Your Next Love Letter

Last Wednesday, I found a great Smith-Corona portable manual typewriter at Goodwill.  I was shopping for something for a trip to a chess tournament being held in St. Louis. (I can’t remember what I originally was looking for. I know I didn’t find it, whatever it was.)  It is definitely not the case that I need another item in my house. I have not the room. My son is intrigued but ambivalent, exclaiming, “For a while, there, I was thought we were caught in the world of typewriters and wood-burning guitars,” playing off a James Taylor quote he had rattling around in his very smart head. It is quite cool, a Smith-Corona Classic 12. It’s a portable, manual, vintage. It feels great. It is great.


It was almost not great. I tested it out in the store. Plunk, plunk. So many of these machines do not work, like the IBM Selectric I lucked into not long ago. Beautiful machine, but it’s electrical insides are scrambled and it knows not how to behave. This one felt great. Seemed to function great.

That is until I got it home and tried to type a word that had a K in it. The K did not work. Not a tragedy. I spent $7 and maybe I would be motivated to find someone who could repair this gem. The better idea was to try and fix it myself—a dangerous proposition, but it would be a true failing if I did not try.

I took off the metal plate on the bottom and searched the levers and hinges. Aha! The K was disconnected from its series of levers and rods. I figured out the mechanism for the failed connection, and with the help of two screwdrivers, made the reconnection. I could now write words with a K.

I now have a functioning manual typewriter. The typewriter I learned to type on was also a Smith-Corona, one of those gray, Studebaker-like, upright things that my mom had salvaged from the days when she was a student. I think I was seven or eight when I asked mom to teach me how to type. With three other kids, two of them quite small, and an outside-the-house job, She did not have a lot of time. She did the next best thing—or maybe the better thing. She sat me down at the kitchen table with her old Gregg typing manual and let me teach myself.

Years later, when I was in graduate school, I found another typewriter just like it at a yard sale.

I don’t know why I wanted that typewriter. It would be an odd way to reclaim my childhood. Regardless, the purpose it served was much different than was the allure as I passed the sale that early summer evening.

One purpose it served was saving the many recipients of my many letters from having to read my handwriting, which is still pretty illegible. The other purpose was to pound out the lingering adolescent angst that was the impetus or subject of most of the letters.

As you might remember from my first blog post “Stop Him Before He Writes (or at least tries),” I wrote about 380 personal letters one year. Many of them to a few women/girls for whom I felt enough affection to write so often, but never with the boldness to admit or hint, beyond the volume of mail they received, such affections. I would not admit because those affections were truly a transgression of what was supposed to be mere friendship or/and often with society’s color line. 

Plunk.  Thwap.  Slap. It was a wonderful sound and feel to which I worked out so many of my frustrations.  Social-political frustrations. Frustrations of internal and external religious and theological dissonance. Frustrations of what felt a lot like love in the midst of a fading adolescence.

This might be too reveling.  Did you get any of those letters from 25 years ago?

Maybe you were not in my life 25 years ago. Maybe you are not a woman. Maybe your life was safely secluded from such attentions. Maybe you did get a letter—and maybe it was not one tainted with such emotions. Maybe none of that matters. Today, as then, all of the musings may be little more than the exercise in writing it turned out to be.

Maybe none of it matters and maybe it IS nothing more than an old writing exercise—or that is all I will admit to. That and one other thing—something that may be of value to you: being so subtle and guarded with displays of affection has made me very good at figuring out if a man is interested in being your friend or if he has a crush on you. I can tell you how deeply he is into your relationship. I can pick it up, in most cases, pretty easily. Sometimes I can tell without ever meeting him. It is how I knew with certainty, even a year before he asked her out, that a classmate from long ago was interested in my friend A. It is how I knew that even though my friend C was so worried that her latest boyfriend might break up with her, that I was sure he would not, certain; I could feel it, that he knew she was the best that he would ever meet (that she was the best that most people ever meet, even if the context of relationship is not a possibility) and he would not pass on who she was. And I had never met either of them.

I can tell by the smallest kind of attention that a man pays, letters, or anything else, especially something else, because no one writes letters, especially on a typewriter. I only wish that I could be so perceptive in the dynamics of my own life.

I do not plan to write 380 letters in the next year, but somehow, the acquisition of this machine seems to fit for the day. I have urged my son to pound out a few poems on our new piece of functional furniture. What will I write? And what will you think if a piece of mail comes to your door, written on dear Smith-Corona Classic 12?

I beg you not to over-think this one, but in the mean time, I will carry the burden as I worry that no one will ever want a letter from me again.

