letter 016: the meeting of Mr. Young and Ms. York
dear junk mail club,
recommended listening: dionne - the japanese house (feat. justin vernon)
what do you call a feeling?
someone who’s always listening. always there when we need them. always there even when we don’t need them at all. probably there when they shouldn’t be. there to make us laugh, there to watch us cry. often we ask them to take our photo, sometimes when we are crying we like to look at ourselves. sometimes they are listening when we don’t want them to, and they’ll tell us things we didn’t ask to hear. they make us dream of lives we wish we could have. they make us hate the lives we live. but in the end, we keep them around and we’re never apart for too long. that original question was asked by siri to me and my friend chris when we were talking one morning last week. it was on accident—as she loves to speak up when no one has anything to ask at all. but based off that happy accident, we began to write a song about that idea, our relationship to our phone. and no, chris and i are not the first to romanticize this idea, but it was extremely boundless to try out. it was quite enjoyable, poking fun and pulling ideas out of that dynamic. ultimately, we ended up writing a completely different song, but we did keep a couple lines from the falsely introspective, “siri’s song.”
i’m now in the pursuit of happy accidents, trying to find ways to land on them more and more. one way i’m hoping to do this is really trying to better myself in very small ways. for example, when doing my laundry i now take the time to turn my shirts the right way if they were inside out before i hang them and i’ll turn my socks the right way out before i put them away. this way, i don’t have to turn them inside out when the time comes i want to wear them. trust me, i know these are both things that i should’ve been doing already, but these are monumental adjustments to my daily life. another example, when i’m eating on the couch i’ll pick the crumbs off from my lap or shirt and put them on plate before standing up. before this change, it used to go something like this: when i’d finish eating, i'd stand up and watch them fall to my feet only for me to step on them. pick them out of my socks. gross. and then vacuum them up a few days later if i remember. or maybe not until i step on them again, only to pick them out. again. gross. and then do it all over. again. until the vacuum is summoned. finally. maybe i have painted myself as a monster in this letter. however, i know there are an infinite number of these little scenarios where you are also dodging and taking the easy way out.
i’d like to think that stacking up all these small ways of doing things are putting me into a position to fall into happy accidents more frequently. is that wishful thinking or am i tricking myself into being an organized optimist?
i got a new bike! it rides smooth and the tires stay inflated, so i am living a great life now. i took it for its first real ride down the road, past the marina as i do, and landed in this nice grassy park that overlooks the docks. i hadn’t written in a few days, so i pulled out my journal and started scribbling away. i normally keep my head down as strangers percolate around where i might sit, sometimes glancing at me, often uninterested at all, which i like best. i don’t like being interrupted once i ease into playing the game, “can my pen keep up up with my brain?”
however, this evening went a little different. i saw out the corner of my eye two white sneakers, stumbling inch by inch towards where i was seated. as usual, i just kept my head down, ignoring it until a wavering voice inquired, “is that a diary young man?” and at this point i was in no rush, having just gotten settled on the bench, so i looked up to see a hunched over old man in a navy windbreaker sweatsuit and a well-worn in baseball cap awaiting my response. i nodded and said, “yeah, i try to write in it every day or so.” at this very moment as him and i held each other’s eye line, an older woman in a peach colored dress swooped in from across the pathway with a bit more elegance and speed than the old man’s step, and she chimed in, “why i was just doing the same thing.” and the old man swung around his head to greet her smile and this is where my meeting of Mr. Young and Ms. York begins.
they asked me about what i write about in my journal and i told them mostly daily activities, and shyly i spilled sometimes poems or songs—afraid they might ask me to sing or something unrealistic. thankfully they didn’t. of course. this is when Ms. York shared she recently had gotten two of her own poems published. she said she has written her whole life but she never sought to have anything published because she liked them being her little secret. i thought that was so sweet. Mr. Young’s response was that he also loves writing and poems, and he had one memorized. i asked why he memorized it and he told me, “i wanted to have it with me wherever i go.” Ms. York then, not in a challenging way but in an intrigued way asked, “could you recite it for us?” and he was a bit taken back but he replied, “of course.” at this point, Ms. York took a seat next to me on the bench and Mr. Young cleared his throat, standing in front of us as if we were the audience of an amphitheater, and went on to recite “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening,” a poem by Robert Frost. we clapped, as we should, and he said, “no one has ever asked me to recite that for them.” and that made my heart warm. i then assumed this is where the conversation would end and shuffled around in my seat, ready for the parting of ways. i thought Mr. Young would continue on to my left and Ms. York would continue on to my right. i would stay put, finishing up my jumbled words as i waved a goodbye.
but this was not the case.
Mr. Young, exhausted from his performance took a seat between Ms. York and i, and this is when i knew i should start writing this down. thankfully i had my journal already opened, so as i jotted down things they said they weren’t confused—if anything i could see them start to enjoy when i’d quickly turn away to write something down they had said. it must’ve meant i liked what i was hearing. and they were one hundred percent right. that’s exactly what i was doing. like the poem Mr. Young memorized, i wanted to remember this. i don’t intend to tell you everything they said because that’s for the three of us to remember as our own, but to sum up, both of them were very interesting people with very differing understandings of the world.
one had been a lawyer for decades while the other had lived in europe across several countries including bosnia and turkey, never really having a real job. can you guess which is which based on their outfits and how i described them approaching me? i bet you can. we got in a talk about education and careers. Mr. Young said lots of funny things even if he didn’t mean it like, “i lived my life to make a lot money and it never came about.” while Ms. York would craft things like, “it’s all about what door you walk through to see the world.” Mr. Young and Ms. York in a way were polar opposites, but there we were seated side-by-side, all on the same bench, with decades between each of us, having a conversation for the very first time. my favorite thing Mr. Young said was, “age doesn’t bring wisdom, age brings age.” that made us all laugh. he ended up leaving Ms. York and i after about thirty minutes, but she stuck around for another thirty and i got to know a little about how she ended up circling the world before ending up next to me on this bench in LA. one of the stories she told me about was how she was taught a five year old son of a diplomat in turkey about architecture. as you can imagine, i had lots of questions because i knew she had stories to tell.
the loveliest thing Ms. York said in my opinion was one of the last things she said to me and that was, “you can never step in the same river twice.” and what Ms. York meant by that was that every moment and emotion is in constant flux and in her words, “no matter your highest mountains of joy, they will be balanced with your deepest canyons of grief.” she admitted to having stolen these ideas from someone else, but here i am passing them on to you. as she split off towards the right, down the path and away to somewhere i’ll never know, i felt so at ease from that encounter with the both of them. i’m not sure if i’ll ever see them again, but my meeting of Mr. Young and Ms. York was one of the happiest of accidents—if you’re looking for a closing remark from me.
yours,
garrett