On Friendship: Saturday E-mail

Re-reading a book of poems on friendship, while listening to music (erroneously classified as Oldies in audio shops!), I wax nostalgic finding Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Arrow and the Song. I had not thought of it for ages, but I am surprised I remember four lines of it still, with eyes closed, as I did in high school. 

I breathed a song into the air,

It fell to earth I knew not where;

And the song from beginning to end,

I found again in the heart of a friend.

And I think of my longtime friend, Lucy. When the Saturday sun rises in the Philippines, twelve hours later it also dawns in Palm Springs, California which is exactly half a day behind us. Lucy goes home from work to take her day-off and checks her e-mail. If I didn't write her within these hours, she won't read and reply to my e-mail till next Saturday.

My e-mails to Lucy are an editor's nightmare. I disregard paragraphs, spelling, punctuation marks, style, and syntax. I write in phrases, with lots of interjections, and unfinished sentences in two languages.

 

They're my weekly songs which I would breathe into the air had not man invented cyberspace. They're songs that openly speak of seven-day hopes and hypes, travails and triumphs, books and looks, fears and tears, writing and . . . writing. Lucy was an author before I became one. 

"Successful debut novels!" she writes back, and peppers her message with unheard of names . . . "I know this Much is True, second novel by Wally Lamb, very sensitive, powerfully written, as good as his debut novel . . . this lovely blouse on sale miraculously came in my size . . . your bone density exam okay? . . . Mabel's and Maru's much-hoped-for-and-most-awaited-by-friends [adjectival phrase, mine] wedding at sunset al fresco was perfect, except for me coming in late . . ."  

I dab more orange and yellow onto my wedding present to Mabel and Maru (two calla lilies at sunset) before I rush to the bookstore for "I Know This Much is True." 

The next Saturday, I write Lucy about how I overstayed in that place for hours, reading the first and last 100 pages, and re-learning that mongrels make good dogs; how I tried fitting blouses on sale but couldn't; how I must quickly have the painting framed.

Writing Lucy is a lot like keeping a diary, only better. I take stock of what I have done with my life for one week. And always, like David, I want to "Sing to Him a new song; Play skillfully with a shout of joy." Psalm 33:3. 

Two questions always stump me. The answers are in my brain somewhere—if only I could wade through the overload of data quickly. 1) On books: What are your favorites? 2) On thanksgiving: What blessings have you received? 

An unstructured reader I am, most times. I have indefinite reading time, I don't speed read, I never finish a book. By finish, I don't mean reading a book from cover to cover, which I do. It's, uh... amid writing, or painting, or whatever I am busy doing, I open a book (newly bought or kept for years), and soak in the words, the unwritten subtexts, and the author's unspoken thoughts. Then I put the book aside, some place where I can easily access it for reading yet once, or twice, or ad infinitum, again. At any time, I have four to five books (of different genre) open all at once.

As for thanksgiving, blessings come nonstop—millions in a fraction of a second—that it is difficult to choose which could be shared during our church's Praises and Testimonies.

Writing my Saturday e-mail makes me decode, then quickly encode, my inbox of weekly comings-and-goings into both heart and soul. And in fragmented sentences, like my own, Lucy validates them; and I am less stumped than I thought I was.

These are some of my boundless, endless songs of grace. They waft back on a Saturday from across the seas, sent by the Creator through cyberspace.  

(In photo: Lucy, the latecomer, and Mabel, the late bloomer—tearful, blissful, beautiful!)