The Last Love Letters in the Attic

Dear Old Friend - Patty Griffin (mp3)
Keep You Happy - Tift Merritt (mp3)

So I'm in my mom's attic reading through a box of notes and letters, most of which my first girlfriend sent me during my junior year in high school and the summer that followed...

When I had that first legitimate romantic kiss, I was 17. Seventeen years before a hand held, or a long embrace, or the warmth of a (fully clothed) body next to mine. That I was deprived of such simple joys for so long only serves to remind me, as I work daily with boys at all levels of social intelligence and experience, that the urges for a physical connection are often so overpowering you wanna ram your skull through a wall. But more on that next time.

With Karla, I had no itch to move past our comfortable PG-rated relationship. She was such a SuperChristian -- leader of her church youth group, on her church's session, president of FCA, yada yada -- that I was all but positive she wasn't interested in going any further, which suited me fine. That "She's So High" song? In my mind, she was literally high above me, like a good mile closer to earning her wings.

By the end of that school year, however, in spite of being physically overjoyed and being with a girl who seemed to be about the sweetest and kindest person I might ever meet, everything started to feel wrong. Romance wasn't a road I'd ever traveled before, so I didn't know where the car trouble was comin' from, but I knew it was somewhere in the damn car.

Karla graduated and was named salutatorian and earned a full scholarship to a nearby college, where she'd play soccer for them. A few weeks into summer I headed to Martin, Tennessee, for Governor's School. She sent me letters while I was gone. I'm pretty sure I wasn't quite so faithful with my writing anymore.

By the time I got back, I was taking her out for a date so I could inform her that I didn't want to date her anymore.

I'd actually prayed to God that Karla would break up with me first, that she would by good luck or divine intervention take the awful responsibility for ending this wonderful thing off my shoulders.

She fought so hard not to cry when I told her. I can still see it in my mind, the furrow in her brow as her oh-so-intelligent brain tried to make sense of the words coming from my mouth. This announcement had come quite literally out of the blue, with no real warning other than my failure to write her much while I was away. I'd never once even tried to share my fears about us, because they seemed too dark, and I wasn't remotely sure I understood them myself.

We hugged at the end of that last official date, and it was the kind of hug neither of us wanted to end. I think she was hoping if she held me long enough, I might return to my senses. I think, somewhere, I was hoping for the same thing. But it just never quite happened.

She kept begging to meet with me, and we continued talking it out over the phone. We shared another month of dates consisting of sitting awkwardly across tables, sipping awkwardly on sodas, holding awkward hands, as she grappled with the insanity of my resolution. Why the hell would I end something that never seemed anything shy of a cheesy Disney movie? What happened to me at Governor's School? Is that where the end had begun?

How do you tell someone you love that you don't want to live in a Happily Ever After when you're not even 18? How to you make sense of the desire to experience all the shit life can sling at you to someone who embodied everything that seemed right and good with life and love and religion? It hardly made sense to me, so how was I supposed to explain it to her?

I kept telling her I didn't deserve her, that she was too good for me (and I still believe that, in a sense). And she kept responding, as calmly and un-blustery as she could, "Why are you really doing this?" And what she meant was, If I'm so damned stupendous, why isn't there anything I can do to change your mind?

My senior year was precisely what I asked for and deserved. Full of rejection from lots of girls who were well beyond my range, full of angst and uncomfortable cluelessness about the social scene my classmates seemed to understand so well. It often felt like I was in rooms with Venezuelan runway models and their handlers. I didn't speak their language, and they didn't much give a shit whether I could or not. I wanted a social education; I got a social education. And I failed the class.

Karla, through all of this, continued to call me and occasionally write me, only served to twist the knife I'd stuck in my own chest. But I couldn't go back. There were plenty of times I wanted to, and it wasn't solely out of stubbornness. It was because, no matter how I sliced it, and no matter how I replayed all of it in my head, we were never going to be together forever. And if it wasn't going to be forever, why torture one another for even another minute?

Almost 20 years later, I don't regret it, and I don't think I made the wrong decision, although I certainly wonder how I could have done what I did better, more humanely. But even without regrets, those letters... feel heavy. And I weep for those two kids who loved each other so much, if only for a short time.

"Dear Old Friend," which was released only on the compilation 13 Ways to Live, has sat comfortably as the "Most Heartbreaking Song I've Ever Heard" since I first heard it four years ago. "Keep You Happy" is from Tift Merritt's most recent CD, Another Country, and I just found out we're practically related... well, OK, that's exaggerated. But her music is great!

Love in the Letters in the Attic

First Glimmer - Paul Westerberg (mp3)
She's So High - Tal Bachman (mp3)

Having stumbled by chance into my mother's attic, I immersed myself into a box of letters I'd received while in high school and college.

