Dear Cassia
November 13, 2005
Dear Cassia,
I’m in Hyde Park, not far from the hospital where you were born, at the first house you lived in; the big brown triple-decker with the white picket fence on the noisy street. I towed our trailer to Hyde Park from Tennessee to pack it with the last of our stuff that’s still here and bring it back home so you and Alicia and I could use it in our home. It’s colder up here than where you are, more crowded and the air’s not as clean, but some of the people are good and later on I’m having dinner with two of them; an interesting couple you’ll get to meet next March.
It was a sixteen-hour drive to get here—but very pretty, through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Eastern Pennsylvania—and I’ve been taking a lot of naps, like you, because I stay road-weary for a couple of days after a drive like that. Not to mention that I was up late last night drinking wine and talking about fishing with an old friend who thought it was funny how you wouldn’t eat your bacon in the video I showed him.
This morning I woke up in our empty little apartment that the realtor can’t seem to sell and had breakfast out of the big steel cooler with the white Ocracoke sticker. I had Triscuits and raisins and coffee, probably not that much different from what you ate.
Then I had to go over to the hardware store and buy eye bolts for the trailer, and I came home and installed them on its roof (with my friend’s electric drill, because I forgot mine—I’m bad like that sometimes.) Now that I’ve installed the bolts I can lash the blue ladder to the roof of the trailer, and bring it home and use it to hang the new ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom, to paint the side of the house where the woodpeckers hammered in hunting for carpenter bees, and to trim the tree that’s tapping on the roof keeping everybody awake at night.
All this theoretical productivity made me very hungry so I had lunch—peanut butter on a whole-wheat bagel—and worked on my novel until I got drowsy. A sign, perhaps, I should make my novel more exciting. Anyway, I laid down on the air mattress and listened to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a wonderful book read by John Cleese, a very funny man, until I couldn’t hear him reading any more because I’d fallen asleep. Maybe The Screwtape Letters isn’t that exciting either. Eventually I woke up and wrote some more, and now I’m working on this letter to you.
So now that we’re all caught up I have to go away and do some other stuff. I’ll do it for a while and maybe write about it afterwards and then something else will happen and I’ll write about that too, and if I’m lucky it’ll be funny or important enough to use in more than one piece of work.
But before you know it it’ll be Friday and I’ll be back in my truck towing the trailer and the stuff and the cooler and—well, not my friend’s drill, I hope, because I’m supposed to return it—and the ladder and the air mattress and The Screwtape Letters...towing all this crap I’ve written you about through Eastern Pennsylvania and the Blue Ridge Mountains and right back to Tennessee where I started from. I’ll come into the house and you’ll grin at me and holler DA-DA! loud enough to startle the dog, but you won’t care two farts about the trailer and all that because you understand that people only need each other to live happily ever after, and not a bunch of stuff.
Which is a very strange way of telling you I love you, I know. But what the hell, writing about it kills the hours in Hyde Park.
DA-DA
Dear Cassia,
I’m in Hyde Park, not far from the hospital where you were born, at the first house you lived in; the big brown triple-decker with the white picket fence on the noisy street. I towed our trailer to Hyde Park from Tennessee to pack it with the last of our stuff that’s still here and bring it back home so you and Alicia and I could use it in our home. It’s colder up here than where you are, more crowded and the air’s not as clean, but some of the people are good and later on I’m having dinner with two of them; an interesting couple you’ll get to meet next March.
It was a sixteen-hour drive to get here—but very pretty, through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Eastern Pennsylvania—and I’ve been taking a lot of naps, like you, because I stay road-weary for a couple of days after a drive like that. Not to mention that I was up late last night drinking wine and talking about fishing with an old friend who thought it was funny how you wouldn’t eat your bacon in the video I showed him.
This morning I woke up in our empty little apartment that the realtor can’t seem to sell and had breakfast out of the big steel cooler with the white Ocracoke sticker. I had Triscuits and raisins and coffee, probably not that much different from what you ate.
Then I had to go over to the hardware store and buy eye bolts for the trailer, and I came home and installed them on its roof (with my friend’s electric drill, because I forgot mine—I’m bad like that sometimes.) Now that I’ve installed the bolts I can lash the blue ladder to the roof of the trailer, and bring it home and use it to hang the new ceiling fan in the upstairs bedroom, to paint the side of the house where the woodpeckers hammered in hunting for carpenter bees, and to trim the tree that’s tapping on the roof keeping everybody awake at night.
All this theoretical productivity made me very hungry so I had lunch—peanut butter on a whole-wheat bagel—and worked on my novel until I got drowsy. A sign, perhaps, I should make my novel more exciting. Anyway, I laid down on the air mattress and listened to C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a wonderful book read by John Cleese, a very funny man, until I couldn’t hear him reading any more because I’d fallen asleep. Maybe The Screwtape Letters isn’t that exciting either. Eventually I woke up and wrote some more, and now I’m working on this letter to you.
So now that we’re all caught up I have to go away and do some other stuff. I’ll do it for a while and maybe write about it afterwards and then something else will happen and I’ll write about that too, and if I’m lucky it’ll be funny or important enough to use in more than one piece of work.
But before you know it it’ll be Friday and I’ll be back in my truck towing the trailer and the stuff and the cooler and—well, not my friend’s drill, I hope, because I’m supposed to return it—and the ladder and the air mattress and The Screwtape Letters...towing all this crap I’ve written you about through Eastern Pennsylvania and the Blue Ridge Mountains and right back to Tennessee where I started from. I’ll come into the house and you’ll grin at me and holler DA-DA! loud enough to startle the dog, but you won’t care two farts about the trailer and all that because you understand that people only need each other to live happily ever after, and not a bunch of stuff.
Which is a very strange way of telling you I love you, I know. But what the hell, writing about it kills the hours in Hyde Park.
DA-DA
posted by GratefulEd | 9:14 AM
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