LETTERS FROM HOME: A FAR PIECE

December 16, 1993

Dear David,

I was remembering the last time you visited California. It was Christmas, and we went to Mendocino. As we threaded through the jade hills, Chris talked about wanting to be a goat farmer. We stopped at the side of the road and walked into a redwood grove. It felt damp and holy there.

I know you had a California dream once, a different one from mine. Yours had brown air and Raymond Chandler in it, maybe some B moviemaking. Music too, the kind of songs sotto voce FM deejays used to play after midnight in the 1970s.

Like me, you kind of liked the romanticism of anonymity, of being in a place where you could try to find out who you are without the reminders of family and too-familiar faces. We held to the belief that who you are is as much who you are becoming as who you used to be.

You, who I always thought the better writer between the two of us, became a businessman, the very thing the old us scorned. I'm sure I still have a few dozen letters from Columbia and Florida and California that prove both points.

Letters never arrived from Michigan or New York, but I knew you still must be looking for your personal Grail. Too many philosophy classes not to be.

I thought, well, he could be a melancholy songwriter. Remember those songs we wrote for Nolan Porterfield's class? "There ain't no more white horses in Georgia to ride/No more old houses to crawl up inside." The only one he liked.

Or maybe an L.A. Svengali pumping out critically acclaimed pop acts. L.A. goes crazy for people with taste.

Then it was a New York filmmaker, something very low-budget, low-concept. Hire your cousin and hope for a grant.

Nope. Too many Scorsese wanna-bes. Disillusionment set in.

Finally, you reappeared talking about transcendental states and "Autobiography of a Yogi" and Alan Watts and a lot of stuff I was ready to hear about.

The world shines from within when you are prepared to see it. I went looking. You stayed put.

What I was looking for I found in the beginning of a poem by Galway Kinnell: "The bud stands for all things/even those things that never flower/For everything flowers from within of self-blessing."

Fifteen years later, here you are, transmitting movies and music and such to cable TV subscribers all over St. Louis. Philosophically accepting that porno pay-per-view is a big money-maker in a struggling industry, and sure that your spiritual self is growing through it all.

Seeing your company, and both your disheveled desk and the way the employees like you, was heartening. Not because one of us finally is in control. But I know you didn't give up any essential pieces of yourself to get there, and that makes all the difference.

And you are what you least thought you ever would be. What's that Eleanor Roosevelt quote of Chris'? "Do the thing you think you can't."

After you returned to Missouri from that Christmas trip, you phoned to say it was good because you came back certain you belong here. Something about the curve of the horizon matching the memories stored in your bones.

You've come far, pilgrim.