Snail mail

I had a friend who died last year, Ted, who wrote six or seven letters a day for decades, I'm sure 'til the day he died, what many today call snail mail. He had many good excuses, all on the communication availability list of excuses: he didn't own a computer, probably couldn't type, he certainly couldn't drive, having given up automobiles in 1952 as unnecessary. He was a literature professor of what must be referred to as the old school, not the glib old school of slick ad-speak, but truly old school of reading novels aloud in American Lit I, and memorizing pages of poetry, a skill on which he prided himself, although he tried hard not to pride himself on anything. We would be sitting at a table in his old basement kitchen, him talking about poems or Greta Garbo or the beauty of his mother or the coldness of his physician father from the mining town in Pennsylvania where he was raised  and me watching a cockroach climb the tiles above the sink; Ted would close his eyes and say the words of a Sharon Olds poem he'd heard that morning on the radio read by Garrison Keillor. 

It bothers me a little bit that it was a chore to visit Ted, now as I get older and lonelier, but I remember so much that I learned about living in one's imagination, and waiting to die, in one's imagination, from our weekly get-togethers. Right now I remember going one day a few years ago when he was a young fellow, a twice-cancer-survivor in his mid-eighties and I noticed he was crying, and he said with a smile, "Two of my closest friends died this weekend," and in spite of my knowing his love of florid language and theatrical timing, I knew it was true and something I wouldn't soon forget.