~ Anonymous
A little postcard I put together recently.
Chapter three, by Brenda Miller, is all about the Lyrical Essay. The author uses the analogy of a piece of braided bread, The Jewish Challah, to describe how different strands of different stories can fit together to create a whole. The genius of the lyrical essay is that because it is fragmented, the reader is able to fill in the gaps which are missing, drawing their own conclusions, forcing the reader to think about what the subject/stories mean to them.
I liked this explanation the essence of the lyrical essay written by Brenda Miller:
“This is what I love about all braided things: bread, hair, essays, rivers, our own circulatory systems pumping blood to our brains and our hearts. I love the fact of their separate parts intersecting, creating the illusion of wholeness, but with the oh-so-pleasurable texture of separation. It is not the same as a purely disjunctive form, the bits and pieces scattered like cookies on a baking sheet. Rather, the strands are separate, but together, creating a pattern that is lovely to the touch, makes the bread taste even better when we lift a slice of it to our tongues.”
In reading this chapter (which is aptly written in an lyrical essay) I though of sitcoms and soap operas- where a bit of a story is told and then switches to another story and you are left wondering how the other story progresses in your absence. I think this could be good practice for me because I am so wrapped up in the little details of story telling that I often forget to leave room for the reader to breathe or bring their own thoughts to whatever it is I am writing about.
Exercise:
1. Take three objects and place them on the desk in front of you. Write for fifteen minutes on each one and see if there is a common theme you can use to bind these together.
2. Go back to an essay that’s been giving you problems. Look for the one image that seems to encapsulate the abstract ideas or concepts you are trying to develop. Explode the essay into at least three different strands, each focused on different aspects of that image, and being weaving, transforming that image from beginning to end.
3. Cut apart an essay (or two or three) with scissors, and lay the pieces out on the floor or a long table. Start moving them around like pieces of a puzzle and see what kinds of patterns you can make through different juxtapositions of the texts.
I admit I didn’t take three objects from in front of me. I took objects that have either passed through my hands or my mind recently. I wrote three different stories by hand, one on each of my three objects. Then I cut the three stories apart and taped them back together, finding ways to make them flow together in one neat braid.
Here’s my story. (It’s a bit long. Sorry!)
I.
Kathlene took a year off from university to travel overland from London to Indonesia.
“I’ll send you a postcard from every country we go to,” She happily volunteered as she folded away the map of her route. Soon after she left the first postcards came, from London and Ireland and France. She wrote so tiny I often marveled how she managed to write so legibly when her pen must have barely moved to make the shapes of the letters. She wrote books on the backs of those postcards, telling me of her adventures overseas, how much fun she was having, the best things she did, and her thoughts on just about everything. I took each postcard, pasted a good thick layer of glue over the back and stuck it next to the other important letters and postcards I had received from her over the several years we had been friends. She gave me addresses in advance which I could send my own letters to her, but my first year in university seemed so mundane and boring, that I never felt I had anything interesting to say. So her mailbox remained empty as mine filled up with postcards sent from far away, beautiful exotic places.
II.
Though I was happy my boyfriend Kevin had the chance to spend two months travelling through Europe, I missed him immensely. I was usually home at the time the postman came, so I’d go through the routine of nonchalantly leaving the front door open, turning off all the sounds in the house and listening for the footsteps that would bring me the morning mail. The patter of footsteps on the concrete steps, the familiar squeak of metal sliding on metal, and the footsteps down the front path moving on to the next house. I’d run to the mailbox, open it, fish out the junk mail and see if I was lucky enough to receive two postcards in one week, which usually I was. Walking back into the house I’d wave my coveted prize in the air and grin.
“He sent this one from Italy!”
III.
Neither of us could believe how warm it was in Istanbul in November. Rene and I were busy shuffling things in the living room with the windows open, letting the light Mediterranean air into our home as we pack our things into boxes marked for Canada.
“Ohhh, I forgot about this.” Rene was flipping through a little black Moleskine Journal. “ Some guy lost this in our office a long time ago.”
She told me the story of cleaning out the travel agency when they had sold it, and how she had to pack up her personal belongings and important papers before the take over the next day. One her way out, she spied a lonely box, dusty and forgotten, sitting under the stairs. Among the outdated tourist guides, an old t-shirt and a tiny camera case, Rene found the little black journal, belonging to a Benjamin Weaver. Flipping through the pages scrawled with personal messages in ballpoint pen, Rene could see Benjamin Weaver had travelled a long way, and had a history of losing things. In the back of the book, Benjamin had preserved phone cards, a receipt for the camera he had to replace, bus tickets written in multiple languages and even a business card to their own travel agency. She slipped the book and all of its memories into her own box as she shut the door to the travel agency and walked home along the quiet streets of Istanbul in winter.
