San Francisco, California
October 6, 2000

Dear Readers,

A couple of weeks ago we published an equally nostalgic and anti-nostalgicletter from Mary Rogan of Toronto to John Hodgman of New York. Mary was responding to John’s open letter, about memory and chaos and a late-summer road trip he had taken with his father and girlfriend, with her own tales of families and road trips and forgetfulness.

I wrote at the time that I liked the idea of readers writing back to our correspondents; it seems like the kind of dialogue that Open Letters was born to facilitate. A second example: a letter I received a couple of days ago from Sara Ogilvie, an Open Letters reader in Kansas City, Missouri; it was addressed to Paul Maliszewski, the author of last Friday’sopen letter about driving a twenty-four-foot truck from Syracuse, New York, to Durham, North Carolina. I passed Sara’s letter on to Paul, and then asked her for permission to print her letter here; she said yes; her letter begins immediately below this wizard’s hat:

Dear Paul,

My mother moved to Saudi Arabia two weeks ago, and this, of course, required packing her entire life into a storage space of ten feet by fifteen feet. And moving that life to storage required a truck. Inevitably, the only one that was available was the twenty-four-foot truck. I won’t pretend to be brave, I wanted nothing to do with driving the truck, and even with my almost ten years of driving experience I was humbled by the hugeness of it. I was also scared out of my freaking mind. I won’t tell you the entire story, but let me condense the experience down into four important points:

1. After unloading it of the heavy things, we had to drive this twenty-four-foot truck, on a windy day, to my house in the city, twenty or so miles away from the storage facility. The wind was vicious, and it didn’t help that we had only five items to weigh it down: a washer, a dryer, a gas grill, and two chairs. These things were like cotton balls in the back.

2. My home is located on the world’s most narrow three-laned street, where I was absolutely positive that we would run thousands of cars off of the road, killing single mothers, priests, and meals on wheels delivery people.

3. Of course, you can’t stop the twenty-four-foot beast on my street, because of the high-density, high-speed traffic that wooshes down it at all hours, so we had to turn onto a even more narrow street which led to my alley. I won’t tell you how terrible that was.

4. On the way home, we had to fill up with gas, and we hit the pump. I think my heart stopped right when I was waiting for the huge mushroom cloud of flames and smoke to rise from the ground.

I feel your pain,

Sara.

Letters to our correspondents are always welcome; send them toeditor@openletters.net, and we’ll pass them on.

Today in Open Letters, the conclusion of Robbie Fulks’s mano a mano title bout with Kelvin Peterson, Internal Revenue agent.

If you missed yesterday’s editor’s letter, here’s the story: Mr. Fulks is a musician, and a damn good one, formerly of Nashville, now of Chicago. He has aweb site where you can buy his records and check out his tour dates. (He’s playing tonight in Houston, at the Mucky Duck. Twelve-dollar cover. It is not anticipated that he will read aloud from his open letter, as some of his predecessors have, but our Houston subscribers are encouraged to attend the show and request such a reading, loudly and incessantly, until Mr. Fulks smashes his guitar.)

Also on his web site: you can read Robbie’s occasional missives to his fans, a feature that he has named “My Day,” after Eleanor Roosevelt’s newspaper column. It is one of those letters that we are reprinting, with Robbie’s permission, in Open Letters today.

To read yesterday’s installment, which one reader wrote in to say was “one of the funniest things I’ve ever read,” gohere; to read the whole thing in one go, look here; to subscribe to the weekly PDF version of Open Letters, which will allow you to print out the week’s letters in magazine form, go here, or send a blank email to weekly@openletters.net.

Next week, a remarkable series of letters on the mental-health system, including a three-part dispatch on life in a psychiatric ward.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough