Dear Megan,
Thank you! Thank you so much for the snail mail last week. I love finding a gem in my mailbox, like a pearl tucked snuggly into the bills, junkmail, and stack of bureaucratic bullshit that’s headed to the recycling bin. Your note was a pleasant surprise! I love my penpals and so I appreciate your ink & paper very much. And there must’ve been some other magic in that envelope because it has up & disappeared. Thin air. I’ve looked everywhere. I swear I set it aside somewhere safe so I could return an analog missive in kind. But it’s gone! Poof! Gone gone gone.
Now, with no return address, I wouldn’t know where to send a return so I’m just going to leave this here, like a message in a bottle, in hopes that you’ll find it one day.
Shoot, I also had an impromptu poem to send you along with today’s bit’O Longfellow and a good Bazooka Joe funny from my bubble gum wrapper. Oh well, perhaps next time.
Ya know, for such a large wad’s worth of gum this Bazooka Joe’s flavor only lasts like four or five minutes. The comics, though, are timeless.
[[[[
From Longfellow -- April 18
It’s better, therefore, that men should soon make up their minds to be forgotten, and look about them, or within them, for some higher motive in what they do than the approbation of men, which is Fame—namely, their duty; that they should be constantly and quietly at work, each in his sphere, regardless of effects, and leaving their fame to take care of itself.
--Hyperion .
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
--A Psalm of Life.
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Latley, the things with which I take the most special care seem to be disappearing the most often. C’est la vie. I don’t know how it happens, how things go missing or how I make them disappear, but I’ve learned from experience that things’ll come back around, especially if I stop looking. I know things are out of sync right now— perhaps because Time is misfiring and gravity is wavy and misaligned— and there’s nothing terrestrial to blame for it. But if there were I’d blame a cat. It always seems to be one of the cats that steals or hides things from me. I had a dream last night that one of my cats took me across a bridge to a whole world of lost things. There were socks and keys everywhere! Just this morning, while looking for my glasses and a pen, I found a stack of books moved from my bedside nightstand to the trash can. And I have to wonder if that’s what happened to your envelope. I’m just trying to hang on to what I got right now but things keep slipping from my grasp. They’ll be back. I’ve recently had returned to me a letter that I sent on October 2, 2001! True story. Twenty four years in the Dead Letters bin! It was a good read though. Another gem.
With love and gratitude,
Blowing big pink bubbles,
Pop,
–PSL