IV.
The noise in the background was so loud I could barely hear Kathlene as she shouted into the phone. I’d only seen her once since she got back from her epic trip, her postcards in my postcard scrapbook, buried under a mountain of clothes in my closet.
“Come down to the nightclub! Our swim meet ends today and we might go there later. Maybe eleven thirty. It’s hard to say. I’ll try to call you back to tell you if the plans change, okay? I’m pretty sure I’ll be there about eleven thirty. It will be great to see you!”
I’d been springhouse cleaning all afternoon to Led Zeppelin with my sister. We’d got a lot done, but we still had so much more to do. By ten thirty I was exhausted.
“I’m tired,” I sighed, flopping down on the couch, throwing the dirty rag into a bucket full of ash-coloured water.
“Kathlene’s not even sure she’ll be there. It’s cold outside and I don’t want to walk all the way down there at this time of night.” I was talking my way out of going.
“I’ll see her the next time. She says they might come again in a few months. I won’t get a good visit in with her in a nightclub anyway. She’ll be back.”
V.
“Are you still working on that?” Emrys looked over Kevin’s shoulder.
Kevin was finishing off the details of the latest postcard. He and his travel partner Emrys were passing time in a German train station. Kevin was wearing a white Andy Warhol t-shirt with a Campbell’s soup can on the front. I know, because he’d stepped into a photo booth earlier that day and snapped four passport sized photos of his grubby back backer self. He’d carefully separated the best one and glued it to the back of the postcard he’d been writing to me.
“I hope Melanie appreciates all the work you put into them.”
“I’m sure she does.”
VI.
Standing in the kitchen in Early November tears running a steady river down my cheeks, my throat too tight to speak proper words to my mother on the other end of the line.
“How did Kathlene die?” I choked out as intelligibly as I could between gasps for breath.
“I’m sorry, Melanie. Really I am. She was hit by a car on the way to her swimming practice. Apparently it was pretty quick. She probably didn’t know what was happening to her. Some woman had Kathlene’s address book and found your name in it. She thought you should know there’s a funeral planned for Wednesday in Vancouver. My God Melanie, imagine that. A year of travelling through dangerous third world countries and you die eight months later on the side of the road in Edmonton. Just when you think you are home and safe. You just never know, do you?”
A few days later Kevin held one of the pages of the postcard scrapbook over a steaming kettle. He pulled his hand away quickly and I knew his fingers were burning, just like mine had been a few minutes earlier.
“Just a little more steam and this one will be off.”
I appreciated his meticulousness of prying the scrapbook paper carefully off the back of the postcard without ripping Kathlene’s tiny writing.
“Thank you,” I croaked, my eyes dry but still red and swollen from the day’s crying.
He offered me a sympathetic smile.
“Look! This one is almost perfect.” He pressed it in a dry kitchen towel and placed it next to the other damp postcards making a line on the kitchen counter.
“I should have gone down to the nightclub that night to see her.”
Kevin turned and gave me a big hug which turned on the tears again.
“It’s a good thing she wrote in ballpoint pen.” He said. “It doesn’t wash away.”
VII.
“How do you know Benjamin Weaver is still at this address?” I asked, flipping through the dog-eared pages. “I’m not really sure,” Rene was stuffing a quilt into a box. Then she squeezed the box with her knees as she taped it shut.
“I found a Benjamin Weaver in Spokane on Facebook, but he wrote back and said he wasn’t the Benjamin Weaver I was looking for. Poor guy. I bet he’s abandoned the idea of ever seeing this journal again. I’ll take it back to Canada and call the number in the book from there.”
VII.
My brows were furrowed, my arms defensively crossed over my chest. Kevin and I had been arguing a lot lately and had decided to part ways. Our dreams were pulling us apart- He wanted to go for more education out East, and me, buckling under the weight of my student loan was off to the Far East to teach English. There was little we could do to solve this problem. Yet today, we’d both crossed the line of amicable break up with an argument that took place on the front steps of my house, right in front of the mailbox.
Rene sat across from me at the table, between us the stack of postcards snug under their rubber bands.
“But are you really sure giving them back to him is really what you want to do?” She asked me in that sisterly tone that told me she wasn’t really asking me a question, but carefully questioning my irrational and emotional judgement. Truthfully, I didn’t want to give them back. I really loved each and every one of those little postcards. But it was the most direct and calculated way I could hurt him, and that was all my hurt self could think of at that moment.
IX.
