I’m sorry you lost your grandmother to Alzheimer’s. My brother-in-law is dealing with the same thing and it’s ugly ugly. Awful to witness, and probably worse if you’re inside the body, but nobody knows and that makes it worse. I feel sorry any child has to bear witness to a thing like that.
Those juice glasses with the stripe and circle did have a moment. I’ve had them for such a long time it’s amazing the color doesn’t wear off, but of course I don’t stick them in the dishwasher. Hand wash only with a soft cloth.
Getting to your questions about the letter writing. I’ll start by saying your note heartened me because here is a secret: myletters have been far more meaningful to me than anything I did with the law. The letters are the mainstay of my life, where I was only practicing law for thirty years or so. The clerkship was my job; the letters amount to who I am. I haven’t the foggiest idea how many I’ve written. I certainly didn’t keep track along the way, and I’ve never gone back to count the ones I’ve received. More than a thousand, I guess. I have written letters since I was a child. I wrote to the odd author or teacher, cousins I rarely saw. I wrote to the local fire chief, Harry Truman, people like that. I had a pen pal, she was a friend who lived down the street from me and then she moved away in high school, and we are still pen pals writing every month or six weeks, give or take, for sixty years. We married brothers (I divorced mine). Oh! Hers is the one with Alzheimer’s. That’s where it started, I guess, though I hadn’t ever thought of it like that until now. Rosalie Boyd. (Well, now she’s Van Antwerp, too.) She is my daughter’s godmother. How’s all that for a big complicated mess?
I write to anyone that strikes me. Friends, lawmakers, editors, teachers, diplomats, authors. Authors are my favorite. It’s harder now, of course, because with the internet people are e-mailing (it’s faster, simpler, less fussy than having to have the materials, the pen, the moment at the desk, the stamp, etc.) and it can be more difficult to find an address, but usually if you really try, you will. And one ought to try. An e-mail can in no way replace a written letter. It does concern me that one day all the advancement of technology will do away with the post, but I hope to be dead and gone long before then.
To your question of ‘how’: I sit down at my desk with a stack of the letter writing paper and the pens I like. My desk faces a small window toward the river and there are honeysuckle bushes beneath it, which, in summer, attract hummingbirds, and my garden lies beyond. The house will be silent, or if I am feeling passionate, Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky from the CD player. I’ll have aglass of water or a cup of tea. Typically I write on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for about two hours. Whatever I don’t finish gets pushed to Saturday, and of course, if the mood strikes me at off times (a shocking current event or anger, usually), I’ll sit down then as well. I mail-order my letter writing paper from England; once I discovered it, I quit trying anything else. I visit the post office once a month for stamps. I never buy seasonal stamps, only your classic stars and stripes, because there is a certain structure, an ORDER, that needs to be obeyed. If you keep the mechanism in order, then the contents of the correspondence, the material of the letters I mean, can go anywhere. Be anything. You can write to anyone. You can say anything you like.
I write slowly. A letter might take me an hour or more. I do not rush. I think through each sentence. My hand does not get tired. You mustn’t rush. When you rush you pen things you didn’t mean and you tire. It takes patience to say exactly what one means, to think of the right word. Sometimes I write a draft and mark it up, then write a clean copy to send. I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal. Sometimes, Caroline, the easiest inroad is to begin with a thank you, for a gift or a kindness or a letter, you know, and then take it from there. Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning.
You’re most welcome to write me back if you’d like, but my suggestion would be to think of someone who is far away, someone you don’t see frequently or speak to often on the phone but dearly wish you could, and write to them instead. I wish you the very best.
Warm regards,
Sybil Van Antwerp
The College of English
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20742
TO: Melissa Genet, Dean of the College of English
FROM: Sybil Van Antwerp
August 5, 2015
I am writing for the fifth and final time to you before I am forced to escalate my request that you reconsider your position on auditing courses in the College of English. Two years have passed since your first refusal, two years of my life I cannot repeat, and I would like to think you were simply taking a bit of time to get your wits about you in the position of dean. A modern literature course would be preferable—1800s at the earliest. Patience waning.
(cont. Sept. 12, 2015, previous pages UNSENT)
Daan died last night. I wanted to tell you that.
Rosalie Van Antwerp
33 Orange Lane
Goshen, CT 06756
September 12, 2015
Dear Rosalie,
I didn’t tell you Daan wrote, it was back in May, a rather long letter saying a great deal. I read it again and again. It is a terrible and wonderful letter. Daan never wrote to anyone, but reading it I wonder why. Several times I sat down to write him back, but my mind was blank, an event that I cannot recall at any previous time. Fiona called this morning to say he’s dead. She was at his side. I never did send him a letter. The paper with his name at the top and some inadequate babble is started right here on my desk. I’m looking at it. Oh, Rosalie. My life has felt enormous, but what do I have to show for it?
This morning I walked down to the river and I was thinking about our trip to Lake Saint-Pierre. I did this on purpose, as punishment, perhaps, self-flagellation, and now I’m making myself write to you about it. I rarely let my mind go there, Rosalie. If there is a map of the world in my mind, I don’t look there at the border of Canada and the US, but this morning I tried to remember. I even went looking for photographs of the trip, but I guess I’ve thrown them all away, but what I was trying to remember was how we were before Gilbert died, what was the last way we were—my whole family. That morning. That week. What was my family like? Daan had been talking to someone at Boston College about teaching. I’d forgotten about that, but it came back to me. It was a position in the school of languages. In the weeks leading up to the trip there had been heavy tension between us because he wanted to take the position, and of course I was totally unwilling to consider leaving my job, but I do thinkwe’d largely managed to leave that impasse at home and I remember laughing a great deal on this trip. Do you remember? You were very pregnant and wearing those awful drapey dresses without shape and your ankles were terribly swollen, and I remember being up on the patio with a bottle of whiskey one evening and laughing until we cried over your ankles. That must mean things were good if I can remember all that laughing. And the children were at such wonderful ages then. I made myself think about the day he died. I went back to the day and put my outfit back together (I could get that far, denim pants, white top) but when I tried to follow myself back down on the dock where I was when he dove into the water, I couldn’t. It is as if, in my mind, there is a sentry standing outside the locked room of this memory—it won’t let me in. It’s my memory! He won’t allow it, stands unyielding. It is like blindness. So that’s as far as I got. I couldn’t get in. But I know what happened. He dove into the lake, he hit the rock shelf and snapped his neck. I have this image in my mind of his back, slick, he’s lying on his side. It’s his body. Beads of water on his tan back. They must have pulled him out—who? Did I? And laid him on his side on the dock. There were two moles on his back and I must have stared at them because I see his tan, wet back, the two moles. Did I scream for help? Who got him out of the lake? Was it me? In my memory, it’s all silence. It has been a long time since I returned to that. It’s been years. It’s possible it’s been decades. What do you remember? Suddenly I am hungry for these memories. Write me and tell me what you remember.
Daan’s funeral will be in three weeks, the first Saturday of October, but I can’t possibly attend. Bruce said he would fly with me. He and the children and Marie will of course attend. I’ve just been on the phone to Felix, who thinks I should go. He says you always always go to the funeral, and, of course, in principle, Iagree. Perhaps I will go. I did always want to see where he was from.
Syb
Postscript: I’ve been readingRebeccaby Daphne du Maurier, but it’s taking me ages. What are you reading?
Kindredproject.org MESSAGING PORTAL
TO: Henrietta Gleason
