Category Archives: Open Letter

Just Sign on The Donor Line…


Open Letter to an Organ Donor: Samuel Flegel (8/31/78-1/11/2000) 

Dear Sam,

It’s odd, how compelled I feel to write you on this day. It’s the day we met, yes. But it meant such starkly different things to each of us and the people who loved us. Love us.

Twenty-three years on the blade. Can you believe it?

Of course you can. You allowed it to be. Or whispered ‘And so it goes.’

For the longest time, I thought of you as mine. Literally, like something I owned, as a parent might think of a child, or an animal lover their pet. After all, you were 14 years my junior at the transplant. Just a kid on a motorcycle, coming home from a party.

Sam

But they must have transplanted something beyond organs that day. Because lately, you have been more like bigger brother than younger charge. A big brother who keeps hammering me with a singular message:

‘Embrace the beautiful sorrows.’

It took a couple decades, but I think I’m beginning to catch on. To spot — and accept — the profound moments when bitter must follow sweet, if only for their passing, just as sweet must trail bitter, if only for their presence.

I think we had one of those moments the day we met. I think we have one with every blood test that goes well, every eye exam that goes poorly, every number that inhabits limbo. Or, as you would have it, south of great, north of hopeless.

It’s been a while since I felt hopeless, and that has to be your doing, your consciousness at work, right? It’s as if a note came with your kidney and pancreas: ‘It’s not enough to live this life. Insist on it.’

So I try to barge. I try to smile, genuinely, at least once a day. I try to laugh, genuinely, at least once a day. The dogs make that possible, though I still often fail.

I try to cry, genuinely, at least once a day. You make that possible, though I often fail there, too, because if I think too hard about it, I sometimes cry a lot.

But you welcome all hypocriticals, especially the ones about seizing sunlight and sniffing roses when some days you’re just trying to get tomorrow in the bag.

Since Covid, I find myself dropping into virtual college lectures on the sciences, from biology to astronomy to physics to math, a class I never took beyond high school. Now I’m convinced math is a faith. That’s you too, right?

Lately, I’ve been consumed by the notion of the multiverse. I love contemplating the quantum possibilities of our seismic days.

What if you hadn’t had the motorcycle crash? What if I hadn’t had diabetes?

Would you read my stories? Would I ride your trains? Would we be friends, fathers, famous? It’s all possible, the physicists say. And I’m all-in on science.

So I believe. I believe that you were at the transom of the multiverse on that day, making sure the rearviews were folded back and the windshield was spotless. I believe you found me. I believe that, like Han Solo ledged over the carbonite bath, you grinned, winked, and said ‘Seeing more yesterdays than tomorrows ain’t exactly a calamity, kid.’

And you were gone. And we were off. And it still makes me cry, a lot sometimes.

What a beautiful sorrow.

Open Letter to A Puppy: Name Change

From the archives but never here:

July 29, 2020

From: The Dept. of Canine Renaming and Redundancy Dept.

To: JayDee Barkinger Bowles

Dear Ms. Bowles,

Your application for a spell-change to your first name has been approved to Jadie.

However, your application to drop your last name has been denied, as has your application for the personalized plate Dane Jadie Clench. And please tell your brother there’s no such thing as a “Disservice Dog.”

An Open Letter to The New York Times


Dear The New York Times,

You are the one publication I fancied working for and never did, so these may be sour grapes. They’re most certainly fermented.

However, you did run blurbs from my reviews and covered my last day at USA Today fairly and accurately, so I consider us even.

But you’re dead wrong about Donald Trump’s presidential run, particularly the headline. Another Trump run is EXACTLY what America deserves.

What did you think you were watching the past six years? Downton Flabby? You have always flouted privilege as an option, from real estate to vegan food to theater tickets.

Yet you seem to think the privilege to choose extends to politics. It does not. Politics is like health: You make dumb choices early, you pay for them later. There’s no skirting consequence.

But all America has done in the 21st century is skirt, hem and haw. When it comes to inconvenient facts, the U.S. has proven itself Jim Crow backward. We’re competing with superpowers and oil barons over who can rot fastest.

Did you not watch the January 6th 2021 attempted overthrow of the United States government? It was in all the papers. Half our nation thought that was no big deal. How long does an American sit in the corner for trying to impose white make rule on everyone else in the room?

Under Trump, we became a nation of denial. Deny science. Deny equality.Deny data. Deny counting. Deny choice. Deny assistance.

He sprung a new dunce confederacy on the electorate (though Republicans gave him a mile head start), including Elon Musk, a Trump III mini-dunce. He made surgical masks look like political oppression. Dumbass stares at the sun: Do we even want to know how many yokels now do the same thing while driving?

Probably not. But do we deserve to have that idiot — who represents half of our union — on public display to reveal what we look like as a nation? Hell yes. We broke it, we bought it.

I didn’t deserve diabetes. But I did — and do — deserve every complication that comes from my mismanagement of it. Cleanup, Aisle Me. Try it sometime.

We’ve had political cancer for a while. The chemo may work, but we don’t get to decide when it’s over.