Old letters

Son 1 graduates from university in a week. He'll be coming home until he finds a job, and will have to park his stuff in my storage unit. So last Sunday I went out to the unit to organize it so there would be room.

Termites had gotten in, eating the door frame and damaging some of the boxes (though not, so far as I could tell, their contents — or not much). So I moved everything into the (happily vacant) unit next door, throwing out a bunch of trash in the process and making some room for Son 1. 

I wrote Marie a long email about the whole effort and considered pasting it in here, but the only part that really matters is one or two paragraphs near the end that touch on the most emotionally relevant part of the four and a half hours of work.

__________

[After talking about moving the physical stuff — bunk bed frame, camping supplies, an old chair — I then wrote about the boxes of paper, which are far and away the largest part of my storage. Some of this is old business or bills that I can probably shred once I sort through to make sure nothing important is hiding there. Besides that, though ....]

And letters. I have at least two different boxes full of letters, and I only looked through the one that I had to rebox. But there were letters from grandparents, teachers, form letters I'd kept because God knows why; letters from my friends in Canada, keeping up with me after I moved to California [back in the early 1970's]; letters from high school friends when we all went different directions to college; letters from friends at college. Oddly enough I found none of yours, and I know I kept them. They must be in the other box. But I found letters from correspondence I'd forgotten all about: C—, the summer after my freshman year; R—, filling a whole folder of his own; K— griping about whatever she felt like griping about [and lamenting "Why aren't you here when I need you?"]; D— apologizing for not having written in so long [and enclosing a photo of herself in a wimple captioned "Does this look appropriately penitent?"]; even one from L— obviously sent after I had graduated, saying "Nobody seems to have the slightest idea if you are coming for Ren Fayre! Are you?" (Actually that one was signed "Sybel" and it took me a while to figure out who Sybel was.) 

[L— was a woman Marie had been in love with for several years and they were briefly lovers; so while I mentioned her letter because I thought it would be funny I didn't mention that there were actually more like three of them. For a brief time L— went by the name "Sybel" and the only way I worked out who that was (lo these many years later) was that she signed one of her letters with that name and also her legal name.]

It left me ... is there a word for it? "Nostalgic" is probably closest, but it implies too much sadness and I wasn't exactly sad. "Very aware of the past" might be a better way to put it. And it left me shaking my head a little at how much I walked away from when I got together with Wife and dropped completely off the face of the earth as far as all my existing friendships were concerned. Hmm. Maybe sadness is an element of it after all? It's hard for me to think of the right words. 

Maybe I'll go full Californian and summarize all these emotions with "Oh wow." Sure. That covers it.

__________

The letter goes on after that, but to me that's the heart of it. Last night Marie and I spoke on the phone; and while she sympathized with all the work, she didn't much comment on this part. But it lingers with me. Yesterday I spent too much of my time at work googling old friends or trying to find them on LinkedIn and wondering what any of them would say if I sent them a note all these decades later.

Wondering ....