This letter was 1×3 feet and the image is from the Caspari Horses from Natural Curiosities, which you’ve seen a lot of recently. It was the last of the stuff that I had from an old donation, but fear not! Christopher Wilcox just made another incredibly generous contribution to this project and the images that are backing the next crop of letters are going to break your heart.
Notes: This letter is from a me that lives in a universe just beside this one. I’m older there, and sadder, but still have access to this great paper. This thing measured about 1×4 feet, and features a photograph of a stuffed falcon, an image never used by Natural Curiosities in their commercial line, but one that made a hell of a letter.
Notes: I wrote this on a piece of the middle panel of a Caspari Horse from Natural Curiosities. I need some new paper from them. I’m down to the dregs and it’s leaving me uninspired. I scanned it at home, which is why it’s so choppy looking here. But if it saves me a trip to the FedEx Office, well then you’re just going to have to forgive me.
Of all the weird, twisted things that you can do to yourself, multiplying is by far the most psychedelic.
As with any entheogen, you can use it recreationally and have a good or a miserable time depending on the quality of your product and your inherent state of being. But if you do it with intention and a bit of mindfulness, you can explode yourself.
Lesson One: Temporal Shifts – What to Expect and How to Deal with It
You have to let go of expectations for the next moment. I mean this both selfishly and in terms of your child. This is why mindfulness parenting is so great. You have to let go of what you think is going to happen. I remember walking and bouncing and binding and doing every fucking thing to get my child to sleep because I was terrified he wouldn’t sleep. We put white noise. We read sleep books (though didn’t do sleep training). It was on our minds. It was a benchmark of parenting. If our child sleeps, parenting will be easier.
As we’ve enjoyed the second and third children, I’ve come to understand no one aspect of parenting makes it any easier. So that’s gone. I also know that the time I want to have for myself when my children sleep – and I DO want that time – is something that I can want and not have. That’s the way it goes. Most nights you get it, sometimes you don’t. You have to deal with things in the present moment and not worry about what will happen if things don’t go the way you expect. Even when the fear of a missed nap is legit – “If he doesn’t get enough sleep, he’s going to be cranky and when am I going to make dinner? When I’ve got one cranky baby and a toddler who needs me?” Those things aren’t there yet, and if they were there, you could find a way to deal with it.
So much of what makes parenting hard is the hanging on to parts of our life that have been compromised by parenting. “Before I had kids, I could do this this and this.” And now that you have kids, maybe you just want this. And that’s not unreasonable. You can have that. You just might not get it right when you want it. Sound familiar? Before I recognized I was doing this subconsciously with my baby – I want to play music, I want to write, so GO THE FUCK TO SLEEP – I did it all the time and now he’s a kid that has a hard time waiting for things, wanting things and not getting them. This is what they mean when they say “Kids are a mirror.” Yup. The good and the bad shows right up and you HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT. And the incredible thing is that if you deal with it in yourself, you can make changes for both you and your child. Slowly slowly, but real changes. Everything is OK.
Dear Mr Bell,
I want to first thank you for all the work you do for the Central Altadena Little League. I know that running something like this takes many hours and requires incredible dedication, and I’m grateful to you for taking it on and doing such a wonderful job at it.
It’s come to my attention that the Bantam leagues are going to finish their season with a double-elimination tournament and an all-star game. I was not made aware of this at the beginning of the season, and if I had been, I would have had great reservations of signing my son up to play in this league.
This is the first time that he and many of his teammates have played on a team sport. If it’s not the first, they are still in the early days of this kind of endeavor. There’s an unbelievable amount of learning required for small children who take this on. Not just the rules of the game, of which baseball has very many, but also the subtleties of being on a team, assimilating into a group of kids to which they are unfamiliar, working with a coach and competing against kids they don’t know. As an assistant coach, I’ve been able to watch these bits of learning happen first hand. These are little things to us, but they’re a big deal to these small people. This is often forgotten in the rush towards adulthood.
