A FRIEND IN NEED
I sure feel better about you. Everybody back home seems to be happier, somehow, than they were just three months ago. You all ought to learn to enjoy that winter back there. I used to go walking all winter, much more than the summer. Just bundled up in my ‘walking clothes,’ a big, thick, white, turtleneck blanket-sweater, with a big, roomy, thick, well-cut overcoat open down the front and hockey sox and high walking boots. I’d be going down a street at 3:48 a.m., my footprints the only prints in town for the four miles I’d walk. And because I wore these high, hard-heeled boots on the brick streets, and especially because I walked extraordinarily slowly, slower as I went along and relaxed, it clears my head to walk, every time, if I commit to go out 45 minutes from home then you’re forced to accept and it brings you a kind of peace if you’re thinking and want to be happy. I’m always thinking and I generally want to be happy. What I’ve been grinding to is this: the sounds of my long, slow boot steps in the silence and muffling snow, at that hour, used to make me think ‘this is how Abraham Lincoln must have sounded when he walked alone at night.’ When I walked, I’d forget who I am. Or I’d remember, and be happy. Of course, you’re a woman and can’t walk at night. You need a rest now that you walked all that way to get your diploma. You moved relentlessly through the almost-endless night, from Ohio all the way to Atlanta, years in Atlanta, and back to Ohio and once more to Atlanta and then back home again, moving as much, by yourself, as a whole Russian Infantry regiment. Do you know that Peter the Third, or Mad Peter, one of the czars who really were the last royal straws the people could hold up, Mad Peter once got irritated at his Palace Guards for drilling wrongly and ordered them ‘about face! March!’ and they marched off in close order until they were out of sight across the hills and the sun had gone down. The Captain of the guard came to the Czar and asked what to do about the guards, since they were probably still marching 16 hours now, heading straight at Siberia. Peter said ‘Siberia’s where I meant for them to go, and off into the Sea.’ And that was the end of that palace guard, and I’ll bet none of them marched too far once they got out of sight, not for a madman. Anyway, you went hunting, even in the psychic wilderness, where every tree throws its shade into the sky, and every rock on the ground sinks all the way down through the world, and the sky is really a membrane on the eye, you kept on walking to get that degree.
Mike –
Today was a knee in the stomach of horrible proportions. I got to work and found out such bad news, and then after I made it through the day I cried so hard driving home that I knew other drivers were thinking “Man!” as they passed me. Pulled into the garage and got out of the car to close the garage door, and some impulse took me to pick up an unlabeled manila folder out of one of the tubs of stored stuff. It was another entire folder full of letters from you! And I picked up the first letter in the folder and found you being all crazy and playful and mentioning some of your endless store of historical trivia, and there you even mentioned how hard I have worked and how tired I must be. And I was comforted. Tomorrow I will post this snippet of the unexpected new cache of message from you, because it has brought me so much needed joy that I want to share it. I heard on the news yesterday that the trial of the Exxon Valdez is winding to a close. You remember – the ship that killed Alaska back when you still had twenty years left to live? Almost reckoning time. And some internet news page listed the richest people nobody ever heard of and I had to laugh. You and I know they ain’t about nothing. It is the people we will NEVER hear about who are the richest after all… If you owned everything – would you let some pissant online reporter tell the world where you live? There was a news story this morning about two award-winning, luggage-sniffing dogs in the opium nexus in Thailand. They had to be let go because they kept humping women’s legs and peeing on their luggage while they were sniffing it. Apparently they were good at their job otherwise – Here’s some opium if you want the arrest bad enough to touch it. Article said they are now on a farm herding pigs and chickens and I wondered seriously if that farm is on this side of the topsoil. Reminds me of that time you told me you and your wife were sleeping naked with the windows open on a hot summer night, and you came out of the house to pee off the porch into the hedge so you wouldn’t have to wake the house blundering through to the other end of it where the bathroom was. You were standing there peeing into the wee hours for about 22 seconds, when WHOOSH! – a guy burst out of the shrub and went pounding down the alley away from you. You said at the time “Poor peeping tom. Probably thought he had peeked on the baddest ass in town. I heard him and come out nekkid to pee on him. He tried to stay hid, until he realized that next I was going to take a crap on him. And after that, I was gonna beat him up – if I could stand to touch him.”
Got to run now…..the czar is waiting.