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June 21, 2009Writers should haveErrors and Omissions InsuranceJUST LIKE ARCHITECTS AND ENGINEERSProbably everyone should. No one gets it right the first time every time. I left something out in my last column about the Silver Fox, my ex-lover who recycled my love letters after I left him: he had every right to do so. I sent him the letters and they belonged to him. They were his to dispose of. I broke up with him, he tried a few times to contact me, and I did not respond. He went on with his life, and got involved with someone who became pregnant. We were not in touch with each other. Time to clear the decks. I went on with my life, then made the small gesture of sending him a postcard from Italy. We got together to catch up with each other, and the letters were already gone by then. HE’S NOT HEARTLESS,nor clueless, nor did he throw me away. We’re still friends eleven years later. We even got back together for a while last year, and, I guess, finished what was left unfinished way back when. The Fox made a judgment call about a possession of his he no longer had use for. He doesn’t stuff his house and his closets with everything he’s collected over a lifetime; perhaps he doesn’t save anything. The letters were of a time, and that time had passed. HE’S NOT THE ONEfor whom literature is a way of life; in fact, he has a reading disability and finds reading more challenging than enjoyable. He’s not a writer, he doesn’t think like a writer, and he’s not the one who considered my letters to be priceless original literary artifacts. Basically, the man is not I, and I can’t expect him to act as I would. IN OTHER WORDS,he probably wouldn’t make a passive/aggressive jab at me for something I did eleven years ago. Why am I bringing it up now anyway for Chrissake? Just because I happen to run across the letters while looking for something else, and thanked myself for preserving them. But it was not that he threw my letters away, especially, that disturbed me, it is that he threw a writer’s original letters away (who happened to be me). BUT IT’S ONLY MY OWN FEELING,which others don’t necessarily share, that markers of one’s journey in life should be preserved, if only for nostalgia and retrospection, or one’s grandchildren, for them to understand your life. While I was visiting a friend in Philadelphia, she made ready to get rid of some guy’s letters, and I actually took them from her rather than see the sentiments disappear entirely into the dust of the past. I never even met him. They’re around somewhere, in some box. WHAT’S “COSMICALLY INCORRECT”to me is not even worthy of notice to someone else. Others feel they don’t want old business cluttering their lives and jettison everything they’re through with. That too has appeal. I knew a woman married to a famous man who died, who had to relocate from their business office after thirty years of occupation, and she was not very sentimental about keeping things. I took some of them rather them see them hit the dumpster. But that’s me. I myself like having evidence of patterns and continuities in my life, but also dream of throwing everything I own in the Bay. I would just love to zap my email history, but I know there are “archives” contained therein. I SENT A PICTUREto a friend of him eating pizza in our local Portland pizza hang, Escape from New York, in 1986. He wrote back, “OMG–it’s funny how some pictures can instantly take you back 20 (+) years! That is awesome–there is nothing that beat a nice hot slice of EFNY pizza–sitting at the bar with a jar of parmesian and hot peppers at an arm’s reach. Those were the days, huh? Well then, so are these!” I GUESSI just like to honor both those days and these days. But not everyone feels that need. And by the way, the Fox had nothing to do with this addendum. I haven’t even heard from him. It’s just one of a continuing series of columns in which I expose how full of shit I was in the previous column. JUST RECYCLE THEM!I told my friend for whom I print my columns out because she has no computer. She wanted to give me back the 3″ black binders containing them because they take up more room than the paper alone, and I told her, “Just get rid of them, they’re on the web.” She made a small hesitant sound of grateful relief that I suggested it. I’m not offended by that, but I once ended a friendship because a woman failed to read a book I wrote in her honor—a blank book she’d given me which I turned into a years-long letter to her. No idea if it still exists. Of course, it was hers to dispose of. Good thing I took a copy! The manuscript belongs to her, but the words, after all, belong to me. And someday, someone will read them who will appreciate them, and my having written them. WELL, WE ALL HAVEthose things that push our buttons. It’s hard for me to separate my writing from my self, but they are really not one and the same; in fact, if someone likes my writing, I don’t care what they think about me as a person. If someone likes me as a person but doesn’t like my writing, well, chacun à son goût. Plenty of writers have their despicable aspects. I’m in love with a reactionary drunk with questionable morals (Jack Kerouac), for instance. YOU KNOWthis guy I moved cross country with in 1981 gave me a violet one day, out of the blue—and I saved it. He moved to SF and I moved to Portland. He wrote to me later and I wrote back, enclosing the dried violet, which I thought he would be touched I held on to. He took it to mean, fuck you, here’s your fucking violet back. You just can never tell what going on with people. I actually at one time, had every rose, dried, that anyone had ever given me. When I was moving from an apartment into the house I bought, I was putting the vases with the dried roses onto the truck and they were falling onto the street and getting stepped on. Someone told me, “It’s time to say goodbye to the roses, dear.” I’VE ALWAYS HADa tough time letting go. I do hold a grudge. It’s hell to stop loving someone. Sometimes I can feel an anger like it was yesterday. I rehearse conversations in my mind like they’re still happening. All pointless, but I’m working on it, trying to stay present. They say the past is over and tomorrow hasn’t come, but today is a gift—that’s why they call it the present. But the present often has some stiff competition in the past, like the subscription to Reader’s Digest (I have a degree in English!) my mother gave me—an unwanted gift that kept on giving. (I eventually asked her to change the subscription to Vanity Fair.) AN INAPPROPRIATE GIFTis always a bit of an insult, demonstrating that the giver doesn’t really know you, or does know you and prefers to give gifts to the person they’d rather you were. THIS IS A HORRIBLE STORY—but my mother crocheted me a “throw” which was in reality a boy’s baby blanket with three-dimensional flowers, in my most hated color in the world—baby blue, a color I spent years eliminating from my Portland house with a heat gun—and I tried to give it away to someone with young children; no one wanted it. Then I tried to take it to a thrift shop, but they didn’t take any kind of bedding or linens. I said, this is an untouched, handmade baby blanket, but they wouldn’t take it. I went into the thrift shop proper to tour the facilities quickly, and left the blanket behind a newsstand in the lobby, because I didn’t want to bother with waiting for someone to check it for the few minutes I’d be in there. When I came back out not too much later, it was gone. I felt like hell, but uttered a small noise of grateful relief it was gone from my life. I am assuming someone in the Mission who needed it helped themselves to it and that it’s keeping some little niña warm. God bless. BUT HEY—if someone gives you a gift, remember—it’s yours to dispose of. “Regift” it if you must. But if you care about the person who gave it to you, think twice…because if my mother comes to visit I’m assuming she’ll be looking for that Russian faux Faberge egg nutcracker that plays Tchaikovsky. Is it worth hurting her feelings to get it off my shelf?
The author’s friend Cornicus, Escape from New York, Portland, 1986. You, me, July 4th in Seattle, darlin’. That’s the author’s Sidewalk Sale advertised on the wall. Photo by the author. ------------------------------------------------------------ Don’t get your panties in a bunch
Come on Fox, call me... copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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