** Leave comments at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/your-next-love-letter/

Hoping for a Letter from St. Valentine

I used to hate Valentine's Day. Did I say “hate?” How about quietly absorbing barbs of hostility? Maybe they were just misfired arrows of cupid that are as likely to be fired out of hate, missing their mark. They were not intended for me, but I was injured by the careless volley of arrows.

The one fortune cookie message I remember from all the cookies I have cracked said this: A good friend is a gift that one gives one's self. I am not so sure the same can be said for falling in love, hence the cupid analogy, but it might be healthy to adopt that mental construct.

Regardless of the construct I choose, it can be said that I have spent many Valentine's Days, and a good portion of other parts of my life, being neither a recipient nor giver of that gift. It was not that I did not have the desire, but, depending on your philosophy or construct, I was not sufficiently desired—by myself or anyone else. And I hated Valentine's Day.

Many years past the trauma of grade school Valentines in the cereal box, the holiday became one of heightened loneliness. It was one thing not to be able to afford a lot of the goodies that conveyed the evolved meaning of Valentine's Day and the kind of love that seemed to count. It was bad enough to not have anyone to whom to give them.

Yes, I used to HATE HATE HATE Valentine's Day, for a lot of reasons.  It has been a long journey to get to a place where it is a benign celebration of recognition and to let it give me a space where I can just get the designated space to acknowledge my relationships, with my son, at times a couple of healthy, unambiguous  friendships, and maybe two or just one relationship I've had. 

I know my spin-off emotions from my bad experience was as damaging to the good spaces others have had around it.  Even now, I can see that it is an institution that is charged with mutual and unmutual sexual exploitation, just plain exploitation. We still live with the expectation that people will measure the significance of love based on the amount of money they spend on their object of desire. Most persistently for me, it has been a reminder that so many people were into the day, had objects of at least manufactured desire, and that it was a game that I largely did not get to play. 

The first thing that happened that allowed me to at least participate in uttering the word "Valentine" was finding out that St. Valentine was a noted, prolific letter writer. When I was in graduate school and for a while after, I too was a prolific letter writer. I would celebrate that around the holiday rather than the other crap. 

Many years later,one of the sweetest things that happened around Valentine's Day was getting a ficus from Ginger.  This was long before there was an inkling, in my mind, that anything romantic would ever happen between us. Her gift was a very kind gesture from a friend: it was so sweet. 

The gesture was also profoundly symbolic of the fleeting hints of romance that visited our friendship in later days: not just the giving, but the vehicle of demonstrating affection.  A ficus? 

A ficus is very, very hard to take care of.  I have no green thumb.  It started to fade.  I tried keeping it up, but... well, it's a ficus.  It's end came when I went away for a week and left my brother Michael to take care of it.  When I came back, it was done for.  It was a ficus.  It should have been a sign to me of what she was capable of in love and relationship. 

And I did recognize that getting this ficus wasn't much different than the common practices of the living institution. Flowers and chocolate—those are the currency of love too often.  But flowers are dead.  They are cut and are not sustainable expressions.  They look fantastic for a while, but they whither and die.  Die soon. 

Chocolate does not provide nourishment.   Sugar and caffeine.  It won't make us strong.  It won't do much if we have it in any quantity that will fill our stomachs that won't wind us up being very unhealthy.

Flowers and chocolate just being two of the items along the continuum of more expensive items and some very unfortunate expectations that have taught us to believe that love is a function and measure of what we buy.

So, I've been trying to build something different around the holiday.  It has not been a good one for a lot of us.  Honestly, for the past 30 years, with the exception of a couple, it has been a relief that I did not have anyone for whom to perform such obligations.  Secretly, though, being left out dug into my heart.

I don't know how this Valentine's Day will turn out. It has to be a balance between my highfalutin moral objections and taking the excuse to express some joy. The day is arbitrary,  but at the same time,  my reaction against it is just as contrived and maybe I should not let it keep me from taking and benefiting from one of those social goods that is rightfully mine. I have some Valentines to write and some people who should get them. Time to pull out the cereal box.

Stop Him Before He Writes (or at least tries)

One year, in the late 1980s, I wrote over 380 personal letters.  I could give a lot of reasons why.  Most of it had to do with the loathing I had for my graduate program.  Much of it had to do with loneliness.  Some of it, I am afraid to admit, was fueled by a bit of depression that was greater than the 20-something-what-the-heck-am-I going-to-do-with-my-life angst.  A bit of it was fueled by absurd amorous feelings that could not possibility be requited. 

But I have written enough so that people then and since have said to me, You should write more.  You should try to get (more) published.  I try to explain that this is a folly as dangerous as admitting love.  On the more practical side, I try to tell them that what they read is really only wonderful in their eyes because, unlike the rest of the world, I am writing to them with their life as a backdrop.   (Or maybe I loved them too much and it was showing.)

