Grasping for straws

We’ve been pulling things out of storage and bringing them back into the house. After three long years, our stuff is all back in one place. That occasions once again going through it all and trying to figure out what, at this stage of life, we can be rid of. My mercilessness and lack of sentiment for the detritus of the lives of others – nothing means anything to me just because an auntie I never met (or even one I did) once owned it – is, unfortunately, inapplicable to my own situation, where I look at a souvenir pack of matches that’s been trailing me around for 40 years and decide it’s going to continue to haunt a drawer somewhere.

But I have gone through my boxes of letters many times, slowly paring them down, getting rid of letters from people whose names I wouldn’t even remember if I hadn’t kept their letters, and narrowing it down to just a few envelopes full of evidence of my life from about age 16 to 29.

We wrote letters back then, all the time, to everyone we knew with even the slightest intimacy. If I went away to some kind of program or conference and met new friends from other schools (other states, even!), we exchanged letters. Sometimes once or twice, sometimes for months. Sometimes I’d write to friends in my own school. When I had a girlfriend who was away at college, I would write her nearly every day. My first summer after freshman year at SU, when I was living pretty much on my own, I wrote to everyone I knew, all summer long. I treated letter-writing like a full-time job. (It was a somewhat lonely summer.)

Rummaging through the boxes to see what letters remained, I saw an envelope I really didn’t recognize, with a return address that meant nothing to me. I suppose I’ve seen it before in previous culls, but never paid it any attention – apparently never even opened it up to see what was in it. It turns out it contained a bit of a masterpiece.

We Were Merely Freshmen

In our freshman year at Syracuse, my roommate Danny and I lived at 235 Day Hall, a modernish concrete block dorm on top of a hill called Mount Olympus. Across the hall from us were a pair of older students; I’ve completely forgotten the name of one of them, and she didn’t want much to do with us (can’t blame her), but the other was Geri Mouchka. She was friendly, quietly funny and more bemused than annoyed by her noisy, obnoxious, opinionated and frequently drunken freshman neighbors. (If I’d had to live next to us, bemused I would not have been.)

Now, if someone had asked me whether I ever maintained a correspondence with Geri, I would have said no. We knew each other my freshman year, ran into each other occasionally after that (I’m not sure when she graduated, but she was still at ESF in the spring of 1981). I never knew her very well; I knew she was from New Jersey, which I had never even visited, and that her family ran a motel, where she worked in the summers. I thought of her often in my years of graduate school both because I was taking courses at ESF and because I made frequent use of that school’s Moon Library, a quiet sanctuary she had hepped me to eight or nine years earlier (SU’s main library was a social center more than a place of study, at least on the lower floors where all the reference resources were). We were always friendly and glad to see each other, but there were no hangs or the like. People who knew and liked each other and went on with our lives (the very kinds of people I find I’m missing most during the pandemic, as casual interactions have been seriously disrupted).

But looking at this strange envelope and wondering, maybe for the first time in decades, who had mailed me from North Wildwood, New Jersey in 1979, I opened it up and found a simply amazing document.

Let’s start with this: it’s written on toilet paper. It’s written on amazing toilet paper that to this day has a certain softness and stretchiness that I cannot recall toilet paper ever having had. It’s written with a fine point felt tip (Pilot Razorpoint, maybe?), with not a bleed in sight. She even included the blotter paper she’d used in making it, and it’s barely marked (and quite a piece of art, as she noted – it’s in the gallery below.).

Transitions

Then there’s this – she was writing at a time of a rather jarring transition for me. End of freshman year, I had very suddenly decided not to go back home but instead got a good job as the news editor of The Summer Orange, a weekly, 12-issue summer edition of The Daily Orange. It paid $75 a week, super solid pay for the time and just enough to meet my expenses – and when we got to August, I’d figure something out.

