LETTERS FROM HOME: BAKED POTATOES AND SALAD FOR ALL

Aug. 18, 1994

Dear Ellen,

My friend Melina is visiting with a friend from journalism school in Columbia. First thing she says is I've put on a few pounds. "People gain weight when they get married," she says.

Yesterday, they toured the Avenue of the Giants, "living museum of the world's tallest trees," and picked enough blackberries for a pie. DC made a feast of grilled fresh salmon fillets with pesto, baked potatoes and Caesar salad. I didn't say, "People gain weight when they have house guests."

We've had quite a few this summer. If everyone DC invited to visit us actually showed up, we'd need to move out to make room. A former '60s Berkeley radical she ran into on the street in Mendocino, assorted dental school buddies, seatmates on planes, all are told to "come on up." A patient with a sore tooth appeared at our doorstep one Saturday morning and DC gave her our bed.

She says hers is a Midwestern attitude, and I admire it even while reminding her that it's Southerners who get all the credit for hospitality.

Even though our history is short, I have missed Melina and her enthusiasm. Such a firebrand.

I first really got to know her when we both were assigned to cover the flood last summer in Ste. Genevieve. The governor was there along with reporters from all over the country and a team from "48 Hours." The plan that day was to follow the governor around as he toured the battlements as it were, stopping at sandbagging locations from time to time to fill a few for the photographers.

Didn't look promising, so I was hoping to find someone who actually knew something about what was going on. When the editor of the local weekly offered to take us in his truck I thought I'd pulled off a coup. We went outside to get Melina, who was standing beside one of those Hummers used in the Persian Gulf War. But she didn't seem as enthusiastic about going as expected.

"Uh Sam, would you mind if I rode with the governor?" she asked in that clipped Sarah Lawrence way.

There are three seats in the back of a Hummer. As the newspaper editor and I scurried to his truck, the Hummer drove off with the governor in the right-hand seat, his gracious wife in the left-hand seat and Melina snapping pictures between them.

Melina makes herself believe she can do anything, which almost got her shot by a drug dealer who didn't want his picture taken, and keeps her from giving in to the doubts and fears that stop so many from doing and saying exactly what they want to.

When she graduates from J-school, she wants to go cover the women's liberation movement in Italy. Judging from the recent election of Mussolini's granddaughter to parliament, that ought to be a grand time. I wonder if Mussolini's granddaughter thinks, as Melina currently does, that pencils are an example of the phallic adulation prevalent in Western culture.

We had a laugh over that one, imagining alternative, womanly shapes for all sorts of objects. Drinking glasses, we decided, go both ways.

Today we're going to Shelter Cove, locally famous for black sand beaches and people who want to get away from the rest of us. We'll go and see their town and then leave them alone.

Not everyone likes visitors. DC and I do. Come one, come all. Tell us your stories. We will feed you and enjoy our days beefing up together.

Love, Sam,

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian, currently on leave at Garberville, Calif.