Dear Flannery,
Sorry I haven’t written in several weeks. I have been across the country and very busy staying with my daughter who has one-year-old triplets who got sick. Can you imagine one person caring around the clock for three coughy, runny-nosed, whiny, clingy, sleepless, inconsolable, heavy babies? One is enough to drive a person to distraction. Of course her husband is a good help but he’s at work all day. To top it off she caught whatever they had and was pretty sick at the same time and really needed some help. It was quite intense there for a week or so of my stay. But gradually they all grew blessedly well again, laughing, toddling, playing, and making great healthy messes of all kinds, and now I am home again. I have made many such trips since the dear babies were born and it's always an adjustment at either end of the journey. Whereas for weeks I have been changing, wiping, dressing, bathing, feeding, carrying, rocking, and singing favorite silly songs in a self-contained all-baby universe, I am now experiencing the quiet shock of participating in my ordinary solitary pastimes.
This latest experience with the triplets reminds me how different my life has been from yours. Aside from us both being female, Caucasian, American, and Christian, I don’t know how two lives could be more different. You grew up in Georgia, I grew up in California and Guam. You were raised Catholic and I was raised in an evangelical Christian religion. You were 15 when your father died, I was 54. You were single, I married young. You excelled in college, I never finished. You had no children, I have seven, and 15 grandkids. You were a genius, I am not. You were a famous writer, I am only a writer. You got sick and passed on at 39, and I have always been healthy and am 56 and still here.
And yet . . . and yet . . . as far as I can see, we share some very basic and deep beliefs about the most important things, and that sameness feels infinitely more important than all of the above differences. Yes, even more important than places and people and churches and accomplishments and temporal circumstances. Even more important than life and even more important than death. This is why I call you friend. There is so much to say!
Back to reading and writing,
J.
