Back in the 1980's, before there was email or any other electronic forms of communication, when we all began going in different directions (and then sometimes the same directions), we kept in touch with the U.S. Postal Service. We wrote letters to each other and those letters included words and drawings and things that we would cut out and things that we would collect, so every few weeks we would all get a little bit of each other in an envelope in our mailbox and that was always such an indescribable moment. You could see and feel that person in that paper, in those marks, in the gum that had to be licked to seal the envelope. It was like that person was whispering to you from far away, and you could almost feel their breath on your hair it was so close and so intimate. Try doing that with email.
This is the envelope of a letter I received from Devin after he moved to Minneapolis and when I was still in Bozeman. His triangle glasses artist character is laughing and I was probably giggling when I opened it up because inside would be some magical bit of Devin that had floated all the way from the metropolis to my basement apartment in the Bozone and it was all for me to read and look at and read and look at and puzzle over again and again. And then it ended it up in a box in my basement thirty years for me to rediscover, damp and discolored, a couple months ago. And then the magic, that bit of Devin, that voice and that breath, could once again giggle like a boat on the water, and I'd feel it and almost see and hear it.
