Letter To Grandma

Dar and IceSha are off at training. I have the house to myself. I'm sitting and listening to music ("Alexa, play music like Jesse Winchester") -- a luxury I haven't had much in a year and a half now. I can't even remember the last time.

I've been wanting to write a couple of things for some time now. I realize that I just don't have much writing in me lately. Maybe anymore. Maybe I'm just feeling a little Gaston Lachaille of late. The Earth is round but everything on it is flat.

A letter came into the office a couple of weeks ago addressed: "Grandma in Heaven". On the front it said (below the address to heaven) "please read note on back". Convenient, that, because we couldn't open the letter to know what it was.

It did have a good return address. That's where it will end up. Back to the sender.

But that sender wanted someone to read the back. She wanted someone to know what this letter was, even if that someone was just a few postal workers reading it over the shoulder of a supervisor at her desk.

She wanted to share what was her current bittersweet moment of life. She was casting her bread on the water. Who knows where such actions will end up? Sometimes we just shout and sometimes we just pray into the universe.

Or into the mail.

Anyway, on the back it said that enclosed is an invitation to her wedding this summer. She said that somehow she couldn't bring herself to not send an invitation to someone who had been so important in her life. She could hardly imagine her wedding without her grandmother. So she was sending her an invitation, even though doing so was against all but a broken heart's reason.

The thought -- the audacious thought I harbored for a fleeting moment -- was that I had the return address. I could RSVP on behalf of her grandmother.

I thought what a wonderful song lyric that might make. What a compelling short story.

But it isn't a fiction I could add to. It is a real person -- she is a real person with a real, though passed on, grandmother. It isn't my place to add my fiction.

Still, I suspect if I had gone through with it, I would have suggested that her grandmother would RSVP:

"Of COURSE I'll be there. I wouldn't miss it for either of our worlds.

"