OLD LETTERS FOR THE NEW YEAR

A painting by my great-grandmother, Ella Valentine Fry.

(From "Language Matters"----www.ncarts.org)

Old Letters for the New Year

By Kathryn Stripling Byer

Lately, my brother and I have been exploring the contents of the attic in the house where we

grew up. We greeted this new year without my father’s presence, and perhaps that is why we

have felt so drawn to what remains of our ancestors whose books, letters, journals,

and articles of clothing rest in the attic like relics.

We found century-old letters from our great-grandparents and one letter from a great-greatgrandfather writing from County Clare, Ireland, in 1869, telling his son Will how proud he

would always be of him. We found another from his daughter, Nell, speaking of our great-

grandfather’s childhood and early manhood, written to his wife, my great-grandmother Ella

Valentine Fry, after her husband’s death. My great-grandmother was quite a letter-writer herself, educated well enough to become a teacher at age 16 in the Lead City, South Dakota schools, the first female so “nominated” to that post. My brother and I unfolded each of these letters as if they were the most precious items in the house. Each one was written with care, the handwriting graceful, the language itself literate in both style and grammar. These letters obviously mattereda great deal to both the authors and the recipients. Now, more than a century later, they speak to us in ways we’ve only begun to appreciate.

Who among us writes letters like this anymore, I wondered, as I read the words that flowed from those long-ago pens, the ink fading, but the language still vibrant? Whose handwriting could match theirs? Not mine. I type my letters, my handwriting increasingly unreadable and hurried. Or, like more and more of us, I email my correspondence. With the click of a mouse, I send my messages. I do not labor with a dip pen to put into durable words my love for a child gone to thenew world to become a miner in South Dakota. My messages are nothing like the letters we found by a sister writing across the Atlantic about her dead brother’s love of tools and engineering. Like so many of us, I am in a hurry. My correspondence is fleeting, disposable.

Most of it will be deleted.

In his poem “Please Write: Don’t Phone,” Robert Watson, my former teacher in the UNC-G

writing program, exhorts, “Let us write instead: surely our fingers spread out / With pen on paper touch more of the mind’s flesh.” He explains, “I can touch the paper you touch,” and “I can read you day after day.” His last lines continue to haunt me: “I hold the envelope that you addressed in my hand. / I hold the skin that covers you.”

In this new year of email and instant-messaging, few seem to have time to sit down and put their lives onto paper that can be unfolded again and again, or placed in a drawer for safe-keeping. The flesh of my family’s past resides in those yellowing sheets of paper we found in the attic. I carry their words into the new year, resolved to write more letters in long-hand, letting the words rise slowly to the surface and take shape on the empty page like a gift to be cherished.

LIGHT AND LANGUAGE, from "Language Matters" for December

This is my last "Language Matters" column.

Light and Language

When I was a studying Spanish in college, I traveled to Mexico for summer school at the university in Saltillo. Before my departure I dreamed one night about an animal leading me into a labyrinth. When we reached the center, I saw that the beckoning animal was a jaguar holding a heart in his paw. I later learned that the jaguar is sacred to the Mayans, and I took this dream as a good sign, because the darkness was filled with pulsing light from the jaguar’s presence.

On one of our trips into the Mexican countryside, my classmates and I encountered a woman who wanted us to take her picture. The day was overcast and she kept asking," Hay bastante luz?"

Is there enough light? That question resonates still in my imagination, the way light enters into so much of what we long for and speak about at this time of year.

I remembered the woman’s question when my four-month-old daughter sat in her baby seat before our large living-room windows, conducting the morning light with her hands and singing back to it. The rest of the day, it seemed to me there was never enough light, especially when her colic returned, and instead of singing, she cried.

One of our state’s most renowned poets, Betty Adcock, has written a poem entitled “Word-Game.” It begins with these lines: “A child watching a moonrise/ might play a game of saying,/ might hold the word moon in his mouth/and push it out over and over.” In lines that could serve as the motif for this season, the poem concludes:
In a net of sound like the body’s
own singing web, a child
will be rising
with light for a language.

In the Christian tradition, the Word is the light of the world. Likewise, each word brings its own particular revelation, regardless of the language in which it is spoken: Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Cherokee, Lakota Sioux. Some politicians clamor for a law decreeing English the official language of the United States, but nothing will be able to stop the words that rise up from the languages of the people.

So this Christmas I wish you in Hindi Krismas ki subhkamna, in Arabic miilaad majiidas, and in Cherokee Danistayohihv, along with the more familiar feliz Navidad and joyeux Noël, and Fröhliche Weihnachten. Each expression casts a slightly different light on the season it celebrates, much the way the lightcatcher hanging in my bedroom will soon begin to gather the winter light and spread its spectrum around my walls. The poet Elizabeth Bishop called these lights “rainbow-birds,” but my daughter and I called them “rainbow fish,” because her astrological sign is Pisces, and I thought of her then as my little fish: ma petite poisson. These rainbows remind me that what looks like a beam of light is really composed of many colors—that light is both particle and wave. What we call reality is really the many manifestations of light, and our words capture that reality in their multifaceted sounds and meanings.