read me your favourite line
I haven’t written an actual letter in ages. I used to write at least a few a year… I was thinking about that fact earlier along with a whole slew of things I need to actually write down so that I can get them out of the back of my mind and start doing them.
I received a wonderful gift a little over a year ago from an old family friend that I (or my family, for that matter) hadn’t seen in ages. The family whose member sent me the gift lived in France around the same time we did during our second trip, from 1992 to 1994, and the husband worked for IBM, same as my dad. The couple are somewhat younger than my parents and they have an adopted son who is a little younger than David. We used to visit them fairly frequently and have wonderful dinners, swim in their pool and play ping pong on their table. They lived in St. Jeannet, a village a few ridges over from ours and perched underneath a massive cliff, appropriately named Mount St. Jeannet. We could look up from their house and marvel at the scale of the cliff towering behind us, or we could look south toward the coast and see the Var river valley, Nice and even the airport on the water. On especially clear days we could ever make out planes taking off, miles and miles away. I remember once or twice taking binoculars and an airplane guidebook and trying to identify them.
The wife in the family–let’s call her “Debbie”–is the friend referenced above. Debbie’s father was a pilot and I think because of that she appreciated my fascination with all things aviation-related. We kept up with them a little bit once we all returned to the States but fell out of touch. And a year ago, out of the blue, Debbie and her husband called my parents to catch up. She must’ve found out that I was still interested in airplanes, or had pleasant memories of me plane-watching from their terrace (and probably discovered that I had gone on to earn my private pilot license), because she wrote me a wonderful letter and gave me a scrapbook-ish illustrated biography of Saint Exupéry. It was a very thoughtful gift, and although she did provide her phone number and e-mail, it’s the sort of thing where the thank-you needs to be hand-written.
I honestly can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do it… It’s shameful, really. One day this week, for sure.