That meant I needed a place to live, and in a panic I reached out to a newspaper colleague whose frat house rented out rooms by the week in the summer. It was a big, elegant old place (although still: a frat house in every way), and I thought I could get by living there for the summer. Had Geri not mentioned it in her letter, I couldn’t have even named the place today. With every friend I had made in Syracuse now gone, I carted my belongings up the hill to this frat house – where they gave me a basement “room” with no windows, no circulating air, use of a disturbing common bathroom and a kitchen I wouldn’t eat in. I walked down the hill to Marshall Street just to be in a familiar environment, called my mother collect on a payphone and lied about how things were going while, inside, desperately wanting to just go home. I had truly never felt so alone in my life.

I was better within a couple of days (just drinking my way through it wasn’t part of my pattern, yet). I was glad the rent was week to week, and I wandered around the bulletin boards and telephone poles, I think, and found an offer of a sublet for the summer. That’s how I ended up on the outskirts of campus in a lovely, sunny, breezy apartment on Broad Street, a long walk to campus in flip flops, or a short bike ride in flip flops– the point being that I spent the summer in flip flops. People started filtering back onto campus for the summer programs, and my colleagues at the summer paper appeared and something like a social life started up again and I ended up having one of the most delightful, important summers of my life, exactly the kind of summer an 18-year-old should have. An almost perfect mix of responsibility, freedom, personal growth and stupidity.

But somewhere in that transition from depressing basement to lovely apartment, I had missed Geri’s cookies.

When communication was letters and landlines

It may be impossible to convey what life was like in the days before cellphones and the instant ability to track nearly anyone who wants to be tracked. Even I often wonder how we did it. How did we find people on those crazy weekends when we were just moving from party to party? How did we track down friends who had moved? How could someone find me when I didn’t even have a phone? Well sometimes it just worked . . . you ran into someone who had seen your friend who knew where they were, or where they were heading. Sometimes you missed entirely. And in this case, as Geri’s letter attests, we just missed entirely.

The genesis of this appears to be that I had mailed her a straw. It’s very hard to scan because it’s been flattened for 43 years, but it’s a once-ubiquitous straw with “Keep America Beautiful” printed on the wrapper as a reminder not to litter, because straw wrappers were once our big concern. Plastic everything hadn’t happened yet. Whether the straw was some kind of joke between us, whether it was something she left behind in her dorm room, or what the genesis was, I just don’t know. But apparently I mailed it without any further communication.

And so she mailed it back, with this nice long letter beautifully written on toilet paper. And she told me she’d been back in Syracuse for her sister’s graduation (no, I had no memory that she also had a sister there), and that she had come looking for me – with homemade cookies. She had known (so I must have written her) that I was supposed to be staying at the frat house, so she went looking for me there without success, because by then I had moved. And she went to the old DO offices at 1101 East Adams Street, where she also found no one because I think the summer editions hadn’t started yet. And so, that’s what happened in 1979: you looked for someone, and if you couldn’t find them, you were out of options. And full of cookies. (I must have subsequently written her with my new address, as she had it correct on the letter.)

I don’t recall how this letter hit me when I got it back then, but right now, I can only imagine that if a friendly face had shown up with a plate of cookies for me at the moment of my lowest low, it absolutely would have meant the world to me. It would have been a gesture I never forgot. Here in 2022, it touches my heart so much – what a beautiful, simple kindness in a time when I was not okay.

I wish I could tell her this. I don’t remember how much we kept up after she graduated and went off to do whatever it was she did. I know that she got married, and then – and I couldn’t remember when, but thought it was probably near the end of the ’80s – there was a memorial notice in the alumni news. She had died.

This was still before the internet so, once again – there was no way to get any further information. We had no mutual contacts, I didn’t know her family or friends, we hadn’t been in touch for years, so I never was able to learn what happened (not that it really matters). But that mystery, that someone who once filled a tiny but pivotal role in my life was now just gone from the planet has always nagged at me.

