Hey Ira.
What's up? I know that you are a public radio show host in Chicago with its high trains and record stores and boys in tweed caps, and I am an unemployed girl in Pennsylvania, rural, desperate, coal-mine cold Pennsylvania, land of a thousand garage sales. And I only know you from a microphone. And sometimes I don't listen to your program, it's true, because I am sleeping or shopping or just not in the mood to be told a story which makes me wonder, look up from my lavender comforter at the barely-moving curtains and think about change. And the stories I wrote, which I finally sent to you after months of letter-crossing, were rejected, as they should have been because they were not good, not my finest, no sir, too many metaphors, and I realized only later that I misspelled the name on the envelope, wrote This American Lift, which I hope at least made some underpaid staffer in the mailroom laugh. No, I never got around to applying to be the world's oldest intern at NPR, three years out of school, five years out of real school--that is school where you do more than wax poetic about your grandfather and date everyone at the table and answer questions about made-up stuff, questions about ether, whatever ether is. And yes, it's true, I have a fabulous love interest. I have most of my life had a fabulous love interest of one kind or another, but you were supposed to find me where I sat at my desk, putting my hair up in a bun secured by a pencil, waiting to be convinced. That wide, dirty city across the river where I once lived--I looked to the other side. I like my coats thrift and my movies subtitled. I wear cat-eye glasses and stack heels and spend Saturdays at library book sales and make Dutch baby pancakes and hold stones in my hands to calm them and chew gum when I'm writing and don't mind shopping for my lox and my bagels and my cream cheese at three separate places. And I hear you're getting married to someone not me. What the hell is up with that?
