Daily Blague

What remained, though, included five smaller boxes of letters. Most of these pre-dated 1977, the year in which I left Houston for law school and very much the before-and-after year of my life. They were in bad-to-impossible shape, having survived some sort of flood in the basement of my father's Houston apartment building. Particularly hard-hit was a sheaf of carbons such as the one above. Many were simply disintegrating along their bottom edges. I knew at once that, for the moment, I could either throw the lot away or throw none away. Triage would have killed me. Perhaps I ought to have hit  the "Eject" button, but my personality hasn't shifted that much.

The letters were not in any order, and all I did was arrange them in neat piles. Just looking at them was wearying. There were a few correspondents, evidently prolific at the time, of whom I could recall absolutely nothing, not even with the help of their letters. There were lots of girls. Girls wrote to me a lot, because I usually wrote back, but they rarely did so disinterestedly, at least when I was a teenager. I was tall and reasonably good-looking and I could dance. I had a sense of humor. The weirdness always took a while to emerge - that and the fact that my mind was very much elsewhere, in a place that I could not seem to find. There were plenty of letters from my parents, including my favorite, the one from my father that consisted a photocopy of my latest bookstore bill, to which Dad appended a paragraph that began, "This is the end of the road for your bookstore credit card." Hey, it could have been booze. He might have preferred that. I also dug up the correspondence that I had with the gentlemen at Blackwell's, including a letter from Basil Blackwell himself. After reading a profile of the famous Oxford bookshop in The New Yorker, I popped off an inquiry and soon had my own, £/s/d, account! I bought some seriously heavyweight titles (for a kid in high school), among which my favorite has always been G. W. Prothero's Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (Oxford, 1894, 1964). Favorite title, that is. It did help me to win a prize.

Upon closer inspection, the carbons appeared to date exclusively from September, October, and November of 1966. I seem to have done nothing but crank out correspondence. I remember taking a lot of ribbing for making carbon copies of my own letters (does everybody out there know what carbon copies were?) and, indeed, I am now blushing at the fatuousness of the exercise. The idea that these scraps could be useful to my biographer (ahem) is truly terrifying! I might as well have preserved a photographic record of the pimples that, mercifully, were never very common upon my phizz. I plan to go through the lot and save the two best and the five worst.

It also seems that M PPOQ, a faithful friend of these pages, had little time for anything but writing letters to me. There are at least fifty and possibly fifty thousand of these, written upon every imaginable variant of his alma mater's stationery. Having done Blackwell's, I wonder if it's too late to take up blackmail. I trust that the letter on exhibit is unreadable, but I promise you that it is not worth trying to decipher.