LOVING LETTERS

 Who has 36,550 photos in her iPhone? I do! Not to mention the 1914 videos. Could this be the very same dinosaur who was dragged kicking and screaming into the computer generation? The one who wouldn’t go near a technological device unless her husband and son were within screaming distance? 

 

Actually, these numbers will not come as a surprise to those who know me as the hoarder that I am. And once I found out, thanks to Reedsy, that I wouldn’t have to choose just one photo for this Author Page but that—wow!—I could have 8–naturally,I had to look through my entire collection to obsess about which ones to choose. Of course there were way too many candidates, but then I realized that my Italian alter-ego, Donatella de Poitiers, the one who writes this blog probably wouldn’t mind if I used the outtakes here. But only if she forgives me for neglecting her during the years it took to publish Letters to Men of Letters, which had a long gestation period. At some point I could go into greater detail about that, but let’s get back to now.    

 

Although the title of my book is Letters to Men of Letters, I have dedicated it to my mom who didn’t live to see the end of this journey, but who was, throughout her 93.5 years, a devoted letter writer. She used her letters, always in her beautiful Palmer Method handwriting, to hold far-flung family together. Since she was not much of a reader, I doubt that this book would have been to her taste, but I know she would have been proud of me for seeing it through. 

 

In the book’s Dear Dad letter to my father, I talk about the role of letters in his and my life. I had dedicated my PhD dissertation to him. But in the wake of the loss of my sweet mom, it just occurred to me that I carry on her letter-writer legacy by writing her an annual Birthday Letter. We are now up to “Happy 97th, Mom!” These Birthday Letters, like my Valentine to Leonard Cohen, seem to make everyone, including me, cry (but in a good way). 

 

Since there is no expiration date for mourning and grief, which have a timeline of their own, she is always with me. There’s nothing like the unforgiving medium of a tombstone to occasion writer’s block. I wrote a poem about that while joining my siblings in deciding what to put on the stone of our father. There was no disagreement, however, about what to write for mom:

 

A GENTLE FORCE FOR GOOD                 

           BELOVED BY ALL