To Stay Kissed

Nov. 15

“Praises us in ways we already know…our muscular school in Washington…the band has yet to play their greatest hit…” A lovely, vivid walk through fall and through some of our shared experience. You’ve given me many gems like this to read and re-read. You’ll see them again yourself, when I sent you the first bound volume of our correspondence.

Yes, like Paul McCartney, I do still feel the life I lived some sixty-plus years ago. As I drive these roads I do have an awareness of the people of our Missouri past. They’re present and real to me the way books I read long ago are present and real. What I mean is, they have the kind of relevance. That kind of ongoing, practical applicability. Cornelius Berg, Ron Bocklage, Pounds, Fortney, Lee, Claudia…and the Fall Festival, Patke’s Dairy, the Emmaus Home…everything we could list about this corner of the world: they’re part of what my brain is made of. Examples, reference points, lenses. Actual physical tissue and hormones, probably: with a theoretically measurable weight and volume. But of course more than that. These neurological echoes of no-longer-visible people and places still do what the originals did. They populate and furnish the world for me. So do the people and places of Brooklyn and Manhattan. I honestly wonder if people who pride themselves on not “living in the past” have much capacity for living in the present. Do they likewise only live in their town, not on their continent? In 2023, not in history? As humans, not as animals? I feel like I’m still having classroom discussions with Mr. Fortney and Mr. Scott. Still running into Lee as she conducts a dance class in Union, Mo. ten years after high school—and she tells her students, “Tom and I used to pass love notes in 7th Grade!” I feel like you and I are still taking that walk around midtown Manhattan that first night of my visit in (I think) 1985, about a year before I moved to Brooklyn. I’m still sleeping with Laura Tucker three or more nights a week in the fall of 1997 and thinking I might want to marry her. I’m still working 70-hour weeks in Manhattan ad agencies, drunk on exhaustion and camaraderie at 3 in the morning. Still driving cross-country with my nervous but loyal dachshund in the seat beside me in Nov. 2016: “Uma, we’re going to be Missourians, now! Are you my beautiful girl? Are you happy?” I expect you knew all that about me when you asked. You and I and Paul McCartney all know this secret. That what we did 60 years ago is real, same as what we did 60 seconds ago. When I was 18 and 19, I used to kiss my girlfriend Penny for an hour at a time before saying goodnight. Driving home, I still felt that kissing. It hadn’t been for nothing. I felt it the next day, too. May we all know or learn what it’s like to stay kissed.