served with some care. My job is only to receive.
I drove for such a long time today, and I didn’t really get tired. This surprised me—you know how I always used to fade out after an hour or two when we took turns on a trip. But I went for miles and miles, listened to radio stations come in and out, thought about what it would be like to live in each town I passed through—there, the grocery store with the woman in pink curlers coming out, that’s where I’d shop; there, the small stone library, that’s where I’d request bestsellers from the gossipy librarian. I love doing this, Martin, I used to try to explain it to you, why I wanted to take the side roads. But you were always interested in saving time, so we took the interstates and there was never anything to look at, not even telephone poles. When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.
I stop wherever I want to, for as long as I want. Today I browsed in an antique store and I went into a dress shop to try on a yellow skirt I saw in the window and I stopped at a farm stand and bought a big fat tomato and then sat in the car and ate it from my hand like an apple. Then I just sat there watching people for a good half hour or so, seeing who came and what they bought, watching kids yank at parents’ hands or quietly rearrange the peaches. I listened to the sound of paper bags being rolled shut, the cash-register drawer dinging open and then being pushed closed. I liked this. You would never have stood for it. I remember once when we were in New York and we passed a man making pizza in a window, throwing the dough high up in the air. I wanted to watch and you lasted about fifteen seconds and then we had to move on. I could have stood there all night. We are so different that way.
I passed a sign for a pet cemetery this afternoon and I went to see it. It was off the bumpiest dirt road I’ve ever been on—you’d have been clutching your chest, Martin, yelling about axles and to turn back, oh yes you would. But I was very careful and nothing happened, the car seemed interested in getting there, too. I’d never been to a pet cemetery before. It’s a heartbreaking and wonderful experience, the crooked signs, the used toys marking the heads of graves, the animals’ names, most of them ending in Y, of course. There was a parakeet named Petey, a cat named Roly Poly. A lot of dogs—Rusty, Tippy, one called Admiral Commander III. I found a little boy, about seven, sitting at the side of one of the graves—his dog Sparky was buried there. Part bulldog, he said, mostly bulldog. The boy, named Ralph, said he never thought Sparky would die—he didn’t seem to be that sick, but he never came back from the vet’s. He told me Sparky snorted when he laughed, that’s what he said, that the dog laughed and that he snorted when he did so. Ralph had his skateboard with him, he visited every day on his rounds. He had a new dog now, Ruffian was his name. But as Ralph so eloquently explained, “Ruffian is his self, but this one here, that’s Sparky.”
It is rather a luxury to go on this way, Martin, to know that you are attending to what I am saying. That you will read this letter through, perhaps twice, because it is a letter and not me.
I wish you could see this quilt, the stitches so tiny and fine and hand done. But even as I say this, I feel some reservation, a stinginess of spirit. Because I don’t think you’d appreciate the stitches. If you’d been driving, I wouldn’t even be here.
Not long ago, I saw a woman in a drugstore pick something up in her hand, delighted, and hold it out toward her husband. It was just a perfume bottle, but the shape of it was lovely. “See this, hon?” she said. And the man said, “Yeah,” but he had his back to her and was walking down the aisle away from her. The woman put the thing back, diminished.
Do you know what I mean, Martin? I think this