Letters to Charles

A throwback shout out holiday appreciation…

The first memory I have of “identifying as a writer,” dates back to the late 70s. The year before we lost John Lennon in the flesh. I was seven years old; living in Seattle Washington with my mom, my younger brother, and our “roommates;” another single mother in her 30s with two children, a boy and girl. Tarika, the brother, was just a little younger than me, and Katrina, the sister, was just a little younger than my brother, Ira.

It was quite the household in a laid-back neighborhood on a hillside overlooking Lake Union. We kids must’ve ranged from kindergarten through second grade (and later third…) There was a handful of others in our age group locally to give a little atmosphere to our regular mischief.

We had a fleet of bicycles in the garage and were able to wander freely, while steep hills to the north and south kept us mindfully boxed in as wandering too far meant a significant outlay of calories either in the going or the coming. Not that we were particularly averse to this and would weekly sojourn the four or five blocks “straight uphill,” to retrieve our weekly allotment of candy purchased with a handful of allowance.

We would also roam the neighborhood with our little red wagon to clear the neighbors of old newspapers and tin cans for a monthly trip to the recycling center and a little cash payment for our efforts. I suspect these proceeds were what we spent on our Star Wars toys and refreshments at the science center where we took regular field trip.

Both of our mothers worked, and we were “latchkey kids.” That was just normal life for us, hoofing it up the hill, or down to catch the school bus and goofing off in the backyard in the afternoons until one of the moms came home to unlock the house. I remember this as a good time with many little rituals, special dinners, special TV shows, building model rockets, etc. the ladies must’ve been regularly exhausted, but we certainly felt well held.

That was the year my mother’s new boyfriend was the ice cream man, he also loved to play with us kids, helping me to learn and fly model rockets, and light stick matches and then blow them out before pressing the burning tip into my Star Wars toys to make realistic laser fire burns in the hulls of the ships. Very cool.

Second grade was the year. I think the school might’ve been named for Martin Luther King Jr., but I can’t be certain. I was on the local community soccer team, and each group of kids was named for the color T-shirt they bore. I was on the beige team. I was very unimpressed with the color, but as the years wore on, I did indeed tend to find myself naturally attracted to wearing more earth tones. Go figure.

I have three strong memories from attending that school. The first was the fact that the school hallway was laid out like a capital letter H with, if I remember correctly an auditorium branching south off the crossbar. I remember this distinctly because walking through the crossbar hallway, one would have to attend to an actual traffic stop light hanging, not at the intersection, but right in the center of the path. The light therefore signaled no intersectional right-of-way, but rather, and obviously absurdly to me, simply demanded obedience to linger and wait should you find it red, or proceed uninterrupted when fortune instead met green. This may also be my first recollection of authority, outside of parental, in this lifetime.

The second strong memory from that year had to do with walking into the class where I would be practicing my penmanship (which would never be quite presentable until my very late teens when I found extremely fine point pens and the beauty of all capital letters). I still remember the worksheets with lines consisting of solid upper and lower boundaries with a dotted line in the middle to constrain our letter construction. But I digress, the memory is less the worksheets and more the walking into class.

I had a giant scab across and down one entire cheek of my face as I entered the classroom with some embarrassment. I remember trying to look down and to one side, in efforts to accomplish the impossible: that my deformity might go unnoticed.

That weekend I had been out riding my bike, a great purple cruiser with a glittering banana seat and ape-hanger handlebars. As I was sailing down one of the long hills in our neighborhood, the front wheel started to wobble frantically. Apparently I was approaching Evel Knievel level speeds and within moments the bike took a hard and fast right turn without me. The bike tumbled and I flew like a rocketship, straight and true with arms and legs trailing like streamers behind my dumbfounded head and face.

My cheek was the first to touchdown and I grazed it along the asphalt for some number of feet feet before the rest of me came crashing down around. I recall the good Samaritan coming out of their house, scooping me up and carrying me, crying, back up the hill to my home. To this day I don’t know what the other kids in class thought, but it was certainly a truly marvelous road rash unlike any I had seen among my peers prior to that, or for many years hence.

