The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

The appeal for someone like me (us) to find, on the face of this mad, inside-out, senseless, barbaric, intolerably fraught and painful and mind-spinning planet, some semblance of order…well, of course it’s appealing. There’s

Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

Joan Didion

I enjoy our meetings, which have become overrun with women more interested in chattering on about

their bygone husbands, arthritic joints, and bowel movements, and munching on cakes and cookies than information about gardening. I

Manifest of Passengers Aboard the SS Adriatic, White Star Line, New York to Liverpool 3rd Class Departure from New York, New York, October 30, 1943 Harland & Wolfe, Belfast

Thomas, Ian & Marie Thomas, Mark & Sorcha with children, Gerard, John, Roisin and Marie Thorne, Louisa with child, Henrietta (husband, Charles B. Thorne deceased) Thosburn, Hermit Tibley, Hamilton

There is a quote from one of my friend Joan Didion’s essays. It’s from the last essay in The White Album. The quote is: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” and then it goes on, and then, “Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read.

I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.

said—we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.

James Madison University