In my last letter, Wuck, I wondered aloud if you attended the Sunday evening ballgame at Citi Field the day Grammar was born. Much to my delight, you’ve taken this parallel lives motif a step further in your own letter, placing yourself, your grandmother, and Tom in heady, real-time simultaneity two or three times.
As I write this, I think first about those extraordinary Scotch Pines in the southeast corner of Sierra Vista Park, not only how they’ve provided the backdrop for so many of my life’s moments, but also how they've been there in the corner of that park just the same when I’m elsewhere in pain or in ecstasy—how they're there now.
How extraordinary it would be to push play on our existences from the moment of, say, Hoke’s birth, <quote-01>to watch all three of our lives play out<quote-01> side-by-side-by-side, to see them converge in forgotten places, to hear them harmonize or collide, to catalog the litany of Dark-Side-of-the-Moon-meets-Wizard-of-Oz surprises.
To wit. Where were you, Hoke, when Pat and Cooter and Gualt and I set out for Las Vegas, when we narrowly missed Wuck? Where were you, Wuck, when Hoke and Tom and I lay atop a king-size bed alongside Becca and Maureen?
What were you both doing, I wonder, when Gibby hit his <quote-02>game-winning dinger in ‘88<quote-02>, when I was awakened just before midnight on Valentine’s Day to say goodbye to my father, when I first kissed Kristen? For that matter, where was I when you, Hoke, contemplated taking a plunge headfirst from Evans Hall, or when you, Wuck, checked yourself into a Pittsburgh emergency room with your first serious panic attack?
Think for a second, Hoke, about our carefree afternoon at Raging Waters just about a year ago. How many people said their final goodbyes at the hospital just down the road during those hours? How many were at the depths of their suffering while we caught air time and time again on Ragin’ Racer?
I remember sitting in an Orange County McDonald’s the day we began writing these letters, eating my feelings on the first day of school and receiving text messages from Conch about Seamus’s last minutes; I wept from behind black Ray-Bans while teenagers in love shared fries just to my left.
You were both out there somewhere living your lives too. How wonderful it is—for a few sparkling hours each year—to live them together.
<pull-quote>game-winning dinger in ‘88<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>in transition from the edge of my tv-facing living room couch in upland into the air in front of it—arms thrust outward with joy, shouting to beat the band.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Really? You were watching that in first grade, Wuck?.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>oh yes.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>That you weren't is no failure of your own, Hoke.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Does Anthony Webber get some mad respect from me, however? He does.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>rehearse<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I've often tried to imagine all those nights Andy spent at your house during The Diviners sophomore year. In my mind it's a non-stop rollercoaster of hellbent rehearsing and hysterical grab-ass.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>yeah. hard to imagine having the ability to know how to rehearse scene work at that age, aside blocking and memorization.<p-comment>
<p-comment>he used to knock on my door in the morning. i’d answer, and his bare ass would be in the air, cheeks spread, and he’d fart. repulsive stuff.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>This joy will return, Wuck, with your child. Remember to laugh and chase the kid as you would Andy, not just to scold and wipe the (probably) unclean little culo.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>to watch all three of our lives play out<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>this is the sense i had of heaven as a youngster—that we would all be able to watch back through our lives like so many spools of film. how enjoyable it would be when they overlapped: the time debbie waited behind a pregnant eloise at the bank, or the time a gangly wuck was tagged out at home by murph in catcher’s gear. who knows?<p-comment>
<p-comment>“our town” is now coming to mind. is there a better play? i wonder.<p-comment>
<p-comment>antithetical note: think of how tragic to re-watch all the moments that we’ve replayed over and over, laden with such cumulative detail and meaning, only to find them at best, desperately lacking--or at worst, totally void of--the substance that a lifetime of remembrance has endowed them with.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>I'd risk it.<p-comment>
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