We Are Still Married (22 page)

The first step in writing letters is to get over the guilt of
not
writing. You don't “owe” anybody a letter. Letters are a gift. The burning shame you feel when you see unanswered mail makes it harder to pick up a pen and makes for a cheerless letter when you finally do.
I feel bad about not writing, but I've been so busy, etc. Skip this. Few letters are obligatory, and they are Thanks for the wonderful gift and I am terribly sorry to hear about George's death
and
Yes, you're welcome to stay with us next month
, and not many more than that. Write those promptly if you want to keep your friends. Don't worry about the others, except love letters, of course. When your true love writes,
Dear Light of My Life, Joy of My Heart, O Lovely Pulsating Core of My Sensate Life,
some response is called for.

Some of the best letters are tossed off in a burst of inspiration, so keep your writing stuff in one place where you can sit down for a few minutes and (
Dear Roy, I am in the middle of a book entitled
We Are Still Married
but thought I'd drop you a line. Hi to your sweetie, too
.) dash off a note to a pal. Envelopes, stamps, address book, everything in a drawer so you can write fast when the pen is hot.

A blank white eight-by-eleven sheet can look as big as Montana if the pen's not so hot—try a smaller page and write boldly. Or use a note card with a piece of fine art on the front; if your letter ain't good, at least they get the Matisse. Get a pen that makes a sensuous line, get a comfortable typewriter, a friendly word processor—whichever feels easy to the hand.

Sit for a few minutes with the blank sheet in front of you, and meditate on the person you will write to, let your friend come to mind until you can almost see her or him in the room with you. Remember the last time you saw each other and how your friend looked and what you said and what perhaps was unsaid between you, and when your friend becomes real to you, start to write.

Write the salutation—
Dear
You—and take a deep breath and plunge in. A simple declarative sentence will do, followed by another and another and another. Tell us what you're doing and tell it like you were talking to us. Don't think about grammar, don't think about lit'ry style, don't try to write dramatically, just give us your news. Where did you go, who did you see, what did they say, what do you think?

If you don't know where to begin, start with the present moment:
I'm sitting at the kitchen table on a rainy Saturday morning. Everyone is gone and the house is quiet.
Let your simple description of the present moment lead to something else, let the letter drift gently along.

The toughest letter to crank out is one that is meant to impress, as we all know from writing job applications; if it's hard work to slip off a letter to a friend, maybe you're trying too hard to be terrific. A letter is only a report to someone who already likes you for reasons other than your brilliance. Take it easy.

Don't worry about form. It's not a term paper. When you come to the end of one episode, just start a new paragraph. You can go from a few lines about the sad state of pro football to the fight with your mother to your fond memories of Mexico to your cat's urinary-tract infection to a few thoughts on personal indebtedness and on to the kitchen sink and what's in it. The more you write, the easier it gets, and when you have a True True Friend to write to, a
compadre,
a soul sibling, then it's like driving a car down a country road, you just get behind the keyboard and press on the gas.

Don't tear up the page and start over when you write a bad line—try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Let the letter cook along and let yourself be bold. Outrage, confusion, love—whatever is in your mind, let it find a way to the page. Writing is a means of discovery, always, and when you come to the end and write
Yours ever
or
Hugs and kisses,
you'll know something you didn't when you wrote
Dear Pal.

Probably your friend will put your letter away, and it'll be read again a few years from now—and it will improve with age. And forty years from now, your friend's grandkids will dig it out of the attic and read it, a sweet and precious relic of the ancient eighties that gives them a sudden clear glimpse of you and her and the world we old-timers knew. You will then have created an object of art. Your simple lines about where you went, who you saw, what they said, will speak to those children and they will feel in their hearts the humanity of our times.

You can't pick up a phone and call the future and tell them about our times. You have to pick up a piece of paper.

