Scribbling Love
I wrote letters in high school to a kid named Eugene (Gene for short). I’d met him at a summer track camp I attended between my sophomore and junior year of high school. Ours wasn’t a romantic relationship and he wasn’t my boyfriend and I didn’t want him to be my boyfriend. We simply liked writing letters to each other and regularly did for a year or so until we both graduated from high school.
I remembered Gene and went searching for some of his letters in boxes I’d salvaged from the hurricane-wrecked attic of my family home a few years ago after having written a couple of new letters recently: one to a friend’s husband who has a long hospital stay ahead of him and one to my grandfather. This got me thinking about all the pen pals I had in elementary school and then in high school, as the internet and email was not yet a thing (at least, not in my corner of the world).
Upon digging through old boxes of letters, I realized I’d had several other pen pals from the same camp, but Gene’s was the only name that stuck out when I tried to recall them specifically. Later, we would occasionally see each other when I moved to Lafayette for college, as he had too, but we didn’t make plans to hang out or get together. We were always thrilled to run into each other, however, jumped up and down a bit and chatted excitedly about how often we wrote letters to each other as high school kids. I remember seeing him at a music festival in New Orleans in 1997, sweaty and drunk and yelling at me across a mosh pit during Faith No More’s set about how this was the type of thing “I totally would have written you about were we still pen pals.”
Pen pals. Do those even exist anymore?
I don’t remember everything we wrote to each other about, other than what I have in the letters. The content is sometimes funny but totally unremarkable otherwise. I have no idea what 16-year-old me would have written about at that time (as I obviously don’t have the letters from my end). My life generally, I’m guessing; running and my times, what my goals were for the year (since we became friends as runners); what music I was listening to, as we bonded over music at that track camp where we met (evidenced by the totally random meeting we had in that Faith No More mosh pit). What I do remember, however, was tiny excitement I’d feel when I’d notice a letter addressed to me in our mailbox: seeing my name on the envelope, the bluish color of the envelopes Gene used, immediately sitting down to write something back. And, most importantly, not having to think about making time to reply — just doing it, instantly.
In my days of pen-palling, you wrote to say hello, to let someone know how you were doing, even if you hardly knew them in real life. I really only knew Gene through letters, and it’s kind of sad to me now that I didn’t make more of an effort to be real-life friends when we both were at university. Too many other people, too many other things to do. We were good friends on paper — literally. That never translated into real life. I wonder how, and what, he’s doing now. I wish I could write him a letter.
You could use those letter writing skills you honed through pen-palling to tell the people you did know in real life things that weren’t so easy to say in person, and I’m sure I did that a time or two. I don’t remember those so well. What I do remember is that I ran a pretty good racket as an 8th grader writing love letters for the girlfriends of my male classmates. A letter for 5 bucks. It lasted until the girls figured out the racket and my customer base dwindled. I was so good at writing those idiotic letters, informed by whatever horrible YA romance novel I was reading at the time. I made money writing letters for people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, write them themselves. I should look into starting that business up again as a legitimate side gig.
I received my own love letters in different relationships through my 20s (and hopefully not ghostwritten). For a six-month period while working on my master’s degree, I dated a poet who often gave me the most beautiful and complex letters. I have them, not for sentimentality’s sake, but because they were so fucking good. Full of bullshit, but good. I still appreciate the artistry of them. I even have a few said boyfriend sent me while teaching in a study abroad program in England during the summer of our relationship, and a postcard or two. The international postage and envelopes capture me as much as the writing.
It takes some care and time to write a good letter. Trite notes about what you’ve been up to are fairly simple, and that’s mainly what I’ve been dipping my toe into with letters to my friend’s husband and my grandfather. But I like the way it makes my mind work: slowly and deliberately, with a dash of “I don’t know what to say next, but I’ll figure it out in a sentence or two, I’m sure.” I also find that I want to write letters only to folks I trust. The things I have to say, however simple, can’t be said to mere acquaintances.
I remember being surprised when, as a junior in high school, I received a letter from my step-grandfather, who was a boat captain off in Mexico doing whatever it is that boat captains do. Because of his job and perhaps personality (quiet, introverted), we weren’t exactly close, and I only ever had conversations about marine and boat captain-y stuff with him.
Anyway: he was in Mexico and I’m guessing I’d probably mentioned something about letters, so he wrote me one while away on this particular job. His letter was scrawled on yellow legal pad paper in his blocky print, talking about wind knots and longitudes and latitudes and things I probably should have been paying more attention to in my science and geography classes. The letter, its tone, style, misspelling my name, reveals the comfortable awkwardness with which we always regarded each other. Once my grandmother died, when I was 19, he disappeared from our lives until a few years ago, when his new wife contacted my dad to say that he’d had a major stroke and was dying. Dad went to see him and he asked about me, remembered me. I wish I could have seen him then, if only to thank him for that letter, which I still have and treasure.
