New York City
November 27, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter comes to us from Dean Allen, a graphic designer in Vancouver, British Columbia, who is also the creator of an iconoclastic and attractive and often quite funny online magazine calledCardigan Industries. (Please spend the day in his archives.) Dean’s letter is to his father, about his mother’s wedding, which Dean attended, but his father didn’t. That’s the way these things sometimes go.

(Speaking of letters and fathers, last week we received a two-sentence-long email from Betsy Lerner of New York, in response to Rick Moody’s letter about birdfeeders, and much else, which read: “Mona Van Duyn’s poem, ‘Letters from a Father,’ is all about feeding birds. On the surface.” I looked it up, and she’s right.)

Dean’s letter kicks off a week of letters that are inadvertently – coincidentally, almost – all by men, and which are, as a matter of fact, filled with manly themes: brother fighting brother, the war with the animal kingdom, real-estate anxiety, the inevitable disappointments of hero worship, the dangers of lying to women for sex.

We’re also taking a two-day foray, today and tomorrow, into letters from Canada, in order to draw the world’s attention to the federal election taking place in that nation today. (On Friday I gave the post office $15.50 to make sure my absentee ballot arrived in Ottawa on time; memo to Canadians who can vote for free: please do; some Americans forgot to vote [though not Sarah Vowell, who was the first one at her polling place], and now the United States has descended into street-fighting and mob rule; we’re all filling old milk jugs with drinking water and stockpiling sidearms.)

So yes, it’s Canada demi-week, though truthfully today’s letter isn’t all that Canadian. But how Canadian is tomorrow’s letter? Well, there are beavers in it. Let’s just leave it at that.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough