So Take a Letter, Maria...

Address it to my wife...
Say I won't be coming home....
Gotta start a new life...

That is actually the letter my brother should be writing. Or having his secretary write. If he had a secretary. The thought of which makes me giggle. On the inside where it counts.

No, like my mother often does, mostly because she does not have a computer (Why on God's green Earth would I want one of those things???) and therefore, does not use e-mail (and therefore has never realized the satisfaction of pounding out a scorching message and letting it fly with a pulverizing stab at the send button...) and neither does he, he is writing a letter to my sister to tell her what is on his mind. (Hopefully not much, there is not much space.)

Confrontation is so much more fair when done face to face. It is so hard to truly dismantle someone while having to look at his face; see his eyes. People are much braver seated at a desk with a pen and a sheet of paper. Or while firing off a nasty-gram via e-mail. Or on the phone with some faceless caller...think for a minute how briefly you hesitate to hang up on the telemarketers who ring your line during Sunday dinner.

But when you write a letter, you have to carefully commit your thoughts to paper. Something about scrolling them out makes them real. And licking the envelope and sending it off to be delivered eventually by strangers (it still amazes me that 44 cents gets a letter to your door in about 2 days...everyone's door. All the time.) leaves you with a sense of mystery and anticipation. Did the other person get it? When? Should they have called by now? Will they write back?

And the written word is so permanent. Come on, we still have letters that Ben Franklin wrote! If a carefully crafted little tidbit of hate mail came your way, you would not save it to someday wave in the face of the gravelling author? E-mails are deleted. Phone calls evaporate into thin air. But letters? They endure!

So evidently Joe has written a doozy - not apologizing but stating that he'd not realized what he'd done was wrong. It is the How to Say It Without Saying It for Dummies letter of half-assed apologizing. As if to say "Had I known it was wrong, I would not have done it, but I didn't, sooooo an apology reeeaaaaalllllly isn't suitable, ya dig?" (Read that: Don't hold me accountable, lady. I am just a moron.)

Had he stopped just there - right after that paragraph, my sister might have cast it all aside saying to herself that he is an idiot and will always be one, and we just have to calibrate our expectations to the Joe Scale of Social Decency.

But he didn't.

He had to go and blame her.

And the words on the page, scrawled in the third grade style script, with entirely too much pressure on the pen, were on fire, the flames of Hell itself now ignited.