Here are three more epistolary works to round out our February posts. I hope you will leave the author comments at the article’s end and go to the other postings from February to read even more from Writing It Real members. Be sure to check out the challenge for March (any writing I receive by Wednesday night each week will appear in that March week’s newsletter). The description of the challenge appears at the end of the three letterform essays below.

Dear Memory by Pat LaPointe 

Dear Memory,

Where have you gone?

Why do you take so long to tell me what day it is? Sometimes guessing doesn’t work and I desperately search for something, anything that shows the truth.

Why do you hide knowledge of important behaviors? Where are you when I’m holding my hands over my keyboard trying to remember a password I use every day or what words I had just intended to write?

Where are you when I start speaking but forget what it was I wanted to say?

Where are you when I’m searching for something I put in a safe place an hour or a day before?

Where are you when I can’t remember a conversation from a short time ago?

Where are you when I can’t remember the name of an object? I can only say “the thing….”

Where are you when a grandchild stands before me and for a moment, I can’t recall his name?

Where are you when I’ve just read something but forget it and have to read it second or third time?

Why don’t you let me live in the “now”? There are times when you excite me with memories of long ago. It makes me smile but it is not a place I want to live forever.

The Wonderer

****

Dear Dr. Klopsch by Judith Barker Kvinsland

Dear Dr. Klopsch,

Although you will never receive this letter, and even if you could, I doubt that you would remember me. But I remember you. Now, more than five decades later, I can still recall your succinct words, “Please see me in my office,” scrawled upon my descriptive essay, the first assignment in your English 101 Comp class. No comments. No corrections. No letter grade, nothing but your directive.

I remember poking my head into your office a few days later, fearful of failure, a first-generation college student summoned to a faculty office. What had I done wrong? Too flustered and nervous to think that anything positive or hopeful could come from the encounter, I perched myself on the edge of a chair in your tiny office and waited.

You wasted no time. “Miss Barker, what are your career intentions? What are you planning to study here?” I don’t remember what I mumbled, probably, something like, “I’m not really sure yet.” Your response to my non-response was quick, “Let me encourage you to major in English. Your essay is excellent, some of the strongest writing I’ve read, and I wanted to assign this A+ in your presence, to encourage you to consider writing as your profession.”

I don’t recall my verbal response, but I remember how it felt to float out of your office and absorb the joy of your comments, to free myself of my insecurities, and even consider a writing career, something attainable, at least, in your opinion. I began to mull over the possibility.

What you and I could not foresee that afternoon, was how quickly the likelihood of becoming a full-time writer faded for me. In order to remain in college, I needed significant financial aid, which was scarce in the 1960’s. I secured one of the few opportunities available, a National Defense Education Act loan, designed specifically for students who might consider teaching as a profession in exchange for significant college financial aid. If I became a teacher and taught for five years, half of my loan would be forgiven, but I still needed to pay off the other half of the loan. Looking at those rigid requirements, the thought of a full-time career as a writer slipped away, with your advice not taken.

Here’s what happened instead: during a satisfying thirty-five-year career of teaching and administrating, every position I held required and relied upon my ability to write. Every day I sat before a blank page or a blank screen and needed to compose, frame and express an idea, or write a concise summary, or a grant, or an accreditation report, or a strategic plan, even recommendations for students. I sometimes wondered if I could meet another day’s challenge. And then I remembered, “I’m a writer,” and forged ahead. You believed in my writing, and ultimately, I absorbed your confidence that served me, and hopefully, others, well.

In 2020, my memoir,  Disturbing the Calm: A Memoir of Time and Place,“ a collection of fifteen, inter-related personal essays, was published by Kitsap Press. In those essays, I reflected, “How the memories of significant persons and places can impact us and be relied upon to give us strength, inspiration, and insight as we maneuver through turning point in our lives.”  In the final pages, the Acknowledgments, I named and thanked my teachers, including you, Dr. Klopsch: “I am indebted and appreciative for the help and encouragement of my teachers and many persons and organizations who have supported and influenced my writing.” I sought out the addresses of every teacher who had influenced and helped me, so I could inscribe a copy, and personally thank each of them. It was then, that I learned of your death in 1990. Perhaps, you would not even have remembered me, but I’ve always remembered you. How I regret that you never knew how much you mattered and influenced my life, your advice not taken, but confidence instilled.

