I'm terrible.

Terrible at posting a blog, that is. I do a lot of writing lately as I have loads of time on my hands here in Copenhagen, but it's mostly letters. I spend at least a couple of hours a day just writing people e-mails, and though I usually start out each letter with the intention of only writing a few sentences or passing on a worthy link, I more often wind up writing the equivalent of several pages. My letters become my diary of sorts.

I've probably received about twenty journals as gifts in my life, and have never made it more than ten percent of the way through any one of them. My e-mails, though--they are a chronicle of my friendships, boyfriends, breakups, family issues, temporary obsessions--and they have been spewed out with far greater abandon than they would have had I sat down with pen and paper. That said, I still always have a tiny journal with me most of the time. I think using a pen versus a keyboard accesses a different part of my brain, as if writing more slowly allows for less free-association and encourages a little more focus. My typed letters tend to be a series of tangents. My handwritten stuff can be tangential, too, but it's far more controlled and I usually wind up inspiring actual well thought-out ideas.

(In the distance you can see a few hundred deer waiting for dusk to fall in Dyrehavn. Then the barking, the mating, and the head-butting begin.)


Today I copied a link to www.zenhabits.com to send to my brother, titled "The World Needs You to Do What You Love." The blog was exactly what I needed to read right now, and I knew he could use it, too. But then I had to preface it with a little introduction. First, I let him know I officially signed up for nutrition school, and I knew that it would help me to write out exactly why this was going to be amazing for me, that I knew I had some self-defeating habits I need to crush, and then, of course, I had to tell him why I thought I had them in the first place. I figured he might get something out of it, considering we had the same crazy parents, we have similar insecurities, we have similar questions about how to fix ourselves ... you get the picture. I moved it to Word so I could see it all laid out in front of me better, and I wound up typing 2,500 words. Whoops.

When I talk I don't tend to be long-winded, and when I write I deeply value brevity. After spending over an hour just typing the stream of thoughts through my head, though, I did not want to go back and make it shorter. What's great is that I know it doesn't matter to him. I know he'll enjoy it, that he'll read every word, and that mistakes don't matter all that much to him. What matters most is that he has a glimpse inside my head, and we grow a little closer as a result.

I think this is the biggest reason why I would rather write an e-mail any day than scribble in my journal. I like knowing that not only do I have a record of my thoughts, I have shared it with one other person, and for me it's a lot safer than writing my secrets down on a journal that could be found by anyone. I've gone back to old e-mails over and over, and sometimes I'm extremely surprised by the bizarre headspace I was in at the time. If it had been taken out of context and shown to me, I often wouldn't recognize it as my own writing.


What makes it monumentally more rewarding than writing in a journal, however, is the response. I don't expect novellas in kind, but any acknowledgment at all lets me know I've connected.

The Fire

My uncle is dating his ex-wife Kathy again, something like fifteen years after their divorce, and her family invites my mother over to Thanksgiving dinner. Ian and I are several hours away in Virginia at his mom's for the holiday, as his family is less dysfunctional and has better food.

It's post-Thanksgiving dinner, and my mom and the other womenfolk are in the kitchen, having a blast with each other, and one story leads to another, and they are soon telling macabre stories from their own pasts. My mom tells everyone of how when she was a young girl she saw the neighbor running out of her house with her baby, limp and bouncing in her arms, screaming for my grandfather, a doctor. The baby choked on a carrot minutes before, and died.

Then my uncle's ex-wife's mother, with whom Mom has not spent time in twenty years, begins to tell a story of how forty-two years ago she was driving down Lakeshore Drive, in Columbia, and saw smoke billowing out of the attic of a house as she passed it. She stopped and ran in the house and called the fire department, who made it in time to save most of the contents of the house, with only minor losses in the attic. Apparently, recalls Kathy's mom, the man who started the fire inside the house had died, drunk and passed out with a lit cigarette. The chemicals in sofas are incredibly toxic, and as they burned they filled his lungs quickly enough that he never woke up to save himself, and was almost the only thing taken by the fire. My mother says,

"That wasn't a man. That was my mother-in-law and the grandmother of my children."

Kathy's mother doesn't believe her at first, but the dates were the same, the house was the same. It was my grandparents' house. They were separated at the time and my grandfather was living in Atlanta. My dad was twenty-six years old, a year younger than I am now and a year away from meeting my mother, and his uncle called him up and simply said,

"Your mother died in a fire."

My own mother had often wondered how the family silver and antique furniture had survived a house fire when my own grandmother, an abused wife and chronic alcoholic, had not. My Dad's father was a notorious asshole, an Army general who was in both World War II and Korea, a man who couldn't separate his feelings about his own family from his violence as a soldier. It becomes difficult to justify kindness and love to certain people in a world where you have to kill other people, who are so often so much like you.

My aunt Sally, having never fully recovered from the loss of her mother at the age of twenty-one, inherited her taste for inebriation. She died almost four years ago at the age of fifty-nine, her insides pickled and her esophagus bleeding from what was probably over forty years of regular alcohol abuse. My grandfather died this past Christmas at ninety-two, having outlived his younger brother and sister, his own daughter, and two wives. It's funny how the people who make us hate life most seem to have the tightest grip on it.

So my mom thanked her brother's ex-wife's current girlfriend's mom for saving our family's heirlooms. If she had come along five minutes later, we would have likely lost them all, but then she says,

"Hey, but if you'd only come along five minutes earlier, my kids might still have their grandmother!"

Then she laughed. We have a similar sense of humor.

There probably wouldn't have been enough smoke to notice five minutes earlier, anyway.