YOUR PLACE AND MINE

Sept. 23, 1993

Dear Pat,

Howdy cowgirl. Have you two-stepped into the hearts of any new Virginia boys lately? Your silences I usually take as a good sign that you're working something out.

I'm leaving for California tomorrow. I hope to persuade the woman I told you about that Cape Girardeau is a many-splendored burg. Long-distance relationships only are good for phone companies. But I don't know whether I command the words to move her.

I'll tell her about walking to the courthouse park in the morning. It overlooks the Mississippi, and was once the site of public floggings, band concerts, dances and military encampments. Now it's peaceful.

Sometimes I follow the long steps down through the terraces past the jewelry store I've stopped by lately. There's a huge clock smack in the middle of Main Street, signifying something Einsteinian I'm sure.

Often I buy a blueberry muffin and coffee at a cheery little cheese cake shop. Then I follow the street past a shoe store I like looking at shoes and the Mexican restaurant where the owner greets me and everyone else as "my friend," and Marilyn's hair salon. In the window, an electric fan and a mannequin dressed like MM recreate the scene from "Seven Year Itch."

I like it down there, even though too many of the storefronts are empty. In one of the towns I used to live in in California, they put up displays of art in vacant storefronts.

Finally I drop down a block to the river. We can see it again now that the floodgates have been reopened, but I used to flop on a nearby bench just to be close to all that power.

This is a place, I have discovered, where the roll of the land is as familiar to me as the songs my mother sang doing housework. I meet people all the time who know my kin, and ask me to say hello. Having chosen to live rootlessly during another part of my life, the feeling of being connected to people and to a landscape sometimes startles me.

If she were here, we could sit there at the river dreaming about going to the Amazon, or she could tell me fishing stories (she prefers California steelhead to Missouri bluegill). And we could say things that need to be said while touching.

But this may not sway her. Her new home in California is enveloped by foggy mountain forests, and the inhabitants embrace each other's idiosyncrasies. "I love these people," she says.

Quite a few who come to her clinic are what she calls "the landed gentry" or "agriculturists," euphemisms for marijuana farmers. Others live out in cabins or even teepees in woods so thick they carry chainsaws in their cars.

Her co-workers have named those furthest out "the people who fell to Earth." They are New Age beings, preternatural women and men who seem to glide beyond the Bosnias and drippy faucets and lacks of compassion that worry others and eventually cause them to act.

Sometimes she thinks I might be one of them, and that I belong in California and she in Cape Girardeau. I say I just have faith in what I see unfolding.

Last night, I watched a movie based on Stephen Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time." He likens the life of the universe to that of a star. He says space is filled with particles and anti-particles that are constantly materializing in pairs, separating, coming together and then annihilating each other.

You and I have lived like those particles, I'm going to tell her. Come, let's annihilate each other.

Love to you and Alan. How tall is he now? Whatever it is, make sure he knows it's enough.

Sam