With belated appreciation,

Judith Barker Kvinsland,

A former student, English 101

****

Dear Wisdom of My Elder by Amy Muscoplat

Dear Wisdom of My Elder,

Now I listen to you, Baubie. You’re 99 and deign to play bridge with me, a greenhorn in the world of majors, minors, trumps, notrumps, and slams. You told me for most of my life that bridge was good for your brain. Only now, in my early fifties, am I taking up bridge classes, meeting friends around the world on Bridge Base and Skype, and playing with you online as often as we can, too. I’m cracking my brain on the game, but I love it.

Long ago you told me not to listen to the fear or the voices that got me down…those inside my head, as a painfully perfectionistic scared young girl, as well as those voices coming from people outside too. In typical grandmotherly fashion, you’d say “stop listening to that.” “There’s no such thing as perfect.” “You gotta tell yourself you can do it. Just try your best and let that be enough.”

It was at least four decades ago, yet I hear it clearer in my ears now than then.

When life threw curveballs and huge changes of circumstances occurred, a wedding called off, jobs and cities changed, when I lived and worked overseas, you’d write me letters and say things like, “I know you have it in you and you’re going to be okay.” “I’m so sorry that X or Y or Z happened, but I know you have the strength, talents and courage to get through this. Just remember to listen to your gut.” “You’re very brave to go to the Peace Corps.” “You’re so talented, I bet you can do ‘it’ well. I’m rooting for you.”

No one else I knew had the distance nor the right words to have said it all to me at the different times I needed to hear it, nor would I have registered the words in the same way from them as I did when words of wisdom came from you. I admit I have been a slow learner and it’s taken me time to pick up on what you’ve been saying. I had wax in my ears.

Now when you hear me saying I’m trying something new, or I’m a little anxious about where I should start in with a new project, and yet, I’m choosing to “do it anyway,” you look at me directly and say to me on Zoom, “Good for you, you learned along the way.” “Just start with the part you already know how to do, and then keep making progress. Besides, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to keep doing it, but if you don’t try, you won’t know.”

You turn to me when I tell you that I’m finding, in many circumstances, I can choose to be right or I can choose to be happy…and sometimes just letting go and being happy is a wiser and saner response. Especially when I have little influence on the person who seems to be unresponsive or arguing.

“They won’t change, Amy. You have to be the one to change yourself. You have to not let it get to you so much. Now that you’re older, you can understand where they may have been coming from when they would say those things to you before.” “They were probably hurting too at the time.  And if you let it go, it doesn’t change their behaviors, but you don’t get hurt in the process.” “You don’t have to be so close to them. You just have to be civil and get along. You don’t need to be hurt because of how they are.”

“Why did I not listen to this for half a century?” I’m amazed it didn’t sink in before. Surely it would have made my heart hurt less. But I know that it was like the words had been mimed to me before, and I needed to grow older in order to interpret the Marcel Marceau act my grandmother was saying to me all along.

I ask you on Zoom last week, “Baubie, how did you know to believe in me?”

“I just knew,” you say.

“But how? I was so sad and scared and down and very young.  Only a teenager.”  “How did you know?”

“I knew that you had it in you.  That you just needed to gain some confidence.  That you had talents and that you could do what you put your mind to and be successful trying.”

I don’t stop asking questions. When you’re almost a century old, I feel it’s better not to leave my questions to you for another time. I don’t want to wonder and regret not asking.

“Baubie, what made you believe I was good inside when I didn’t hear that message elsewhere? When I was too young to know it on my own?”

For a moment she’s quiet. “Well, people are basically good, and I knew you were alright.” Besides,” she adds chuckling, “I knew you had good genes.”

“Thanks for the genes, Baubie,” I tell her.

Decades ago, you bought me a silver necklace with your senior discount from Dayton’s.  You gave it to me in a pretty box with a card that said, “Always remember to look for the silver linings in life.”

So, dear wisdom of my elder, thank you for gifting me time and the ability to hear what was being said all along. There have been and still are, many, many silver linings in my life.  Both Baubie, and the time with her and our conversations, have been among them.

With appreciation,

Amy

****

And now for the March writing idea:

So many of you have published books, are writing books you hope to publish, or dream of books that you might write and publish for an audience of readers. I hope you will write letters to agents, editors, publishers, audiences of one or general audiences you hope to reach, explaining why you wrote the book you wrote or are or will be writing it, how it matters to you and what you hope audiences will gain by reading it. You might write about what it took or is taking to accomplish the writing. If your book has an unusual form, write about that. Please include links to your book if it is published or to others’ books that have inspired you. These letters are the ones you wish you could write to the gatekeepers or audiences, both the ones you hope will love the book and the ones you imagine will hate it. I look forward to another month of publishing these letters by Writing It Real members.