The third memory I have of attending Martin Luther King Junior primary school, is that of receiving an award in an all school assembly for some piece of writing that I had done. I don’t recall the work or any detail of the occasion, it’s just impressions really: the high well lit ceiling painted in some industrial yellowish white, the expanse of seated people all around me and stretching way towards the front of the room and the podium, standing at or near the podium myself and receiving a little trophy of some kind, maybe. Maybe the page of writing was there as well, pretty slim pictures, as I say, mostly just feelings…

But that was it. Apparently I was a writer. Further, it seems that this remains the case today. I didn’t do much with it for many years, save being bugged by friends on occasion to ask why I didn’t do more of it, and to goad me along that I probably should. (Thank you for the loving encouragement, if that was you ;-).

But to the point. Just a little more than a decade ago, my old friend Charles finally rattled my cage on the matter one more time and it seemed to have been just enough. If for no other reason than simply to silence his persistent inquiry, I offered to write 100 words a day and put it in an email to him. Little did I know what a gift he gave.

Charles kindly and religiously replied to every one of those messages. The scrawls quickly grew well past 100 words per day; it’s a pretty sparse scattering of thought to keep contained to such short lines. I would hit send and generally within a matter of hours, if not sooner, I would have a reply lovingly berating me for some offensive overuse of adjectives or absurd failure to actually say anything at all.

I would grimace, welcome the critique, and try again the next day. Gradually, the artifacts grew longer and more coherent. To be sure much of that first year at the very least was mostly all about clearing myself of the god-awful jumble of nonsense that laid as a decades-old strata of froth over any formal promise waiting in gestation beneath.

I think that effort lasted perhaps a couple of years. Eventually it trickled off as I got busier with other interests and pursuits, but fortunately it never went away entirely. I’ve had a couple of pushes since then, of writing consistently for a period of time — not just writing but actually making visible and sharing with even just a handful of others.

It’s a habit I’ve enjoyed and have enjoyed as a point of connection with a handful of others over the years (David, Cassandra, Molly, Dennis, Karilen, Richard, and others, to name a few names. ;-) It’s a habit that lives here today, as an outlet to share a certain quality of wild ride that has been in my life for recent years.

For most of that time the record has been grounded in something fairly autobiographical, but to no one’s surprise that knows me, I’ve often found myself called to wander and wax more philosophical.

There is something elegant and simple about human lives. Each one of us embodies a certain version of the human story. Even those most plain and uneventful offer a gentle majesty when we really look at the unique collection of threads that have woven together to bring them about, keep them afloat, and pass them along through this river of time.

It’s a good story to tell. Not necessarily good like useful and productive, but good like the blue in the rainbow. Just good by itself. Intrinsically good. Basic human dignity good. Life is mysterious and magical, beyond words and yet so subtle we might miss it for days or months or years, or even lifetimes. We might miss it for ourselves, we might miss it for others. We might miss it for the whole dazzling wilderness that is this little soaked and spinning rock twisting through space on a journey beyond our scope of reckoning.

I got to spend some time with Charles yesterday. We live a few hundred miles apart so present company remains a not so common but cherished gift. I blathered on for some time, making excuses for why I wasn’t writing my personal human story, so much as aspirations for philosophy and humanity.

Really though, when it comes right down to it, I’m grateful that I have this gift of words to give, and it really wouldn’t be so, or at least it would be much lesser of a gift if it weren’t for Charles. So if I have the privilege to write, such as I do today, I hope I will always remember to feel that gratitude for that act of friendship, and for what little beauty it might have now, and may continue to whisper into the world, like little flecks of pollen on a spring breeze.

Well Charles, there you have it, out of season metaphors in the “dead” of our Southern California winter. Now you see what you’ve done? I trust you are pleased with yourself, you’ve certainly earned it. :-)