By far the largest portion of letters, 50 or so, were from my first girlfriend. Cue the fuzzy flashback camera... (Faces blurred and name changed to protect the innocent and/or those who would s#it bricks if they were ever to discover I'd depicted her with me.)

I met Karla in the first month of my junior year of high school. My mother taught English and journalism at Red Bank at the time, and I had gone over there to help her move some things and help with the computers in her newspaper office. Her editor, a brilliant girl now working in D.C., took a shine to me and invited me to go out with her and some pals. I first met the group of four girls and three guys at Subway, back when that was a newfangled joint. Subway Before Jared.

I had been invited in order to be the romantic foil for a lovelorn pal of hers, but subtle set-ups never work the way they should, and I immediately found myself smitten by a different awkward goddess in my midst. She was in line to be the school salutatorian, was all-state in soccer as a junior, and had won all these awards for being a generally nice and giving person, not to mention that my mother spoke of her as if she dropped straight from the Care Bear clouds.

Barely a few days passed before I sent her my first note. My mother became our pony express. That we entrusted these notes to the care of my frikkin' mother shows just how innocent and clueless I was, even at 17. I got a response that very night. It's amazing how many times you can read the same brief note over and over, parsing every sentence, every phrase, the way a word is written out. If you stare long enough, you can imagine the hand that wrote that letter and start wondering why it jittered here or elongated there. Did she write it during a single class, or did she carefully consider it, one sentence at a time, over the course of an entire school day?

It began what would be a routine of note-writing and -reading, virtually every school day. My specialty was redrawing and rewording Calvin & Hobbes or Bloom County cartoons or spinning semi-fictional yarns; Karla's responses were generally shorter and simpler, but every response meant validation, and validation meant hope.

I went and watched her last two soccer games, and the already-faltering "group" would go out and celebrate afterward. I then went and watched every one of her basketball games. By then the "group" had faded, and it was just me, sitting on a bench watching her.

In spite of all the notes and my following her like a puppy whenever possible, it took until mid-December before I had the nerve to ask her out on a date (dinner and "Rain Man," if you must know). It took another month, maybe a little longer, before we shared our first kiss. Our courting methods would have tested the patience of tree sloths.

Is it weird that I don't remember our first kiss? Shouldn't everyone be able to remember that first kiss, my first romantic kiss ever? Do you, dear reader?

Here's what I remember. I remember Carol (the newspaper editor) confiding in me later on that for months Karla would come to her in mock hysteria, pulling on her hair and wondering when the hell I was going to make the slightest physical advance. And I felt awful, 'cuz I thought I was being polite and respectful. I then remember Carol saying, "And she's still wondering when you're going to move past the kissing part."

I never gave the response that to this day I can remember thinking: What's "past the kissing part?" Seriously, I thought kissing was the end-all be-all of dating. Not that I didn't know about sex, because I did. I knew about sex like I knew about the moon. I knew they were important and out there, but I had no reason to believe I would be visiting either one anytime soon. I'm not sure I understood that there was anything in-between kissing and sex. In my mind, physical relationships went in three stages: (1) You kissed. (2) When you really loved someone, you French kissed. (3) When you got married or loved someone enough that marriage was inevitable, you had sex.

That it took us three months of note-writing and almost a month of actual dating before we kissed, and another couple of weeks before we French kissed, seemed to me like we were moving at blinding speed. We had gone two-thirds of the way to marriage in only a couple of months! Or, as those Toyota commercials put it, Who could ask for anything more?

I can remember hanging out in her family's small secondary living room, popping in a rented movie, and making out for hours. And by "making out" I mean kissing. My hands never went anywhere they shouldn't. They merely roamed around the safe, non-erogenous zones. My lips never dipped more than an inch or two below the jaw line. Four, five, sometimes six hours of kissing would only pause to refill a glass or grab a cookie or for a bathroom break. Then we'd both settle back on the couch and stare at whatever the hell was on the TV screen for all of 10 seconds before we tried reinventing the kiss one more time.

Did Karla ever get bored on those nights, just kissing and kissing and kissing? The thought never even crossed my mind, to be honest, since I was more worried about her knowing, uh, just how excited I was. Each new night of kissing was like an entire weekend at DisneyWorld. Her mouth was this ocean of possibility, and my lips and tongue were a merry crew, sailing merrily into the unknown and in no hurry to get anywhere else in particular.

Yet, somehow, less than six months after that first kiss I can't remember, it was all over.

To be continued...

(For those of you who are bored to tears with my reminiscing, I'll get my ass out of this attic after one and a half more attempts...)

"First Glimmer" is from 14 Songs, a terrifically underrated pop album. "She's So High" is from Tal's self-titled debut, a modest record with a few decent songs. Both are available at iTunes and Amazon.com.