So I post this as a way of saying – here was this person I barely interacted with who has nevertheless made a lasting impression on me. Never forgot her, always thought of her when I was on the ESF campus both in graduate school and in later years (I was mistakenly remembering her as an ESF student – but that was her roommate; Geri went to Newhouse, though she was the one who tipped me off to Moon Library, and I think had some other involvement there), and although I may have forgotten that she wandered around Syracuse trying to provide me with cookies that I very much needed at that moment, I didn’t forget that that’s the kind of person she was. Had she lived, there’s an excellent chance we’d be connected on Facebook today, as I am with so many others with whom I shared that brief moment in time. And I would like her posts and enjoy still being connected and seeing what her life was like, and that would all be a good thing. And then I’d uncover this gem and be able to share it with her. I’m truly sorry that I can’t.

A Postscript

It’s 2022, so even some things that happened before the days of the internet are available. An old friend did a search after I posted this and turned up details I hadn’t found. I almost hesitate to add this, but – in fact, Geri had returned to Syracuse, was working a fairly high profile job for WCNY, was married and even had a child, and unfortunately was killed in an auto accident, in February 1991. This happened after I had moved away, or I’d have certainly heard about it (though perhaps I wouldn’t have recognized her name). It’s saddening to learn this, but not really a surprise.

The Letter

The full letter is transcribed below:

May 24, 79

Dear Mr. CJ,

I am deeply saddened . . . I received a straw in the mail yesterday and it hadn’t been used. I’m not quite sure what to do with it . . . you see I don’t drink. I’m sending it back to you in the hope that you can find some use for it . . . perhaps as an instrument to assist you imbibe some strawberry wine or as a help in your next spitball competition. I do hope this poor straw will be put to good use in some way . . . as chairperson of the new “SAVE THE STRAW’ campaign I trust this straw will have a happy, healthy life with you. DO NOT ABUSE THIS STRAW!!

So, how are ya? I was eagerly looking forward to seeing you last weekend but you obviously were not at Phi Delta Theta or the D.O. office on Monday afternoon. I had made you a bunch of HOMEMADE cookies for you and you only!! But . . . yes, you guessed it . . . YOU BLEW IT BUDDY! I went to Phi Delta —> pretty creepy place – all the way up to the 3rd floor in search of Mr. Johnson, alias CJ – when . . . I got the creepies that someone was watching me through a hole in the wall somewhere . . . I ran from the house screaming hysterically . . . . actually the house was empty and a beautiful mess. Next I tried the D. O. Office. That too was humanless . . . so no cookies for you sweety! Don’t worry they didn’t go to waste!

Where are you living? An apartment or what? It has to be better than Phi Delta – yeckers!

I’ve been pretty busy with things in general. Went home Thursday, unpacked my school junk and repacked to go back up to S.U. for my sister’s graduation. Monday and Tuesday we packed a U-Haul with all her stuff (she’s such a materialist!) and headed for Boston on Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday we unpacked the truck. Moving was HELL!!! It is not easy getting a sofa-bed up three flights of stairs! Besides the moving, I had a fantastic time seeing the city. It’s the only city that I’ve felt safe in . . . no one attacked me on the subway – like in NYC!! I hope to visit her a lot in the future up there.

Sunday (the 20th) I headed home once again (for good?). Monday I unpacked for the final time. Monday night went to Philly to see The Beach Boys in concert — they were great but I guess they could never match your opinion of the Beatles.

Now I’m just hanging around the motel getting ready to open the ol’ place up. This weekend starts our season . . . thrills, thrills – it’s supposed to rain until Sunday – this is worse than old S.U.!!
Well I’m running out of TP . . . you see I was in the bathroom and suddenly I thought of you . . . so, I thought I’d write. You see TP is a lot cheaper than writing paper and IT CAN BE USED AGAIN!

Hope everything is going OK up there. Maybe you can send a letter in the next envelope, OK?

Love ya,
Moo…?

P.S. Is the walrus really Paul or were you just putting me on?!
P.S.S. My Ziggy calendar says you should “Grasp for Straws” on May 26th. Remember!