Letter to My Grandnephew

Letter to My Grandnephew

Dear Jack,                                    7-28-12

My spoon broke. My roommate moved out. You are almost six years old. The Olympics are starting. I have made a pair of plastic balls out of compressed plastic wrap. I only have three ballpoint pens left. I don’t like the color blue. I wrote a poem about a little girl who drowned in a river. There is a turkey sandwich in a paper sack at the foot of my bed. I just saw the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the first time in my life. I have a little yellow plastic bead shaped like an elephant. It is standing on a small red, hexagonal box. The box is painted with glittery paint and has a picture of the Buddha on it. Inside is the 1,000th paper crane I folded wishing you would come visit me.

I have an Arabic language CD but no CD player. I wish my sister Alyssa didn’t have cancer. Today when I was working on my math I had trouble holding my left hand steady. Last Monday I taught a yoga class. It is possible to chew a piece of celery forever, because its cellulose does not break down. I’m writing a computer program to solve systems of non-linear equations. Since I don’t have a computer I’m writing it in my head. I have written 721 pages of letters to you. The paper I write letters to you on is 8” x 10.5”. I hate that. It’s supposed to be 8.5” x 11”.

My beard is long and the hair on my head is thin. I look in the mirror more than I used to. I own two rubber bands—no, wait, three…I just remembered I have a rubber band around a bundle of 26 artificial-sweetener packets. Happiness is easy.

I heard that lightning starts on the earth and strikes upward toward the sky. Unless my sister accidentally wrote the same name twice, I recently had two grandnephews born who are both named Carson. I get very nervous sometimes. The world is astonishingly beautiful. I don’t believe that our eternal destiny is determined by what we do in this lifetime. I love you.

Chris