A long post promoting the acquisition of a trunk (part 1)

I had a few minutes before class today and I used the time to leaf through the New Yorker (see post below) that came in the mail. I remembered how this was the first magazine I ever subscribed to on my own, back when I was just around 20. Gradually I had stopped reading it – no time, no desire really. I kept up with the cartoons for a while and then, when the family expanded, I cancelled (for a good 15 years). The unread stacks were getting to me.

Today, I remembered one particular article that I did read, back in 1978. It was in the Notes & Comments section, and it talked about the sudden acceleration of the nuclear arms race (I can’t remember the triggering event). The writer had said how he had always imagined that some day, when he’d be long dead and gone, his red-haired children would be running around, and his grandchildren, and other children, all taking his place. This was a great comfort to him, though it was then threatened by the political ferocity of the administration’s so called defense measures. The comment affected me so much that I wrote him a letter explaining that I felt the same way.

All these years I remember fondly that he, this (presumably junior) writer from the New Yorker, wrote back. Tonight I went downstairs to the basement to poke around. I have a trunk there and it has in it a number, a great number of letters from both sides of the ocean, all written during the 1970s.

Of course I found the letter from the New Yorker. I knew it would be there. It said:

Dear Ms. Lewandowska: Thank you for letting us know about how much you liked our February 13th Notes and Comments piece. We’ll see that your reaction is passed along to the writer. Very truly yours, Fred Keefe (Editorial Office).

No, that’s not how I remember it! I heard from the author! Didn’t I? He was so wonderful and responsive. Wasn’t he?

In the trunk I also found a letter from my grandmother in Poland – agrammatical (she never finished elementary school), with good wishes for some new undertaking that I was embarking on (can’t imagine what). I know I probably impulsively (see post below) changed my mind and did something entirely different, but her letter was remarkable and uplifting and full of blind devotion and support.

And, buried underneath a stack of other treasures, there was an unmailed letter that I myself had written to the faculty member at Chicago who was to supervise my dissertation. It included the following sentences: “I received your letter today and I have to say that I am extremely angry at you…What you want is a dissertation of the type that’s never been written…People like you cause me to reconsider the veracity of all those intellectual ideals you claim to uphold. I'm convinced that you see only one road to creating sociology – your road… Aren’t you scared that in ten years you’ll be surrounded by clones of yourself? “ and so on. In the end, I never did send this. Good thing, because the prof is still around and in an indirect way I have contact with him.

Letters. No one these days has trunks, they have email folders. Too bad. And there is no such thing as good mail anymore: the box outside is filled daily with bills, ads and catalogues.

I am certain of this advice: print out the good emails (forget about the rest), stick them in envelopes and put them away in a trunk. Everyone needs a trunk to open at some point.