T
WENTY YEARS AGO, I quit college and got a job on a daily paper. It was a long jump for a young punk, but I was restless in school, felt useless, and had romantic ideas about newspapering, and also I was broke. They gave me a seat at the city desk—a horseshoe table where the city editor sat at the apex, the assistant city editor sat at his right, and I sat at the foot of the left leg and wrote what they gave me to write, which was mostly obits. Mortuaries phoned in the names, and I called the next of kin to get the facts.

The big obits for prominent people went to other reporters. Mine were all standard obits for people we'd never heard of, and were as formal as the sonnet. Services will be held on Day for Whom of Address who died When. Second graph: An employee of Which for Number of Years, he was a member of This, That, and The Other. Third: He is survived by Her, Them, Them, and Them. And though I got the idea from other reporters that this was lowly work, not meant for a person of talent, I enjoyed it. I felt useful. Someone had died, and the family wanted the world to pay some attention. They were glad to talk to me, the fellow from the paper, and, unlike the blowhards other reporters had to endure, my people were modest and had small expectations. “I don't know if you can get this in, but one thing Dad did was swim across White Bear Lake and back every summer until he was eighty-two,” one man told me. “It's nothing important, but it'd be nice if you could get it in.”

I did get it in. I tried to get a lot of stuff in, some of which the city editor took exception to. “Zinnias?” he wrote at the top of one obit. “For Christ's sake!!” But I managed to convince him that large beds of beautiful zinnias were one of the deceased's accomplishments in life and should be noted in her obituary. He wouldn't let me mention another woman's rhubarb cake. “Recipes don't belong in an obit. Too disrespectful,” he said. But he did once let me say, “An employee of the Northern Pacific for thirty-seven years, Mr. Johnson was well known for his skill as an electrician and for taking good care of his tools.”

I thought of my obit-writing days the other evening, after I'd spent the afternoon going around to estate sales. Like the obit trade, they might have been depressing—the homes of the deceased opened up for the sale of stuff the survivors didn't want, and hundreds of us strangers tramping through the rooms looking for bargains—but they were not. Not to me, anyway. I found them very satisfying. I went to three houses, all small and jammed with stuff. Though people of modest means, the deceased all had terrific dining-room tables, monumental solid oak or walnut dressers and bedsteads, and they had all been pack rats and kept impressive collections of knickknacks, souvenirs, bric-a-brac, and what the want ads call “collectibles.”

I'm a saver myself, and to my considerable collection I added a little bit of each of theirs: a white plastic radio, circa 1950 ($5), a black serving tray with a map of North Dakota on it ($1), a glass pitcher with cheerful red roses on it that is similar to one my mother had ($2.50), a small “I WANT ROOSEVELT AGAIN” button (50 cents), four chauffeurs' badges ($5), a copy of Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-four
inscribed “Happy Birthday, Fred—Mar. 1950—Hazel” ($1), a Tag-olene Motor Oil folding yardstick (10¢), and some other stuff I thought I'd enjoy owning. I was a discriminating buyer. I passed up a busted Victrola ($95) and a crate of
National Geographics
circa 1940 ($10 for the lot).

Going to estate sales, a person is struck by the fact that possessions survive us. The chair I'm sitting in should be good for another fifty years, at least. This typewriter should clatter on into the twenty-first century. This solid-glass paperweight could be darned near eternal. I'll hang on to them, they are so dear, but when I'm dead they should be sold to strangers at rock-bottom prices. People who may not be born yet should come by my house and snatch them up as the wonderful bargains they will be. That's why I took good care of them—to extend their usefulness beyond the unimaginable day when I'm no longer here. The big obits of prominent people referred to “a legacy of public service” they left behind, and maybe they did and maybe they didn't. I am definitely going to leave a black Underwood upright in very good condition,
cheap,
and who knows what that could lead to?

O
F PORCHES THERE ARE TWO SORTS: the decorative and the useful, the porch that is only a platform and the porch you can lie around on in your pajamas and read the Sunday paper.

The decorative porch has a slight function, similar to that of the White House portico: it's where you greet prime ministers, premiers, and foreign potentates. The cannons boom, the band plays, the press writes it all down, and they go indoors.

