apartment. You must be happy, with all the good things in from California, in the valise of the goodest of them all. I hope Mom doesn't just see me as another old, fucking ‘man' now. I'm not. I never have been. Even other men think I'm different from them, almost all of them. I remember once in Basic, a guy defended me to a bunch of fellows who were putting me down in my absence (heard this from my roommate) by saying "He's got more sense and a bigger heart than all the rest of you put together!" And all I'd done was send his little sister a Halloween card. When I heard that and saw the fellow, I was so stunned I didn't even know what to say.
I grateful you've found yourself at home with that guy. That's the secret. Partly. It's right to stay with one for a good while, too, for sure. You'll know when it's time to go. I don't think there's a single thing wrong with you that love won't cure. Self-love, too. Look in the mirror and kiss yourself for me, ok? Dad told me to stay away from Thurl, ‘he's happy'. He didn't tell me to stay away from you. Haw. That's Dad. I hope you all feel like going to his grave sometime, to say hello for me, anyway. Well, that's out of my province.
Mike Rasputin Zempter
[letter to Mike]
Mike -
I'm having a problem with publishing pieces of your manuscript lately. So I looked in the book on geophysical anomalies you were highlighting in when you died, and found I seem to have exhausted the segments you marked for our attention. Tempted to move on past the sections you reviewed and see if anything else you had not reached yet would have likely caught your eye. Point it out for you. But that doesn't feel right. Amazing how much you wrote and who ended up with it and how little is available to still be published in your name. I've encountered a lot of good quotes lately, I can just hear you enjoying them. Like the son of the 63 year old woman who went fishing and got her raft caught in some remote tangle of brush. Missing five days before another fisherman spotted her and got help. By that time, her sons had suspended search and rescue and were in recovery mode. Looking for a body. When she turned up sunburned and relieved, one of her sons told the press....
"She is always doing stuff she shouldn't be doing. Like this." ;-
Also came across a year-old account of a small plane pilot in the UK who experienced engine trouble and was forced to land in a pasture. He hit a cow. At first he thought he was cool, because all the cows huddled around the edges of the pasture when they saw him coming. Most of them on his left. So he went to set down away from them, and at the last minute one "silly" black and white went rushing across his path to go be with the majority of the cows on the other side of the pasture. The plane hit, scooped and rolled her, and according to the pilot, she hopped up immediately and hurried off to recommence grazing nearby. (But probably not any nearer by than she could help.) The pilot said words to the effect of:
"I have to say this is the first time I've hit a cow with my plane."
I guess it would be kind of like getting bit on the ass by a deer while you're out hunting. God's way of saying you could work on accuracy. Poor Bossie. Probably a cousin of that cow that was spotted on the floor of the Pacific by a submarine back in the late eighties.
And here is one I know you would be all over, if I haven't mentioned it before. How about those poor creatures washing up these last few years on the New York coast? They are not readily identifiable as dogs or pigs and seem to have beaks for snouts - per the photographs, beaks like giant fleshy octopus beaks. The press is calling them something like the "Montauk monsters," and the first one to wash up a couple of years ago had, whether by tangling in flotsam or by human design, a tether knotted about one of its front .....paws? hands? Feet? Hard to say. Poor little Moreaulets. You would be hot on the trail. This I know.
I stayed the night with Eric and his son in Maysville last month. We watched that pearl beyond price "The Bear" on DVD. Then after Alex went to bed, we stayed up and talked about you until after three a.m. The lamp there in the living room kept flickering, and I asked Eric about the wiring, but he said the wires are fine and his lamps just do that sometimes. In the morning, I checked my cellphone for the time, and it was drained dead. Black, blank screen. First time ever since I acquired this new phone with the brand new battery four months ago. Never even made a call all night and took it off the charger only fifteen hours earlier. Flummoxed, until I got home and turned on the TV to lend background interest to my housework. One of the Ghost Hunters was explaining to a client how the batteries in freshly charged phones and cameras and etc. often drain completely when the spirit world is manifesting. The ghosts, he said, drain from the batteries the energy they need to accomplish their manifestations. So I thought you drained my phone to listen to what Eric and I said about you, and hopefully to watch the Bear with the three of us. And to flicker the lights. Then, I thought, but when I go to Maysville and can't make calls because there are no Sprint towers, perhaps the phone reaches and searches for a tower until it exhausts itself. There could be a natural reason why my phone drained dead as a doornail from being there overnight.
Last week I was in Maysville for a number of hours. At some point I pulled out my phone and it was in "Power Save Mode." So that shoots my theory that it goes into tower search overdrive and drains itself. I wonder if you flicker the lights there sometimes to say hi to Eric. If so, I hope you watched "The Bear" with us. We could have used you there. Especially during the turtle scene. ;-)