To Whom This May Concern

The semester is over except for the grading and the letters of recommendation—LORS. These kept me from applying to residencies or fellowships for decades as I couldn't bear to bother anyone with a request to write one for me. After I had written dozens for other people I too began to ask, and it was agonizing but also simple—a yes or no proposition. No one likes it but it is part of the work. I have two to do today.

But…I have also been addressing holiday cards. I have always loved them and collected them. I have my mother’s old scrap books where she pasted the Christmas cards that came to her parents; I seem to have inherited the fascination. It’s hard to justify aesthetically. Most cards aren’t great works of art, not even those that are reproductions of great works of art. Many are photos that depict a family happiness that wasn’t my lot in life—my family of origin hasn’t gotten together for a holiday in many decades. Yet these depictions don’t arouse envy in me, but a desire to write. I am writing a novel about a relatively connected family now, and the imagining is consoling/distracting. As they say, there are many ways to make a family.

What has been tougher is going through my address book. I got it in the eighties when I lived in Manhattan, a 5 x 8 three ring binder where I clipped in dividers marked with an alphabet letter and lined pages. There are two sets of pages, the first with listings for phones at Home, Office, Fax, the newer set eliminating Fax in favor of Mobile. I made a list of the cards I wanted to send and went through the book to discover what addresses I had there. As it turned out I have many more than I need for this years’ cards. Reading those names and addresses again is shocking. I have lost touch with so many people who were once very important to me.

How did that happen? The simple and probably most accurate answer is everyone got busy, people got jobs and families, hanging out went the way of Fax machines. There are names in the book that were written down in happy days before a falling out. I do not believe in fallings out—I learned very young the absolute, harsh, destabilizing silence of death, the pain of the one way conversation that follows, the irrevocable end of things—an afterlife not withstanding. I don’t like to enact that awful silence with living people, and don’t understand it. But my feeling isn’t shared by everyone, and so there are addresses of people in the book that represent a time before the friendship broke and was never repaired. Every day I wake up feels like another chance for repair.

There are addresses that now belong to other people, and there are the addresses of those now dead. I read those names with a powerful mix of emotions, as my own death is now more than a fact but something I can taste. (I am fine, but aging is happening.) I read the address book more and more slowly as the days go by, taking the time to remember every name, and now, taking the time to record a memory of every person. I think this address book is the conduit to the past that I will keep, even after I have jettisoned letters and photographs, Playbills and trip itineraries, all the detritus I have saved out of an archival impulse I no longer have.

It makes sense. My own past addresses are portals to entire worlds of feeling and experience, and the numbers and words make my heart beat faster. There are family houses now gone that I miss so bitterly it wakes me up at night. And there is on my wall the sketch of the house I’d love to build on a bluff with a view of the sea. (I even have architectural plans for it, thanks to a generous friend at Macdowell.) The invention and creative habitation of Fellowship Point was deeply pleasurable. It was real to me, and it has certainly seemed real enough to readers that many have claimed to know exactly where it is. It is only today that it occurs to me that I can add an address for it in my book. And now it occurs to me that I might write a story about a phantom address book recording the addresses of all non-existent houses that appear in a person’s dreams—and a pilgrimage to find them IRL.

There is a crossover between the LORS and the cards and the novel I am writing, a common underpinning of considering to whom this may concern. And isn’t that how we address our deepest cries of the soul? Our novels? Our prayers? Our hopes and dreams. There must be an address, a recipient, an old or new friend out there somewhere.