I find my way to the beat up shoe box with a Union Jack cover that I’d put in the back of the closet four years ago but had been dragging around for years.
I open it in the den and begin looking.
The first thing I find are the rejection notes. Playboy. The New Yorker. The Crescent Review. There were more than a few, I recall, but these are the ones that still lay sleeping in their envelopes. They are single sided. Single spaced. Typed. They bear the mastheads of the magazines I hoped might change me.
One is perfunctory, but on it, in handwriting, is a personal notation: If the piece were a little shorter, we’d have taken it.
I post it on social media with the caption, “I was too proud to edit.”
The Playboy missive is from one of the magazine’s better known columnists. I sold books to him on Michigan Avenue and I remember his face immediately, the warmth of his smile. His kindness. Though I did not know at the time he’d been a Marine, I’d sensed even then that he’d been in the military from the way he walked. He took time to write carefully about what I’d sent him. It was a good piece with plenty of potential and a good build. An invitation that I did not take up to submit it formally.
The last note is from an editor at the New Yorker who I’d met through a brilliant cousin, L, in New York. His note is long and you can see how the keys of his typewriter struck the page. Manual. A labor of mind and hands. I’d recently seen his name in a thank you section of a Pulitzer-winning book, but now here it was in his own scrawl as a signature you couldn’t read if you didn’t know it. He was more critical, but no less encouraging. The story might’ve been too easy because of the age of the protagonist. But thank you. Keep going.
Reading them together, I am struck by the sense that these three people each were responding to something that was worthy and good, something I had made. I’m reminded of who I was and wanted to be 30 years ago. It brings a twinge of regret, but not anger. I might’ve done things differently, but I didn’t. So now I’m father to two boys. And today I know better than to think someone else can change me by just saying, “Yes.”
Then I come across the letters from friends, siblings, parents. I am amazed at the penmanship and the subject matters. The cursive and printed sentence tell about books and reading and relationships. One is from a friend who became CMO of a large chipmaker. He tells me about his struggles with prostitutes. I open another note from a writer-colleague in the Peace Corps. He mentions his desire to see an ice cube when he comes back to the states. Then there’s the one from a woman who’s gone on to write for a well-known comedy magazine and website: She tells me about all the new music she is discovering with a sense of awe and bubble gum.
Many of these envelopes contain snapshots and newspaper clippings. Almost all end with a bit about me needing to write, to keep going. It’s sweet and kind and I feel lucky to have known these people. And I am surprised by how much I was surrounded by people who believed in me — and equally surprised at my blindness to them.
Then I come across the letters from the women I knew. The girlfriends. These are harder to look at. They bring up the deepest story I told myself when I was younger, a story of damage that I began for myself when I was just a little younger than my 8 year old son is now. One of these women I hurt when I rejected her in drunken shame. Another laments the end of our time together but assures me it was the right thing to do.
But it’s the woman who writes to me of a lie she told me that is the most difficult. It’s an awkward, fumbling note — a letter of amends. Though I know I have read it before, it’s like the first time I have seen it — and I realize why: Whatever the words said literally, I was too certain of my own broken nature that I couldn’t read it for what it was: An absolution that, had I taken for face value, might have led to a new path and new view of myself.
The relationships these letters bring up are all years apart and while none of the writers ever knew each other in any way (except abstractly through me), they all also carry a theme about the way I saw myself that is related to this flash of understanding about myself that I see now.
Be kinder to yourself. You are good. Go gently.
The clarity of the story I once told myself is astonishing. I am amazed to see it mapped out so neatly in the past by the hands of others. I know that the feeling of unworthiness I carried kept me going. I used it to drive the work by which I hoped to prove it wrong.
I’m also amazed to know that something strong lived side by side with it, another voice that the authors of these letters also heard. A goodness that wanted (and wants) to live.
I am fortunate to have been guided by that, too. It lets me forgive the twenty something kid that got these letters because he did not know, but he did not give up, either.
It’s led to a life that could not have been planned. A life with a dog and two kids and a good, full-hearted woman who, on meeting him almost 20 years ago, told her closest friend that she saw a man who was truly kind.
Some of the letters I keep. Some I throw away. But I’m glad I looked them over. While I wish I’d been able to do it sooner, I don’t regret any of it. It’s all mine. It is part of getting past my past.
And it oddly makes me feel more ready than ever to learn to surf next year.
