Three weeks later, the organization held its annual appreciation banquet. Veterans, volunteers, and donors filled the hall as I walked through the entrance, and about a third of that room stood up, and every one of them had a piece of paper in his hand.
I had not asked anybody for anything. What happened is that a man named Dewey Pruitt put a notice in the newsletter that said, if you ever got a letter from Marilyn, bring it Saturday.
Dewey had thirty-one of them. Every one I ever sent him, in a rubber band, going back to 1998.
Here is the thing about a handwritten letter that a woman with a master’s degree in nonprofit management did not understand in her first month.
A man who has not gotten personal mail in nine years does not throw it away. He puts it on the refrigerator. He shows it to the nurse. When he goes into the home, it goes in the box with his medals.
They read a few out loud that night, which I would have stopped if anybody had asked my permission, and nobody did.
Mostly they are nothing. That is what I want people to understand. I asked after a knee replacement. I remembered that a man’s daughter was moving to Arizona. I wrote on the anniversary of the day, which is the one nobody else remembers, because the family remembers the birthday and the man himself remembers the other date and cannot say why he is in a mood.
Thirty years of that is somewhere over forty thousand letters, and I know that number because I kept carbons.
Not to prove anything. Because you cannot ask a man in March how his knee is if you do not remember writing to him in January about the surgery.
Fifty-one boxes of carbons in the basement of that office. The director had them slated for the dumpster in the renovation, which is how the whole thing started, because the maintenance fellow told Dewey.
The county historical society took every box in February. They are being scanned by three volunteers, and a professor from Wright State drove down to look at them in the spring and used the word irreplaceable in front of me, which I did not care for and have thought about every day since.
Inside the lid of the first box, taped there in 1996 by the woman who trained me, is a card.
Anybody can send a letter. Almost nobody can send the second one. Keep the carbons, Marilyn — the carbons are how you love people you will never meet.
The director sat through all of it that night. She did not leave, and she did not make excuses, and at the end she came and asked me to teach her the file.
I go in Tuesdays now, as a volunteer, and she writes four letters a week in her own hand and I make her keep the carbon.
My fountain pen came out of that drawer. It is on my kitchen table and there are eleven letters beside it that I have not finished yet.