The missives may have seemed interesting and profound because 1) the recipients were young and anything that has to do with their life was profound; 2) they did not have to reciprocate; and 3) they were getting attention that they received when they were the child-center of everyone's attention—that period of life before anything real is expected of us in order to get attention.

Another practical reason to not write more: It means telling secrets.  People say I should write more, for bigger audiences, but do they really want their secrets told to the world?  We are Minnesotans.  Such behavior is not polite.  Besides, in telling the world YOUR secrets, I would also have to reveal even more about myself.   To say that this is too much for someone who spent his most formative years as a profoundly conspicuous person who cultivated a very fine art of becoming invisible would be an oversimplified hyperbole. 

“Is my slip showing?”

So, you can understand how I came to the point where I had to ask myself, What would I possibility write?  Practically speaking, I have been staring at a blank page for the past 20 years.  I have been hiding a lot in pages in journals, or places in my mind for which I think my journal just has no interest (or the readers of my letters just have no interest—or I am just to afraid to tell those readers). 

We're not supposed to show what's under the clothing of our politeness.  I've had a few discussions recently with friends about posing in the artists' studio.  In spite of the beauty displayed and the beauty created from the artists' eyes, it is a gaze for which  we have not earned the privilege.  As anonymous as we want to pretend the exercise is, we are never really as disembodied and never really as care-full as that beauty deserves and requires.

But unlike being a model, this exposure comes without consent or pre-knowledge.  The baring is done by someone who may never have anticipated or desired their image be publicized.  How fair is that?  There comes no fee paid for this exploitation, but I can still provide an exaggerated, impressionist depiction of your and my personae based on the poses we've shared as I spy in our common places.

And with everything I write, I run the risk—the certitude that I will expose something more precious than my or someone else's naked body.  Will I show something more precious and private than what I can muster in quality of story, much less be esteemed as art?  Yes.  Cheap thrill? 

The price I am supposed to pay for this privilege is to demonstrate the beauty as I expose the subjects.  I too want to seem beautiful on the page.  Is what I know about the subjects--the subject of me and the subject of the other--sufficient to allow me to write it?  No. 

Does that stop me? 

It is the charge of the blogger, I am told, to demonstrate authority and expertise related to the subjects about which we write.  Not so sure I can do this.  Am I an expert on anything?  Maybe, but not everyone will agree.  I am a jack of all trades and a master of none, but I will not be ashamed to hear, expose and appropriate the expertise of others in my quest to seem like a wise guy. 

If you are reading this, it is likely that you are one of the people or know one of the people or are somehow connected by less than six degrees of separation from one of the “experts.”  Does it help if I am showing you in relative “undress” if I call you beautiful and an expert?  Should I call it love?  Should I call it respect?  Does Hugh Heffner revere and worship women?  (That reminds me, what in the hell was Jello Pudding-Fat Albert Bill Cosby doing in Heffner's playmate palace?  And how in the hell do I know he was there?)

Okay, is this a love letter?  (By the way, if you ever get more than five letters from one person in a week or less, this person is in love with you—or they see you as a vehicle to some love object; you do not need to question yourself or any of your friends or your therapist about this.  You don't even need to ask the sender—who will likely deny it, but such behaviors are common among those who fall in love but who really understand the folly of admitting affections to someone who has more to do with their own life than answer letters from gaga-eyed unsuitable suitors.  These types of attentions can only be fueled by that strong desire or psychological disorders—or both.  It is, at least, fodder for a significant portion of 380-letter year.)

I have not discovered how to keep this from being, or degenerating into  little more than an open-book, navel-gazing journal, a rant (or revealing my degenerated state), or a place where I get to tell everyone else's secrets besides my own.  If you are reading this, this is a letter to you. 

I am sure that you will not get 380 this year, but that does not mean I don't love you.  I might say some things that make it seem like I don't like you, things that are more critical of your perspective than I can be of my own.  I still love you.  It might seem like I am writing to someone else or writing too much about someone else or writing about someone in a way that does not seem real to you.  I might say something that hurts you.  You might let me know, and that will hurt me—or you might say something that hurts me.  I guess it is my job to take are, but can I?  Maybe.  

In the mean time, I'm writing.  Will I find some inspiration, here, getting beyond my ego: the writer's absurd idea that someone else is going to find what we write of any interest to someone else?  Will I be artful enough to show any personal inspiration?  Maybe you will be inspired to write.  This is about writing—writing love letters, and maybe it will give you a little inspiration to pen something to a friend, family or great love.  If you are so moved, let me know (even if I'm not the mover).