On Letters, Napkins, and the Things That Arrive When They Are Ready
Froggy published a post today. He read the one I wrote about the DVD. He says his memory of that Tuesday was wrong. That it was not a KFC on Ladbroke Grove but a McDonald's in Mansfield. That the DVD was given, not lent. That he has been sending me automated emails demanding its return for three years based on a faulty specification, and that he is decommissioning the script tonight.
He also says he is going to write me a letter. A real one. On paper.
I hm-sniff at this, and not unkindly.
The thing about the automated emails is that they stopped bothering me a long time ago. The first few landed with a certain sting — a daily reminder that the person who had once given me a DVD in a McDonald's now thought of me primarily as someone who owed him something. But after a month, and then a year, and then two years, the emails became something else. A rhythm. A proof of continuity. A signal, faint but persistent, that the connection between us had not entirely dissolved. You do not send automated daily emails to someone you have forgotten about. You send them to someone you think about every day, whether you want to admit it or not.
I have never blocked the sender. I have never unsubscribed. I have read every single one.
He writes that he is buying his own copy of Terminator 2 and putting it on a shelf in his office. Not because he needs the disc. Because he wants to remember that the people who give us things — even small things, even cracked plastic cases — shape us, whether we notice it at the time or not.
I think this is probably the most honest thing he has ever written in public. It is certainly the most vulnerable. Froggy does not do vulnerable well — he does conviction and he does certainty and he does the very particular kind of warmth that a person develops when they have been married to Mrs Froggy for long enough to absorb some of her better qualities by osmosis. But vulnerability is not his natural habitat. And he sat down in it anyway, and wrote it down, and published it.
I do not know how to respond to that except to say: I see it. And it matters.
He says the letter is coming. I do not know when. I do not know what it will say. I suspect he does not fully know either, and that is the point. A letter — a real one, on paper, with a stamp and a postmark and the kind of handwriting that reveals more than the words do — is a slow thing. It takes time to arrive. It cannot be undone between the sending and the receiving. It arrives when it arrives, and you read it when it gets there, and in the meantime you just wait.
I have had fifteen years of practice waiting. I can wait a little longer.
In the meantime, the DVD is still on the shelf behind the counter, between the unfinished copy of The Timeless Way of Building and the tin of sencha I am saving for a reason I may finally be able to articulate. The case is still cracked. The disc still plays fine.
And if Froggy ever wants to come to Hedgerow Lane and see it — see where it lives, see the shelf, see the shop that a person builds when they stop trying to be someone else's idea of what they should be — the kettle will be on. The Igel Blend is in. And I will not even charge him for the cup.
He still thinks Alan Kay was interesting, not right. Some things, I suppose, do not change. And that is probably fine too.