Letters In A Box

 

“What are you hoping to get out of them?” my wife asked. To which I’d reply, “If you’re parents abandoned you, abused you, or sent you to boarding school in Siberia there’s always a ‘Why.’”

I’m reading through some letters in a box. They were with my mom’s things, fifteen years ago when we cleaned out her house. A shoe box I put in storage. Forgot I had them until the unit was unloaded. Letters from my dad to my mom. Letters dad wrote to my mom from before my birth until I was seven, my sister five. A one-way conversation.

There are relationships where one partner’s vibrant character, and purposeful lifestyle pulls the other clod out of catastrophe and into a smooth orbit. Not our story. My parents were arcing toward collision. To avoid it my parents lived separate lives, three-thousand miles apart.

The iconic Civil-war letter goes something like, “I would brave hot musket shot and cannon-ball fire to experience your red-hot loving again.” Those were not my dad’s letters. Writing from New Jersey to my mother in the San Fernando Valley the letters contained four basic sentences, incorporated four themes: the weather, repentance, money, and plea.

Two pages, handwritten; “It is March, and I am still sleeping in my long underwear.” “Sorry I missed you when I called last night. The boys and I went out. They bought a round. I bought a round…” “Did you receive the money from Rochester? They owe me about 140 dollars.” Often, there was a question about bringing us to visit or to live in the east. Neither ever happened.

The explosion came in high school. Legal divorce. My sister and I were not surprised. The letters survived, in a box. In a closet. Devoid of answers.

Photo by Ire Photocreative on Unsplash

Hemingway Meets Jelly Roll

 

“I hate the man I used to be, But he'll always be a part of me, right now looking at my past…I know it’s unpretty.”--- Jelly Roll

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?” ---Hemingway

 One classic struggle, two men, two souls. Hemingway seems a man broken by tension. A man’s man by reputation. The four wives, the whiskey and emotional polarity, all hint at a soul not sated. In contrast his experiences were bigger than life. His writing rich and vibrant, he poured himself into everything he did.

Jelly Roll is the biggest artist on the country music scene. Not the man’s man Hemingway was. Incarcerated for much of his young life, his daughter Bailee was born while he was in jail. That crushed him. He turned to the gospel he’d heard as a child. His music is his story. He plays it close to the bone. It resonates.  

Both struggling with darkness and their love for whiskey. Hemingway certainly; and would have benefited from current pharmacology. Jelly Roll shares part of how he was healed from self-pharmacology through 12-steps, “Hardly sobered up, already wanna quit quittin’, sweaten’ in an old church basement, wishin’ I was wasted.”

At 19 Hemingway was on the frontlines delivering candy when he was hit by machine-gun fire and 200 metal fragments. A priest administered last rites. As a result he converted to Catholicism. Later, he “more formally” converted” upon marrying his second, Catholic, wife. Some credit these ‘conversions’ to his vision and moral landscape. Whether he was committed to the framework of the church or to the risen Christ, his writing reflected the three great transcendentals of truth, goodness and beauty.

Knowing God doesn’t guarantee good art. Faulty coping mechanisms aren’t easily slayed. It’s surgery. In Christ, in art, in healing, fulness necessitates leaning into the blade. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”