I am a terrible correspondent.

I mean world-class bottom-of-the-barrel correspondent.

Phone, email, letter, telegram, message in a bottle…. I am excruciatingly bad at returning communication. Which is a bit surprising given the number of words that I churn out in a given month but what it is really? Busted linkage.

I am absolutely responding to you.

I am really reading everything you send me, thinking about it deeply, and formulating a response to you, often several, often for weeks… It just doesn’t always make it into some sort of medium and make it to you.

Aaron Sorkin occasionally uses a device to allow for narration and direct author comment on situations. One of the characters will be writing a letter to a family member and “explain” a situation to them over the course of an episode. I am rewatching Sports Night right now and Sorkin uses Jeremy’s letters to Louise for this purpose…

And I realized last night – I have been “narrating” a letter to my mom for two weeks now. I have been writing a letter in my head for the last two weeks heading into my (second) anniversary and the sputtering start-up of the next Cambiare project and my own weird malaise and the changes in her life over the last few months and the big changes in the next few months and…

I haven’t actually written any of it in any place where she could, y’know, receive it. So roughly I’ve been “talking” to my mom for two straight weeks and she just thinks I’ve forgotten about her. Poor woman.

For the record… her email is in the other window as we speak.

“You see Mom, we tried to go to Saba Blue Water Cafe and even got  a great parking space on Congress with almost no trouble but they were closed. Not not open, like CLOSED closed, for good and forever. So we punted and decided to try Uchi for the first time, what a great consolation prize…“