Letters in the Box in the Attic

Letters from the Wasteland - The Wallflowers (mp3)
Open Letter (To a Landlord) - Living Color (mp3)

So I was up in my mom's attic recently to turn off a light that got left on, and I stumbled on a box my mother dutifully entitled "Letters to Billy."

The box was filled with letters. Postcards, long missives attached by staple or paperclip, letters on standard rule or word-processed. Dozens upon dozens of letters. And because I'm me, and me is someone who frequently worked his butt off on letters to make them super-duper fancy and intricate but then couldn't seem to find the f*#kin' motivation to address and stamp the damn thing, I even had four or five letters I'd written to folks and never sent.

I love email as much as maybe anyone on the planet. Email is one of the magic oils in the engine of my life that allows me to write with minimal wrist-cramping, without the need for white-out or balled-up paper to be thrown into waste baskets. I can write someone a 1,000-word meandering waste of their time without having to feel like I've killed an entire tree to do so.

But discovering that box gives even this email-o-phile pause. It makes me think -- and I'm still chewin' on it -- that maybe I need to mail a few more letters to my friends and the people I love. I'll read through every damn letter in that box at some point in the near future. I've already gone through a dozen or so. A large percentage were from my two longest-running childhood friends. We wrote each other regularly once our elder member left Chattanooga for Boston College, and we kept it up when the remaining two of us split to UT and UNC.

But I also got letters in response to ones I wrote in the summers after my freshmen and sophomore years of college, when I was waxing silly and sentimental to reach out to those people I missed (or, OK, desired) the most. I even kept a letter from the girl I met in Panama City on Spring Break my sophomore year. She and her pals from Villanova and my fellas from UNC kinda became a united and co-ed beach threat, protecting us against redneckier types. And OK, occasionally hooking up.

Her introductory thought in the letter proves I haven't changed much...:

     So who would've thought I'd be writing some big geek I'd known for only a week? Well get used to it. I know you secretly like it...

Then there's the "Stoopid Survey" a friend of mine sent out in the spring of my sophomore year (1992) that I seem to have never quite mailed back. It's definitely the kind of thing you'd see on Facebook nowadays, but I was amused by some of my responses, so I thought I'd share.

1. How often to you clean your belly button?
Whenever it itches or starts to turn green.

2. What method do you use to clean your belly button?
The pick-n-eat method, kinda like when apes groom each other on National Geographic TV.

4. Imagine that your house, containing everything you own, is on fire. Your parents and pets are safely out, but you have time to rush in and make one final dash to save one item. What would it be?
The box I keep my letters from you guys and from ***** and my diaries in... You can't buy those back with insurance money.

5. Do you like plants?
No, but I respect them and hold them afterward.

9. Do you consider buying music a hobby?
No. A scathing, acidic, bottomless addiction.

10. What is your favorite hobby at the moment?
See #9.

11. What is your second favorite hobby?
"Duhhh Beersss." [SNL Mike Ditka/Chicago Bears reference -- b]

12. What is your third favorite hobby?
Suckin' face (It would be my first favorite if I was still dating ********.)

15. If I had a wishbone and asked you to make a wish on it with me, what would you wish for?
Bottled beer in a can... wouldn't that be great?!

16. Are you a pillow-hugger at night?
No. I throw my left arm over my eyes to guarantee the removal of all light and my right arm on my massive chest and saw some big damn logs.

18. Do you like pajamas?
No. Not unless they have Yodas 'n' shit on 'em. [Raising Arizona reference -- b]

23. How many kids do you want to have?
"Six or seven.... Strapping young boys, like me!" -- Gaston [from Beauty and the Beast -- b]

28. Rate your top five traits for attracting a woman.
(1) Not UNattractive
(2) Will never ask her out but will be one helluva trusty friend.
(3) [never could come up with three more, it seems... -- b]

30. What do you strive for most in your life: accomplishment, security, love, power, excitement, knowledge, or something else?
Power doesn't become me. Security suffocates me enough already. Accomplishment eludes me. I'm looking for some way to defend how love and excitement and knowledge are all inseparable so I can claim them all.

Reading the letters has been heartwarming in a way that I needed at present. But it's also served to remind me that I've hungered for written connection with people for as long as I could string decent compound-complex sentences together and form semi-coherent thoughts. It's a need older than Cyrano deBergerac, yet I've always feared it was somehow childish or immature. All those letters make me think perhaps it was childish to think of it as childish.

So, please pause now to consider one of two requests from dear ol' Billy. First, if you've ever saved some letters and haven't read them in a while, go find 'em. Go read 'em. I've spent so much time looking through photo albums that I'd forgotten that letters pull out photos in our memory that are in ways all the more vivid. Second, consider writing someone a real, bona fide, handwritten (or, OK, typed) letter.

