My nephew Peter turns one tomorrow. So I wrote him a letter. As letters go, it wasn’t much, just a one-page affair that his mother or father can read to him at his birthday party, which is actually being held this evening. Mostly what I told him was “Get used to it, you’re going to get letters on your birthday.” It’s what we do in our family. My brother Cliff has eight kids, seven of them sons. You will in fact find three of the kids listed in the blogroll to the left – Dan, the oldest boy, Valerie, the next in age, and Michael, who is actually the third oldest boy. Both Dan and Val were blogging before I was, and both were publishing little magazines aimed at Christian youth for several years before that. The second oldest boy, Dave, so far as I can tell, is still largely allergic to the written word.

 

We never wrote letters when we all lived in the Bay Area, Krishna & I in San Francisco, Albany or Berkeley, Cliff & his wife Jenny (she has a blog also) in Petaluma or Rohnert Park. But about twelve years ago, they moved to Waco, Texas, in order to join a Christian commune – not that one! – putting us at some remove really for the first time in years. At the time, I was particularly distraught by the move, because I’d seriously bonded with their kids, of whom there were then four. But it didn’t dawn on me to start writing letters seriously at the time, perhaps because Cliff’s kids were still fairly young – Dan was around ten – but even moreso because I was in denial. I felt sure that they would eventually find their way back to the Bay Area before too terribly long.

 

Instead what happened was that Krishna and I followed in their footsteps a couple of years later, not going to Waco & certainly not joining a Christian commune – our communal days were very much in the 1960s & ‘70s, thank you, with all that that implies – but moving instead out here to Chester County, Pennsylvania, twenty miles west of Philadelphia.

 

Whatever illusions I may have harbored that Cliff & his gang were returning to the Bay Area, I couldn’t much imagine that they would end up out here, especially once Cliff built a successful landscaping business. And so that was the point where, in order to connect with them more deeply, I started writing letters about whatever was going on in our lives. Letters for birthdays, letters for Christmas. And, at a certain point, without any real prompting on my end, I started getting letters in return. They’re wonderful – the best gifts I ever receive from outside of my immediate house.

 

Which is how writing became a form of giving in my family. Even my brother, who was pretty laconic when he was younger, is an accomplished letter writer these days. Which is why I sent Peter a letter for his first birthday. He’s a Silliman & that’s what we do.