Three Sentences

I get "one of the best e-mails ever" about two or three times a year. A simple message from a friend, oftentimes just a sentence or two, that summarizes -- to an exact precision that amazes me into admiration -- someone's position in life in a well-turned phrase.

This week it was Katie Stubbendick, a friend from back in Madison, back in the ALPs days. We worked together for a semester, then I left to adventure. She just recently graduated to adventures of her own, she's now teaching English on the Reunion Islands of the Indian Ocean.

Brave soul.

In one e-mail, just a three-sentencer, she rocked herself from "old acquaintance" friend to "embarking on some of the same adventures and same thought-processes" good friend.

hey buddy
how do you deal with lonely?
i am frustrated with my reactions to myself.

Wow. Boo-yah. In three sentences, folks, there's the question of life, when you boil life down to being a native-speaking-foreign-language-teacher-teaching-as-a-foreigner-living-with-only-the-comfort-of-your-own-mind.

The way she builds those sentences! Anyone, thousands of miles away in a different reality starring at thousands of glowing dots becomes as intimate as "buddy." How do you deal with "lonely," as if lonely is a companion, a friend, a pet, a person. It takes life. It's more than simply being lonely, it is a disease to be lived with. How do you deal with John, how do you deal with cancer, how do you deal with hornets, how do you deal with smoke around the campfire?

I am frustrated...with my reactions...to myself. Break down the pieces, there's an elegance, a simplicity, a beauty. I am frustrated -- not happy, not content, but willing to work at it. With my reactions -- the understanding that it's a dialogue, it's a conversation, it's a process, it's a relationship between so many different parts of the same whole. To myself -- because that's who it is, that's what does the haunting and that's what does the happinessing. Myself is who I am where I am, and there are so many different who's to each where and each when.

To her I wrote (among other things):

Wine helps.
I've found more pleasure in reading than ever before.
Fiction.
My Message-in-a-Bottle campaign.
Invention.
Routines.
Buying things.
Infatuations.
Mail.
Walking.
Sunshine.
Smiling.
Thinking.
And then more wine.

Who is set to receive those messages in bottles forthcoming?

Gaines Greer - All-Time Winner

Dave Lund - Wine and Conversation (and Sometimes Women)

Jenny Reidy - Part 2 of Wine and Conversation

Ann Carlson - The Laughter of Living

Shawn Stephany - Part 2 of The Laughter of Living (Wedding Edition)

Sam Myers - Companionship and Loneliness

Brian Vest - The Poetry of People

Sarah Patschke - The Learning of Teaching and the Teaching of Learning

Aaryn Joyner - Between Fiction and the Truth