Letters have a half-life stronger than nuclear waste.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep reading the letters from the person who sent me more than the rest of the people in that box combined.

To be continued...

"Open Letter..." is from Living Color's most successful album, Vivid. "Letters from the Wasteland" is from the Wallflower's vastly underrated sophomore album, Breach. Both can be found on Amazon.com or iTunes.

Light in the Attic

Gravity - Josh Joplin Group (mp3)
Rudderless - Lemonheads (mp3)

While over at my mother's house for dinner recently, I was following my 16-month-old whirling dervish as he two-stepped like a drunken penguin down her hallway. I looked up at the entrance to our attic and noticed a light had been left on up there.

Our attic is a place of personal myth and legend, as I suspect attics and basements are for many children. I remember thinking it was a grand privilege to be allowed to go into the attic. I felt special climbing those rickety wooden ladder-steps and pulling myself up into a place that was always 50 degrees colder or warmer than the hallway below. The temperature change made the attic feel supernatural -- certainly ghosts and other creatures caused such climate change -- and having to maneuver around and over the entrance lest you fall to your premature death added a constant sense of risk.

Back in my childhood and teenage years, the attic was so packed you couldn't hardly get to anything. Boxes packed in so tightly that the only way to reach the ones farthest back would be to remove the ones in-between from the attic altogether. Entire undiscovered species of rodentia could have (and probably did) lived comfortably amidst this cardboard and fiberglass city.

Even when I was much shorter, I couldn't stand up in the attic, so going anywhere required crawling on all fours, which made it feel as if I were on reconnaissance in some military exercise. Perhaps the military feel came from the long line of Navy uniforms my father kept hanging on a pole that stretched what seemed 30 feet along the left side of that attic. Because this clothesline sat right near the narrow middle aisle, it was inevitably the focal point for anyone truly hoping to explore the greater mysteries on the darker, sketchier end. Beyond those clothes was increasing darkness and thus an ever-increasing ominous feeling. (Not to mention that if you went up there in July, the deeper in you went, the more likely you could pass out from the overpowering heat before you could reach the exit.)

When I lived there, one trip into the attic virtually guaranteed a week-long obsession over a single box or region. I must have spent several hours a day during one of my junior high summers, going into that attic and carefully investigating every yearbook my mother had tucked away. The ones she saved from her own school years were fascinating, but it was her collection of '70s and '80s books from teaching at Central High and Red Bank that I would study with hunger.

What were those high school students like? Were they all as fucked up as my step-brothers, who failed to make it out of there with a diploma? What made the cute girls cute in 1975? What made the popular guys so popular in 1980? What did happiness look like for a teenager? Was there anything more worth coveting than being captured permanently in a book for all eternity dancing with or standing next to, with arm around the neck of, a beautiful girl?

It was the pictures of couples I studied more than anything else. Why were those two people together? What did she see in him, and he in her, and who the hell on this planet will ever consider being in that kind of picture with my arm around them, or dancing next to me?

Other times I'd explore my father's boxes of military paraphernalia, things I'm absolutely certain he never once looked at once he boxed them up. He liked saving things for the symbolic act of saving them, because he knew they were somehow important enough to keep, but I don't recall him spending much of his life traveling down memory lane. As much as he enjoyed golf, I don't even think he enjoyed golf stories. He was a gardener at heart. You don't garden in the past. You garden for the present and future. Last year's tomato crop ain't worth talking about. Once the seasons change, you box the important memories up, stuff 'em in the attic, and let 'em sit there until you die.

After my brief obsession would end, I'd forget about the attic for a couple of seasons. More boxes would be shoved into all corners. The journey would get more treacherous, and the lighting would reach fewer nooks and crannies. And these changes made going up there again in eight or nine months all the more delicious.

I'm decades older, but I still look up at that entrance every time I walk under it. It still holds sway in me.

As I crawled toward the back of the attic to turn out that light, I passed by several boxes of my things I had yet to take to my house. Magazines I kept over time filled two boxes. Several years' worth of Esquire back when it wasn't trying to be Maxim. Several "Collector's Editions" of LIFE. Two years of Atlantic Monthly. And what kind of male would I be if I hadn't stuck a few Victoria's Secret catalogs and three highly-adored issues of Playboy in-between these other mags?

But the last box... it's exactly the kind of box that makes an attic magical, because no matter how many of these "last boxes" you find, you only find one of them at a time, and you find them when you most need to find them.

To be continued...

"Gravity" is from Useful Music. "Rudderless" is from It's a Shame About Ray. The latter can be found on Amazon.com or iTunes while the former is only on iTunes.