The true porch, or useful porch, incorporates some of that grandeur, but it is screened and protects you from prying eyes. It strikes a perfect balance between indoor and outdoor life.

Indoors is comfortable but decorous, as Huck Finn found out at the Widow's. It is even stifling if the company isn't right. A good porch gets you out of the parlor, lets you smoke, talk loud, eat with your fingers—without apology and without having to run away from home. No wonder that people with porches have hundreds of friends.

Of useful porches there are many sorts, including the veranda, the breezeway, the back porch, front porch, stoop, and now the sun deck, though the veranda is grander than a porch need be and the sun deck is useful only if you happen to like sun. A useful porch may be large or not, but ordinarily it is defended by screens or large shrubbery. You should be able to walk naked onto a porch and feel only a slight thrill of adventure. It is comfortable, furnished with old stuff. You should be able to spill your coffee anywhere without a trace of remorse.

Our family owned a porch like that once, attached to a house overlooking the St. Croix River east of St. Paul, Minnesota, that we rented from the Wilcoxes. We lived on it from May to September. When company came, they didn't stop in the living room but went straight through to the porch.

You could sit on the old porch swing that hung from the ceiling or in one of the big wicker chairs or the chaise longue, or find a spot on the couch, which could seat four or accommodate a tall man taking a nap. There was a table for four, two kerosene lanterns, and some plants in pots. The porch faced east, was cool and shady from midday on, and got a nice breeze off the river. A lush forest of tall ferns surrounded this porch so the occupants didn't have to look at un-mowed lawn or a weedy garden and feel too guilty to sit. A brook ran close by.

In the home-building industry today, a porch such as that one is considered an expensive frill, which is too bad for the home buyer. To sign up for a lifetime of debt at a vicious rate of interest and wind up with a porchless home, a home minus the homiest room—it's like visiting Minnesota and not seeing the prairie. You cheat yourself. Home, after all, doesn't belong to the bank, it's yours. You're supposed to have fun there, be graceful and comfortable and enjoy music and good conversation and the company of pals, otherwise home is only a furniture showroom and you may as well bunk at the YMCA and get in on their recreation programs.

The porch promotes grace and comfort. It promotes good conversation simply by virtue of the fact that on a porch there is no need for it. Look at the sorry bunch in the living room standing in little clumps and holding drinks, and see how hard they work to keep up a steady dribble of talk. There, silence indicates boredom and unhappiness, and hosts are quick to detect silence and rush over to subdue it into speech. Now look at our little bunch on this porch. Me and the missus float back and forth on the swing, Mark and Rhonda are collapsed at opposite ends of the couch, Malene peruses her paperback novel in which an astounding event is about to occur, young Jeb sits at the table gluing the struts on his Curtiss biplane. The cats lie on the floor listening to birdies, and I say, “It's a heck of a deal, ain't it, a
heck
of a deal.” A golden creamy silence suffuses this happy scene, and only on a porch is it possible.

When passers-by come into view, we say hello to them, but they don't take this as an invitation to barge in. There is something slightly
forbidding
about the sight of people on a porch, its grace is almost royal. You don't rush right up to the Queen and start telling her the story of your life, and you don't do that to porch sitters either. We are Somebody up here even if our screens are torn and the sofa is busted and we're drinking orange pop from cans. You down there are passers-by in a parade we've seen come and go for years. We have a porch.

It is our reviewing platform and observation deck, our rostrum and dais, the parapet of our stockade, the bridge of our ship. We can sit on it in silence or walk out naked spilling coffee. Whatever we do, we feel richer than Rockefeller and luckier than the President.

Years ago, my family moved from that luxurious porch to a porchless apartment in the city. Our friends quit visiting us. We felt as if we had moved to Denver. Then we moved to a big old house with two porches, then to another with a long veranda in front and a small sleeping porch in back. Now we have arrived in Manhattan, at an apartment with a terrace. A porch on the twelfth floor with a view of rooftops, chimney pots, treetops, and the street below. A canvas canopy, a potted hydrangea, and two deck chairs. Once again, we're ready for company.