Our coach, Dan Hall, has done an incredible job of making sure each of the kids gets a shot at everything they want to try. Our son Otis has had a positive experience on the team.
That said, something has been lost. When he began the season, he would so happily tell anyone that he was the best thrower, the best runner, the best hitter. Then the mid-season faire came along with the skills tests, and though he did really well, that was the end of him saying he was the best at anything. That makes me profoundly sad.
These lessons come, and no matter when they do it’s difficult. But six is early, too early, to have that feeling taken away from you.
Now, with the double elimination playoffs and the all-star game, it’s certain to happen again and perhaps with more permanence. Maybe not to Otis, but probably. And that’s true of most of the kids who are playing in the league. Only one team will win the tournament, only 5 of the kids from each team make the all star game. This leaves the rest of the kids, the bulk of the league, feeling like not only are they not the best, but they might not even be good.
And to what end? The kids that possess natural talent are already rewarded at every turn for their gifts. They receive heaps of praise, they get the choice assignments, they are lauded by their peers for their accomplishments. Not just in baseball, but in society. We’re always all to eager to praise a child for their natural abilities, no matter what they are: the early reader, the deft artist, the strong swimmer. The kids who are good already know they’re good. We’ve already told them over and over. Why do they need further reward by either winning a tournament or being selected as an “all-star”? What more are they meant to get?
And more, where does that leave the rest of the kids? Are they expected to go to the all-star game and cheer on their teammates who have been officially designated “better than you”? Or do they skip it in order to buckle down and work harder on their skills for next year? Why end what’s been an otherwise mostly positive experience like this?
At this age especially, it seems like the goal of the league should be to provide children with the most basic understanding of how the game works and what it means to be on a team. It seems pretty clear to me that this has nothing to do with double-elimination tournaments and all-star games. These are constructs of competition that have nothing to do with a pure love of a game, which is all I wanted to give to my boy when I signed him up to play Bantam league.
I can’t imagine that you’ll call off either the tournament or the all-star game, though I would be glad if you did. It’s too late for me to tell Otis that he can’t play in the tournament. There’s been too much talk about it and his teammates are excited. However, I won’t have him considered for the all-star game. If either of these elements are part of CALL’s next season, I hope to be informed about them before the season starts so I can better gauge if it’s an activity I want my kids to participate in.
Thank you very much for your understanding.
Sincerely,
Clay Allen
Notes: This was first written on the Selectric on a beautiful piece of paper and scanned and then lost when it fell out of my bike bag. And I thought, well, at least I have the scan. And then I went to check the scan and it was fouled up.
So I rewrote this on my beautiful manual Olivetti one morning and I think this version came out better anyway, so there you go. Also, more typos. But, more character.
Didn’t scan this, but took pictures of it. Pretend you see it as all one long piece of butcher paper, because that’s what it was.
Tree sitting is a new sport/hobby/spiritual practice which I learned from unseen entities. I had a great time of it yesterday, so I thought I’d take a second to explain the rules. Everything has rules, even tree sitting.
It has some major USFD infrastructure in the form of these big rock and cement check dams. These kind of dams are fairly common in the San Gabriel foothills and were made in the middle 60s, most of them. They’re easy to climb, thanks to the poles that run up the side, making a nice little ladder. The highest is pictured below, which is about 40 feet. A little scary, but that’s part of what makes it fun. I went over a few of these and about 15 minutes back into the canyon. There’s a path, but I can’t tell who walks it. Maybe Forest Dept folks? Hobos? Definitely animals. And yesterday, me.
Note: I think I’m not going to hear back on this one, either, and mostly because I misspelled “opioid” throughout the letter. Sure, they make typewriters with SpellCheck features, but none hammer so finely as the IBM Selectric.
Back image (pictured below) from an old version of Natural Curiosities Lord Bodner print.
Letter size: 1′ x 4.5′
Note: I don’t think she’s going to write back.
