1988 Calvin Smith Letter -Feb.10

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February 10, 1988

Dear Harold,

I'm sitting here during an office hour (in which nobody has shown up even though several essays are due in the next few days), looking out on a sunny village-scape of snow, bare branches against the sky, and a white cross on the church spire across the street. 

It all somehow reminds me of New Vienna, that other village of my life, which has by now become entirely a village of memory, existing only inside my head.  But then of course you still live there, right across the street from the locus of my earliest memory of the place; and your mother still near the center of town measuring out her days one by one with a sturdy tenacity – praise be! 

Even our old school principal who we visited not too long ago (and can I recall his name?  No!).  Only the other day I was remembering the study hall stretching along the front of the second floor, and the sixth-grade room downstairs from which of an early afternoon one could look across the playground to the railroad and the little rise beyond.  But you I always see, along with Melvin Long, in the high-school years:  working on "Vienna Viewpoints" (I ran across a batch of them not too long ago as I cleaned out a cupboard); my trying to keep you two from snitching tickets to – what? the junior class play?  and not succeeding; your serving as cashier down in the lunch room and (to my horror) drinking off some cans of evaporated milk. 

Then what year was it?  We both went down to Miami University for the statewide achievement tests.  And the Great Peach Ice Cream Episode.  And then your inviting me up to Cleveland, and the concert at Severance Hall, which I thought was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. 

I must tell you also that your father's series of Packards triggered an early dream of mine even before I knew you: at about age eight or ten, I asserted that my ambition in life was to own a Packard and drive to Florida.  The vanity of human wishes!  Before I'd even got my first paying job (aside from clerking at Streber's or competing with you in the newspaper-boy business), Packards had disappeared from the market. 

And now that I could go to Florida I have no wish to . . . .  In fact, with the two little strokes wherewith I was stricken last year has come a curious revaluation of things for me.  Although I have no observable physical effects, my whole outlook on the world has shifted ever so slightly so that things have taken on a different aspect altogether:  not many things seem really worthwhile.  Not that there aren't still thousands of things to enjoy and delight in; but their transience seems all too apparent, and transience is disturbing. 

I am understanding, really for the first time, the necessity out of which the idea of God must have been formed:  an ultimate, an all-encompassing eternal holding the bubble of time for a nano-second, a Point for all the goings-on of human life, which would be pointless without it.  I regret that I have outlived my faith in that God, as I hope you haven't.  For without a God to give it all Point, this village-scape outside my windows and the village in my memory where you live are a bit absurd.  Yet that I am enjoying the winter scene outside and getting much joy from fingering my memories of New Vienna and your large part in them does invest both with a worth that might be called, I suppose, sacred . . . . 

I hope you're still living gracefully, you and Jean, peddling across Iowa, leading little kids to books, running your jacks factory (are you still making jacks??); it's nice to know that you're there, now a pillar of the town, helping to keep it going in the flesh as I keep it alive in the spirit.

Sincerely,

Calvin