Back in Canada. I was sorting through the boxes that had arrived from Istanbul. I’d waited until Rene had left for Vancouver to sort through my own things. The boxes hadn’t really survived the move and were split open by rough mail handlers at the sides. Rene and I had bought big plastic tupperware containers to store our things in before the mice looking for a new home got into them.
But somehow, sorting through my own stuff, I found the journal of Benamin Weaver. I knew Rene had wanted to return it to him herself, but she was gone now and the Benjamin Weaver journal was in danger of being put in yet another box for safe keeping. I put my things down, flipped to the page that he had written his number, and called Benjamin Weaver.
He wasn’t home, but his mother was.
“Tell me again how you came to have my son’s journal?”
I explained again.
“Our family always does stuff like this, you know. Did you know he lost his camera and wallet in Budapest?”
“Actually, I did know about that!” I laughed. He wrote it here in his journal.”
“How did you know to find him here, anyway?”
“He wrote your number on the front page along with an address.”
Benjamin Weaver’s mother giggled. “At least he did something right that trip!”
X.
It’s been over a decade since Kathlene died, yet I’ve carried her through every country I have ever been to. In the King’s Palace in Bangkok I found the winged statue she’d sent me on a postcard. I remembered her story about giving money to street children only to have them chase her through the streets of Old Delhi when I was in India. I stood on the top of Borobudur temple in Java, overlooking the smoking volcano and sent a big “Hello” and “I miss you” into the Indonesian sky. If there were ever a place my words could float to heaven, this would be it. All of these were places she had been to many years before. And I wondered what she would have thought about me being here, following her footsteps years later, and what kinds of messages I’d write to her in tiny letters on the backs of many, many postcards.
XI.
Twelve years later, we were standing outside a Victoria breakfast eatery after a nice casual morning brunch.
“Did you ever find those postcards?” He was used to this question. I’d asked him quite regularly ever since he told me I could have them back. Except, he didn’t have them anymore.
“I gave them to Emrys. For safe keeping, I didn’t want to look at them after you gave them back and I haven’t seen them since.”
My stomach still twists a little when I think of the postcards. I’m not sure if it’s the guilt I still feel for callously throwing them back so many years ago, or the idea that they could be thrown out in the trash, or rotting away in someone elses’ basement after all these years.
Kevin paused a moment.
“You really hurt me back then, you know.”
“I know. And I am really sorry.” I’ve never spoken truer words.
“I was hurt too. But I thought we’d make up eventually and you would give them back. But you didn’t.”
Kevin laughed. “I sure showed you, didn’t I?”
XII.
I wrote two pages in Benjamin Weaver’s journal explaining where his journal had been and how in ended up in my hands. I slid it into a bubble envelope, tickets and all, and addressed it to Benjamin Weaver and sealed it.
“If he’s a nice guy, he’ll send you something to cover the postage. Or give you some kind of reward.” My mother said on the way to the post office.
“It’s not about that,” I told her.
“I’m not sending this on because I expect anything from Benjamin Weaver, I’m just happy that I have the opportunity to reunite him with something he has probably missed and would be tickled to have back. There is nothing like rereading your own journal. Words can describe things that pictures can’t, and they recreate clearer images of events the mind forgets over time. I know I’d be over the moon if I had lost something valuable and someone went through the trouble of getting it back to me.”
XIII.
I never go anywhere without my friend who taught me not to take anything for granted, not to fear new people or new places, new adventures or new challenges, because we never know when our time on this earth is over. When people ask me, ‘Aren’t you scared to travel to some of these places?” Kathlene answers for me. “You can travel all over the world and meet all sorts of wonderful people and horrible people and see and do fantastic things, and then have it all end at the side of your road, in your own backyard, or on the way to work one morning. You might as well live your life the way you want to live it.”
XIV.
I do miss Kevin’s postcards. I still have hope that they might surface one day and we’ll have a good laugh about how I came to lose them for so long. I think the thing that makes me sad about losing them is not that I no longer have them, but that at one time I disrespected the thought and feeling put into those little cardboard pictures and the person who spent a good chunk of his travel time creating them for me. Ultimately, if I can be grateful for anything, it’s the fact that we can still call each other friends after all these years and all has been forgiven from that time in our lives so long ago.
XV.
It’s only been a few weeks since I sent Benjamin Weaver his journal. And no, I haven’t heard a peep from him. But I’m pretty sure he has it and he’s probably flipped through the pages and reminisced about his trip through Europe that passed through Istanbul a few years ago. He’s probably grateful that my sister rescued it from a box destined for the garbage heap in Turkey.
The fact that I could have a hand in getting the journal back to its rightful owner gives me hope that one day, the collection of Kevin's European postcards will come back and take their place next to the wrinkled but readable postcards from Kathlene, in the box of precious memories.