Letter size: 3’x1′
Paper: The middle panel of the Caspari Horse from Natural Curiosities (no longer in production)
Typed on the good old IBM Selectric
Dear Whoever You Are, I forget your name, we signed those documents a while ago now, what is it, three years?
I still dream about the lake house. Maybe once a month or so. It happens a lot. You’re often there, or some shadow of you. I have to sneak in, sneak around and look at the changes you’ve made, look at the things you’ve kept the same. In my dreams, it isn’t my house any more, but I still dream about it.
We sold another house, just after we sold you the lake house. This was the first house my wife and I bought together, an A-frame type deal set on the side of a steep canyon. We solidified our marriage there, we put down roots in this strange part of the world. She birthed my two sons in that house, under the sloping walls. Knotty pine. Cement floors that we put in. A hot deck. A red and white A-frame nestled up between oak and pine.
We lived there for eight years. I haven’t had one dream about the place since we left.
But the lake house, the house that my grandparents built, the house you now own and take care of – I visit there often. I can’t stop. I try. I don’t want to go anymore. But I’m taken there. The lake is sometimes too high, it’s threatening the house. Sometimes I break in and make myself at home, I don’t care if I’m found out. Sometimes you’re there and I dodge you just in time. I’ve never been caught.
Oh shit. I just realized. I’m the newest ghost in that house. That haunted, haunted house we sold you. I know you know. One of you mentioned it to my mom when you so kindly came down to bring some of the many things we left there.
(How could we take it all? We tried, but we couldn’t even get rid of it all. Jesus, but we tried. We filled dumpsters. We hauled and hauled, but they left so much. My grandparents had so much stuff there. Their parents had stuff there. My parents had stuff there, and so did we. It was the family tomb, and then yours to deal with, and I’m sorry for that.)
But you knew, when you came down to bring a box of such stuff to my mom, so kindly. You knew. You said, “That middle room? What’s the deal with that.” And my mom told you. Stay out of that room.
I made my peace with whatever moves up there, and I hope you have as well. I wasn’t troubled by that room too much (though I never slept in it). But there have been many nightmares come out of that room.
And that middle room or not, you must know by now that every piece of wood in that wooden house is ringing with things in the past. Every corner, every inch of that house is deeply haunted.
Like I said, when I lived there, I knew it and made my piece with it, and I sincerely hope that you can too. I don’t say any of these things to spook you or to be cruel. I’m sincerely grateful you’ve taken the house. From what my mom says you’ve taken incredible care of it, you’ve preserved much of the magic, the things we all loved about it. There were thoughts when we were selling the place that someone would just push it down and start again, but you didn’t. You saw the magic in it and you decided to keep it alive. It means more to me that you can know.
And I’m writing to tell you that I’m sorry. I’m one of the ghosts in the house. And I hope I don’t bother you much. But yes, that’s me in the shadows, in the darting refections off the glass. I’m checking it out. I haven’t left.
I tell you this tonight because I broke one of the few remaining glasses I have from that house. We left a lot of them up there. A lot. With my grandfather being in the restaurant and bar supply business, they had a lot of glassware on hand. We left a lot of it up there. I can still feel the weight of them in my hands, that one tumbler with the gold medallion set into it? I loved that one.
Remaining I have one beer glass, one wine glass, two brandy snifters, and now one tumbler. I broke the match for this one from the Hoffman House – Madison | Rockford | Wisconsin Dells.
I know that each of these glasses is doomed to break. That’s the nature of a glass, any glass, all glasses. In its making comes the guarantee that it will break. I know this, I accept this. But I can’t help but feeling like I made a terrible mistake leaving all that glassware up there. Why didn’t I just ship it? Would it be another hundred bucks? Two hundred? What was I thinking?
And so I ask you, as the human form of one of the ghosts you see in your periphery up there – if you send me any and all glassware of my grandparents that remains up there, I’ll pay the shipping and handling and be forever in your debt. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll stop dreaming of the place and leave you and your family in peace.
Sincerely yours.
Your friend, Clay 