a thirty-year correspondence...

Couple of weeks ago, my friend T invited me to a reading event at the Symphony Space. It was a Letters of Note event. I follow them on twitter and so knew that it would be a fun event to attend. It was indeed a wonderful evening, made even more special by the actors who read out aloud the letters, which were unique and startling and always revealing about the letter writer. What people write when they think only one person will read it is usually different than what they write if a crowd is going to read it. Jane Curtin read a job application letter by a funny woman from the south, writing in to the New Yorker. (I’m forgetting her name now.) Phylicia Rashad read a surprisingly ordinary letter from Queen Elizabeth II to Eisenhower about her drop scones and also included the recipe that had measures in the form of tea cups; 'very quaint' is all that came to mind. An everyday letter from a not-so-well-known (at the time) Keith Richards to his aunt was so exuberant and youthful and innocent that the vision of Richards now was hard to reconcile. One of my favorites of the evening was Kate Mulgrew reading a letter by Kathryn Hepburn, in perfect Hepburn pitch (honed perfectly from Tea at Five, I’m sure; Mulgrew even had Hepburn’s head-shake & voice down pat), a letter to Spencer Tracy, a letter unsent to him and unread by him, a letter of confession and of questions, a letter so beautifully honest that it made me cry. It was a cold evening that night. T & I walked a few blocks after just to take in the cool air. I mentioned how letter writing had been a wonderful activity for me growing up and how this event reminded me that the two long-running correspondences I’d had so far, had both ended. One by death. One by just times, they are a-changing. Both had begun when I was eight… and thirty years later, they were both over.

G came to visit us at school and he was instantly someone we wanted to be with. His humor and foreign accent and endless quiz questions were a hit. He played football (soccer) with anyone who wanted to. He taught us folk songs that only years later I learnt were legendary Pete Seeger tunes. And his unbelievable sketching/drawing/painting skill/talent was only matched by his generosity to share it all with us. As kids we sat patiently as he sketched us. Those sketches today are one my sweetest treasures. G came every year, bags full of chocolate, empty sketchbooks and full new sketch pens, lists and lists of quiz questions, and an incredibly open heart. And when he left, we all wrote him letters. And he responded to all of us. His letters were marvelous little typography lessons, penmanship flair on display, witty sketches about little annoyances like buzzing bees while he was painting or about everyday Seinfeld-like things, except in sketch form. I always had a love of stamps, (my grandfather had left me his small stamp collection) and writing to G meant that one would get back new and lovely stamps from wherever he was. He also sent stamps from his collection. Magyar Posta. QEII stamps. After I graduated from high school, we continued to correspond. I would collect stamps to send to him so that he had enough stamps to send the next generation of kids he was wowing at my old school.

Starting in 2007 I think, we also corresponded by email but it was not as frequent as the letters we sent. I was with G in York when 9/11 happened. The scope of the tragedy was unimaginable from so far away. I was apart from my family but I couldn’t have been with sweeter people, awaiting with fearful anticipation, news that my parents in New York were okay that day. The last email I received from G was in 2011, months after he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. A year into the illness he lost his ability to draw and paint. A little after that I received a letter from him, what would be his last letter to me, where he started writing “Dear V…” unfinished as he couldn’t remember my name nor how to write it. The rest of the letter was written out by his wife M. With every letter I received from M, I opened it in fear of reading the inevitable news, which came Dec 2014. G was 85 years old. My G letter collection is well over a hundred letters. I have photocopies of some of the sketches he made of me as a kid, and of some of the letters I sent him as a child. Reading them now is like a real version of the Griffin & Sabine trilogy.