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Letter to prison
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Just found this letter while un-packing. I never sent it when I wrote it. So I added a note on the back and sent it off today.
Dear Coi,
It’s Friday evening, and I wanted to take a moment and write you a quick note. It’s more than halfway through January, and we are just now getting our first significant and sustained snowfall of the winter. And it is keeping at it for the moment, which is nice. For the last few weeks we’ve had bitter cold and blustery winds, as in -11F or so most nights. I like cold weather, but that’s a bit much even for me. We should get at least eight inches of snow before the night’s out. I know that’s not much for folks closer to the Lakes or, like you, up in the mountains, but it makes for a much different landscape here after the flinty ground and leaden skies of a few days back.
I’ve been stressed as hell, and I’ve been taking it out on Matt, I think. The IRS is after me for about $15K I owe them in taxes – I got off my payment plan in November – and I don’t exactly know how I’m going to get current with them the way things are going. I could always vow to make more money at work, as I work for commission, but that business is such a roller coaster that I can’t depend on my performance being up to par with any degree of consistency. It’s like trying to sell widgets that change their minds in the middle of a given transaction. If I weren’t bald, I’d pull my hair out. As it is I chew my nails pretty well.
I finished War and Peace and went on to read Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln. DiLorenzo contends that Lincoln waged an unnecessary war to consolidate Federal power and implement Whig/Republican economic policy over the heads of the sovereign states. Up to the time of the Civil War the right of secession was taken for granted by most Americans as a last defense against just what Lincoln succeeded in doing. He writes tendentiously, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
When I finished that book I read a book Dad sent me titled Big Bend, which is co-written by J.O. Langford and Fred Gipson (of Old Yeller fame). Langford homesteaded three sections of land in the Big Bend of the Rio Grande in 1909 before it was a national park, and he remained there with his wife and two young daughters, and their dog Tex, for four or five years, until the revolution in Mexico caused raiding bandits to make life on the river untenable. They left for El Paso and didn’t return for almost fourteen years. In the interim one of their daughters had grown up and gone on to teach school and the other daughter had died in a swimming accident while still a young girl, and they added two sons to the family. They returned to the Big Bend around 1927 and remained there until 1942. I’m not sure what happened to them after that.
I absolutely loved that book. It was only 153 pages long and very plainly written, but I wanted a few hundred more pages of it when I was done. I mentioned that to Dad over the phone, and he said he would mail me a few books in a day or so. In the meantime I picked up one of my Will Durant books out of that 14-volume set on the history of Western Civilization. It was The Age of Napoleon, which I had begun last summer in Texas but put down after less than one hundred pages. I started getting interested in it today just when the package from Dad arrived. I got a Wallace Stegner book titled Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs and a book by John Graves, a favorite author of mine, titled Hard Scrabble, which as far as I can tell is just a book about life and his observations living on four hundred acres of limestone hill country in Texas. I dove right in to that one on the way home from work, and I already know I’ll enjoy that book.
I’m still enjoying it now on Sunday. I’m sitting here at my desk listening to Robin Trower while Matt naps in the other room and tries to get over his sinus infection. I’ve been craving Trower for some reason lately, though there’s nothing particular about his music. I may just be feeling nostalgic. I’ve been really homesick lately much of the time and stressed about money and the other garden variety difficulties I have, and listening to music I enjoyed in my teens and early twenties likely induces some sort of euphoric recall in me as a form of escape. In any case, the music is good, so it could be worse.
I imagine the playoffs have already started today. I’ve paid minimal attention to football this year, though it’s fun living a few blocks from the Metrodome in a town with this much fan support for the local team. They’ve been erratic this year, but I like Culpepper, the quarterback, and Moss, even if he is a notoriety-seeking showboat with no discretion. I think Philly vs Atlanta and Pittsburgh vs the Pats today. I think it’d be fun to have a purely Pennsylvania Super Bowl, and I guess we’ll know what it’s going to be before I get this letter in the mail. It’s 2:15 p.m., and I haven’t checked the scores yet.
I’m sorry I haven’t written more to you. It’s not like I’m averse to writing. I have two friends in prison in Texas who I’ve known for years as well. I also have two pen-pals, one each in Indiana and Kentucky, who are also locked up. I got them off the internet, just because I enjoyed writing back and forth to Josh and Bill in Texas. Bill was my best friend in high school. I dated his sister when I was fourteen, and his mom rented a room from my mother for a short time when I was a teenager. I met Josh in a rehab in Abilene, Texas back in ’96. He got locked up shortly after he left treatment, and I’ve been writing to him for the last seven years or so. He may make parole this year sometime. I just started writing to Bill a short time ago. I only knew he’d been sent to prison for a long, long time, and I had no idea how to reach him for a while.
How long do you think you’re currently looking at for a sentence realistically? I can’t imagine what I would do, honestly. I guess I’d have to adopt a completely different mindset and just shut a fair amount of my thinking out in order to adjust myself to circumstance. But that’s just idle speculation. My own problems, however, seem pretty insignificant when cast in that light. And I suppose that even in your shoes things could be much worse. It’s all a matter of degree to some extent.
I just noticed online that Johnny Carson died today of lung disease. I’d not thought of him in years. He was a fixture of our world for such a very long time and in such a substantial way, at least as far as TV personalities go. But I rarely pay any attention to television anymore, and I haven’t in years and years. I reckon that has a good deal to do with it.
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