Los Angeles, California
July 25, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Heather O’Neill, a young writer and mother in Montreal. Her editor at Open Letters is Jonathan Goldstein, who wrote a letter himself a couple of weeks ago about a phone call from a former love. (I wrote a lengthy, link-filled discourse about him and his radio career in the editor’s letter that day.) I tracked down Jonathan at a motel in Saskatchewan, and asked him if he’d write today’s letter from the editor. He obliged. This is his letter.

Dear Paul,

When I first met Heather she was twenty-two. We were at a poetry reading where she was performing. She had this Virginian accent and in my Canadian mind it contributed to an over-all romantic enigma. Heather struck me as the kind of woman Dean Moriarty would be dating in “On the Road.” She looked like she was from some by-gone era where women with southern accents worked with their hair tied up in kerchiefs on assembly lines to help the war effort. By all of this, I mean to say that Heather was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

When I walked into the café that night, she was sitting in the darkness by the door smoking a cigarette. I had seen her around and was anxious to speak with her, so apropos to absolutely nothing, I launched into a rambling synopsis of this story I was writing about a boy who becomes sexually involved with his dog who, as it turns out, is the reincarnation of his grandmother. Thankfully, before I wound my way into the big “doggie-style” finale, she was called onto the stage to read.

Heather read about angels trapped in rib cages and her father hiding under cars on the street to surprise her on her way home from school. After the reading we went out for beer. I was impressed by how fast she drank and she was impressed by my eye glasses that only had one arm.

“From the side, you look like a cartoon doctor,” she said.

A couple of days later I convinced this mutual friend of ours to bring me over to Heather’s apartment. She had mentioned over beer that her two year-old daughter, Arizona, had recently shoved their TV off the coffee table, so I traded on some favours and got her an old RCA. I remember carefully walking up the winding staircase to her house, thinking “now I have a reason.”

We sat in her living room on the most uncomfortable couch I had ever encountered. It was like something out of a Gothic mental hospital waiting room. She told me that she had gotten it to get rid of her mother. Her mother, who she hadn’t seen in years, had shown up one day and had begun sleeping on her couch. There she had stayed until Heather swapped couches on her.

At one point, while talking about her, Heather picked up a big Glad bag of her mother’s stuff and pitched it off the back balcony. She told me about a year later that she only did it to make an impression, and that after we had left, she had gone searching for it in the alley with a flashlight. When she told me that, I just about wept.

We spent much of our early friendship sitting on that back balcony of hers. People would come over and drink wine and beer. After she had put Arizona to bed, Heather would play us songs on her guitar that she’d written and for days to come, I couldn’t get those songs out of my head. Sometimes they still creep in and when they do, I’m sunk.

Today’s letter is about the extra-curricular poetry class that Heather teaches at her daughter’s elementary school. Heather understands that poetry can be found anywhere, and I’m glad she’s teaching little kids just that. If I had a teacher like Heather, I might not have ended up a petty thief with no faith in the Canadian educational system. (That isn’t exactly the case, but I still would have loved to have been taught by someone like Heather.)

She wrote her first film last year and it’s premiering this fall. It’s loosely based on her own experience growing up. It’s called St. Jude. As you might know, Jude is the patron saint of lost causes, mad men, and of course, children.

Enjoy,

Jonathan Goldstein

Yours truly,

Paul Tough