Unscrambling the letters...

I’m in a really interesting mood right now. I think some people would call it melancholy but that isn’t right. Reflective is probably more fitting, doesn’t have that overriding sense of depression that goes on with a melancholic disposition. I’ll explain…

See, I’ve spent the entire weekend cleaning my apartment. Depending on your point of view, this is either spring cleaning or getting my apartment to the point where it is finally fit for human habitation. At least for a moment, each room in my apartment was clean, though my bedroom, which was clean Saturday morning, now has an unmade bed and clothes on the floor. I’ll have to address that issue at some point or another.

But one of the things that I do when I clean is that I go through my files and in doing so I uncover my past. Because I am one of those people who keeps everything (hence the continually messy apartment). Other people would just do a purge every once in a while but I always feel that what I saved as something important at one point in my life is now part of my history, part of my story. The cartoons that I clipped from the paper show what struck me as funny, a picture that caught my fancy, and the quotes that I used to tack to my inspiration board all remind me of who I was in the past. And then there are the more personal artifacts of one’s life.

Like a picture of some friends from college, all of whom I lost track of years ago, and myself. It’s kind of stunning seeing myself twelve years and fifty pounds ago, I’m not sure if I recognize the person in the photograph as me. There’s that old stat about all of your cells regenerate every seven years and you become a completely different person and maybe there is some truth to it. I looked at the picture and could tell you immediately the time and place, who I was with and what they did after college, and while it really doesn’t feel like twelve years ago it does feel like it was a lifetime.

But that isn’t what really put me in a reflective mood for the night. What has had me sitting around thinking are the letters I came across, which all make me wonder what might have been. Came across one from Heather, who my not dating her in college is now officially one of my three regrets in life, talking about going to see Marcia Ball and Sonny Landredth in concert and talking about going to see Wayne Toups sometime in the future. And holding that letter and seeing mentions of bands that I would see years later, completely unaware of the coincidence until that moment, just makes you want to know where people who were in your life have ended up.

And of course I came across letters from Meg, who I’ve written about here before, which I always end up rereading whenever I organize my life and really hope that one day I will have one more conversation with her. I think that is what we all want when we uncover these moments from our past, I’m not hoping right now to right some past wrong or that a girl I liked in high school might somehow hold the solution to all of my problems. It’s that I’ve met all of these cool people throughout my life and then have lost track of them and it just seems unfair (or stupid on my part). Looking back, there were a lot of laughs left unheard and stories left unshared in my life.

There’s one other thing that struck me as I went through all of these old letters and postcards, it was that I’m probably one of the last people to have a collection of letters and that means something. A letter from someone in your past means so much more than an email or an instant message. Even if you’ve saved your email (and yes, as many of you probably fear, I do save a lot of my emails) all it is at the end of the day is a lot of digital code being projected on a screen. It might be personal and important but it is also cold and mechanical. But holding a piece of paper and seeing the crossouts and the handwriting and knowing that at one point in time someone was sitting down and writing just for you, well, that just makes you realize how incredible life can be at times. The digital revolution might be wonderful and it does allow me to sit up at night and share my thoughts with anyone willing to stop by and listen but I miss the simple letter. Because no matter how old I get, no matter where my life takes me, I know that stored somewhere will be a letter written to me in 1990 and I know that no email I come across could ever hold the same emotional impact as those few pieces of paper.

The five random CDs for the week:
1) Jack Ingram “Acoustic Motel”
2) U2 “Achtung Baby”
3) Rufus Wainwright “Want Two”
4) Keb’ Mo’ “Slow Down”
5) The Handsome Family “Live at Schuba’s Tavern”