![]() Every so often I get it out and look at it, hoping this will be the moment when my brain will make a connection and offer up a memory. I have kept this postcard for more than thirty years. How could this Mark not only have known, but thought to carry the address with him on his travels? Few people even knew where I was staying that summer, let alone had the address. The thing is, I have no idea who Mark is. and you? hope you are well and active, alive - love, mark I live in an olive grove, dense and green, among broad bands of ferns fired to golden hues by thick yellow bolts of greek sun penetrating the olive canopy: in an isolated valley among scattered farmhouses, grape vineyards and wheat fields. On the back, written in blue felt pen using all lowercase letters, was this message: On the front of the postcard was a mosaic with a sun in the middle. I would be at their house only until the end of August, at which point I planned to leave Canada and hitchhike around Europe. In the summer of 1971 I received a postcard from Greece signed simply “Mark.” It was addressed care of the couple I was staying with just outside of Vancouver. On the typewritten pages we are all young again and full of possibility. I read the letters every night for the rest of the winter and on into spring, after my miscarriage. “And she’s objecting! One should always object,” he writes, on that distant spring evening in Madrid. His daughter (me) is learning to speak and sing “Heigh-ho” and “all that jazz children do.” Right now she is going to bed. “Don’t be sad,” he tells my grandmother when her mother dies. They are visiting Portugal and arranging to come back to the U.S. The car is broken down, and he’s trying to have it fixed. Here he is living in Spain with my mother. When I try to flatten them out, the brittle paper begins to tear and crumble. ![]() In the second week after his death, I find the letters: just a handful, seven or eight, written years ago to my grandparents on his old Underwood typewriter. One night in February, my father slowly walks to his bedroom with his cane, calling out, “See you tomorrow.” The next morning I find him lying beside his bed, dead.įor weeks I walk through the house, touching his things: a cuff link, an ashtray, an old suitcase with a Greek Line shipping label. People hint to me that our situation is odd, that I should have moved out of my father’s house when I got married. Being a practical man, he teaches us how to repair the dripping faucet, patch a leaky pipe, and refinish the dining-room floor.Īs my father becomes less mobile, he retreats to the living room, where he sits in his chair watching television, or to the kitchen, where we take turns cooking meals and sharing gossip. In spare moments we listen to my father tell of his upbringing as the child of Salvation Army officers, of his travels through Europe and North Africa on a motor scooter, and of the years he spent in Spain working on a novel. We listen to baseball games on the radio, watch the children dance to marching songs on the Victrola, and mow acres of lawn. My brother and his family have settled here, too, and three generations of us jostle about the drafty rooms. My husband and I live with my father in a big, rambling farmhouse. The letter was so small he didn’t even need to fold it. This he scrawled with a cheap ballpoint pen on a scrap of notebook paper. He’d had a change of heart, he said, and hoped I wouldn’t be mad. Considering how long it took overseas mail to arrive, he’d probably already forgotten me by the time I opened the envelope. While in Austria I received my first and only Dear John letter. Sometimes I would drop little pieces of my life into the envelope: a bus ticket, a bar coaster, a page of a newspaper, or a leaf from Hellbruenner Allee, where I walked every day. Letter writing was a dreamy and timeless activity, like walking somewhere when it would have been faster to drive. This was before e-mail, and my only choice was between the expensive instant gratification of a phone call and the languorous pace of a letter that would be hopelessly out of date by the time it was read. After much deliberation, I chose the midnight blue fine-point, handed over the crumpled two-hundred-schilling note I’d received for selling my plasma earlier that day, and took the change to a cafe, where I could sip my coffee for hours as I wrote letters home. They all made urgent, dramatic marks on the tissue-thin pink airmail paper. ![]() Passing the roundish proprietor in his hunter green boiled-wool cardigan, I stopped at the wall of pens: thirty-seven shades and ten different tips. I slipped into the narrow, dim space and inhaled the smells of loose tobacco, milk chocolate, and stacks of thick paper. to noon and again from 2 to 4 P.M., because in Austria everyone needs a good, unhurried lunch, and anything you can’t do today you can do tomorrow. ![]()
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