San Francisco, California
September 20, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is by Dennis Costello. There are three things I’d like to say about him.

1. The first is that his editor at Open Letters is Stacy Abramson, who also brought us Nick Davis’s great letterabout his mother and his daughter, part of our parenthood week, back in August. Stacy works as a producer at Sound Portraits Productions, the radio-documentary outfit. (She’s also the co-author, with David Isay, of the bookFlophouse, which hit the stores this week.)

Stacy and Dennis met back in March, when Dennis applied for an internship at Sound Portraits. Dennis’s application read, in part, “My name is Dennis Costello, I’m 40 years old, I’ve worked as a scenic carpenter for the past 15 years, live in Brooklyn, got thrown out of college three times (long story) and since I was nine or ten have been fascinated with recording things and the radio.” So there’s a little biography for you.

2. He is the creator of an ongoing project on the web called Public Readings. In an email to Stacy, Dennis described it as a “stunningly dull web-site listing all the people I see reading books and magazines on the subway. A couple of years ago I made a resolution that I had to make at least one person every day laugh for a year. When that year was up the resolution was that I had to notice one person every day that I had seen before but that I didnt know. This year I’m working on the ‘what people are reading’ thing.”

3. When Stacy first wrote him about Open Letters, back in June, he wrote her back this email, a brief memoir about love, hamburgers, and the mail:

Dear Stacy,

Letters and mail are one of my obsessions. As a kid I was always ambling out to the front porch to check the mailbox. Saturdays and summers were exciting, because I could spot the mailman up the block and follow him with my eyes from the window as he got closer and closer. And I never got mail!

The summer between third and fourth grades I would watch “Jeopardy!” every morning, and I guess they were pulling in an older market at the time, because one of their sponsors was a hearing-aid company. The host of the show would do a little pitch for them and hold up this tiny hearing aid, and said that viewers at home could send away for a free demonstration model. This was my idea of heaven! First there was the idea of getting this hearing-aid thing, which to me was like a variation on my romance with radios and tape recorders, and then on top of that, it was going to be mailed to ME! In the mail! I would write a letter, mail it, the mailman would take it to Chicago, someone there would read it, pack up a miniature hearing aid, put my address and some stamps on it and within a week or two it would be sitting in the mailbox.

Of course I didn’t tell anyone I had sent away for it. Even at nine, what I was doing didn’t make much sense to me. When it finally came, I snuck it down to the basement and opened it up to find this tiny thing that didn’t actually work, but I could stick it in my ear. I imagined ways I could finagle the real thing, but it wasn’t me who answered the phone when a salesperson from the company called wanting to speak to me about purchasing a hearing aid, it was my mother. When she asked me why I had sent away for a hearing aid, I said “I don’t know,” which was pretty much the same answer I gave my father about five years later when he caught me grilling hamburgers at dawn – every morning during that particular summer I felt the need to get up at five and go out to the backyard and make a little fire in the grill and barbecue some hamburgers. I did that for a month and a half until he caught me one day. It was about five-fifteen on a weekday morning in July and I was standing next to the grill flipping my burger in my madras shorts and bare feet on the dew-wet grass. He asked me what I was doing and I said, “I don’t know,” because I didn’t. Both my father with the grill and my mother with the hearing aid reacted with the same expression on their faces.

As I got into my teens and twenties I became even more compulsive about checking the mail. When I was in college I met this girl and developed a crush on her. We became friends over a summer, and then she went off to travel through Europe. Every once in a while she would send me a postcard or letter. I would look in my mailbox two or three times a day – even on Sundays, which was pointless, but the world is a mysterious place. I knew some of her girl friends and they would get these very sort of detailed descriptions of where she was and what she was doing, telling all about the cute guys she met in Ireland or France – what I would get were these very vague and dreamlike missives full of allusions and cryptic little notes hinting at some deep soulful connection we had (if I was reading them correctly) and a possible romantic future we might have. It was hard to tell for sure what she was trying to say – it just made me bump up checking the mail to four or five times a day. I also couldn’t decide if what she wrote me was the “real” her, or was it what she was writing her other friends?

One day in February (she had left at the end of August), I was sitting around thinking about her and studying the last card I had got from her, trying to figure out if the stamp she used had any deeper meaning. It was a Sunday, about eleven o’clock in the morning. There were a few feet of snow on the ground from a storm a couple of days before. It was cold and depressing and all I wanted was another inscrutable letter from her, so I got up and opened the door to check the mail. The sun was out and everything was blinding white from the light bouncing off all that snow. It looked like a cheesy scene from some cornball movie about angels. That’s when I noticed her standing at the end of the sidewalk in her red tights and big Norwegian sweater.

I gave her a ride down to her parents’ and a few months later we started going out and a few months after that we moved in together, and although we broke up a few years later, it really did reaffirm my belief in the mail as an essential part of life.

Hope you are well and happy,

Dennis

Since we’ve ended up publishing two letters from Dennis – the one above andtoday’s open letter – we’re going to leave them up for an extra day. We’ll post a new letter on Friday. In the meantime, we invite you to visit ourarchive; subscribe, if you haven’t already, to our weekly magazine, or to the daily reminder; read our littleessay/manifesto about our weekly subscription, and content on the Internet; and download back issues of the weekly that you might have missed.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough