The stars
floating above our heads on this Cool Maine evening look the same to me as they
did when I was a thirteen year old boy surviving North Carolina. Every Sunday
night I would flick on the garage light, throw open the back screen door and
noisily drag the wheel-less trash cans down the gravel driveway. After placing
the metal cans on the curb there would be a sudden piercing silence. Looking up
at the starry sky I would imagine what life on a planet circling one of those
distant points of light might be like; wondering if there was some lonely alien
boy looking back at me.
But I was
certain that any civilization existing on a distant planet would be far too
advanced to be touched by divorce, discrimination or Sunday night football. This was the year that my kind- hearted eighth
grade teacher, Sister Mary Claire asked us to write a letter to our grown up
selves; a message in a bottle to be delivered sometime in the distant future.
I remember
feeling self-conscious about what to write. As a thirteen year old gay boy in
the south, I didn’t talk about my feelings, I suppressed them and goodness
knows I didn’t eat them, I was far too
skinny. So, I wrote a generic letter:
Dear
Bill,
Wow,
I can’t believe you are an adult now, congratulations!
I hope that life is good for you now
and that you are happy. I am sure that a
lot has changed. Are you still best
friends with Willy? I bet you are.
Do you still live in Greensboro?
Well, I better go now.
Sincerely,
You (Ha, ha!)
I don’t
recall ever receiving the physical letter.
Perhaps Sister Mary Claire threw them all away in a rage after catching
most of the eighth grade class in the field at recess smoking marijuana. Or maybe she lost them when she was
transferred to a convent in a crime riddled neighborhood of Baltimore. Many years later I heard that she left the
Catholic Church. Perhaps the yellowed
letters written with a number two pencil sit in a shoebox under a disenchanted
aging woman’s bed who stares out at the expanding galaxy of her own past. But it was less the actual delivery of the
letter and more the act of writing it that spoke to me. That there would be a future Bill in a distant
world was enough of a message.
It did not
occur to me then that Sister Mary Claire might have written a letter to
herself. But we are all made of stardust.
I think we both searched the heavens looking for answers while the world
around us spun out of control.
When Paul and
I bought our cottage in Maine I bought two solar “sun jars”. We place them under the full sun during the
day and sit by their soft yellow light under the stars at night. Tonight, I look up at the stars, and see
their history; see the light that left on its journey through space years ago. Looking across the table at Paul’s face I see
the answer to that thirteen year old boy’s question and more importantly, the
delivery of his message.
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