Rediscovering Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Well, not truly "rediscovering." It is not as if I set my knowledge and admiration of Anne Morrow Lindbergh down somewhere and then just walked off and forgot about her. Anne has always been near at hand, my fingertips just grazing a quote or a passage from one of her books. But it has been a long time since I have immersed myself in her works.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh is, in my opinion, one of the two most graceful and lyrical American writers ever. (E. B. White is the other.) Her writing, especially her published diaries and letters, are ones that I have turned to over and over again for almost 40 years. When I was undergoing my two stem cell transplants in the summer of 2005, Anne was on the bedside table in the Cleveland Clinic, along with pictures of Ben and Sam. Whenever I play the "if you were stranded on an island and could only have five books with you" game, Anne is always on my list (along, not surprisingly, with E. B. White).

I first discovered this amazing writer in 1973, while still in high school. A quote from her second volume of diaries and letters, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, was the prompt for a timed essay I was writing as part of a competition: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world be wise, since everyone suffers."The moment I finished the essay, I went straight to the library and checked out both that book and its predecessor, Bring Me A Unicorn. I had to find out who this person was.

I ended up taking Anne Morrow Lindbergh to heart and have never let her go.

On the crowded tabletop in front of me are two small books, each bound in red: North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind. These are her two travel books, detailing the early (1930s) global navigation expeditions she undertook with her husband, aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. I'd read them before, probably 25-30 years ago. In between "new" reads earlier this week, I picked them off my Lindbergh shelf to dip into again.

I am not disappointed. This scene, from North to the Orient, is an example why. Anne and Charles have stopped to see her family before setting off on their lengthy and dangerous trip and they have just finished their goodbyes:

The next morning we are off again, I with an extra handkerchief tucked into my pocket. "You will probably need an extra one, you know." That extra handkerchief seemed to set a seal of success on the trip. It made it at once intimate and possible. Hadn't an extra handkerchief taken me to school and back, and put me on the train for college, and sent me out the day I was married? One could go anywhere with an extra handkerchief--especially if it had a blue border.

I came across that paragraph and closed my eyes in delight and memory. It is classic Anne. In the midst of telling us this tremendous aviation tale, she brings us back with a personal moment: a mother insisting on tucking an extra handkerchief into her daughter's pocket. It is the smallest of touches and the bravest of attitudes: "One could go anywhere with an extra handkerchief--especially if it had a blue border."

Anne was born in 1906, 50 years before me, and died in 2001. Her last volume of diaries and letters, covering the years 1939-1944, was published in 1980. She went on keeping her voluminous diaries and writing fistfuls of letters, but I assumed that, other than the excerpts appearing in Scott Berg's stunning biography of Charles Lindbergh, written in 1998, those diaries and letters would never see the light of day. So it was with total shock that I learned that Anne's daughter, Reeve Lindbergh, is publishing her mother's diaries and letters from the mid-1940s to 1986.

The book, Against Wind and Tide, will come out on April 24. I am hoping Reeve edited her mother's words far less harshly than Anne, who often trimmed her own thoughts to appease her husband and maintain the Lindbergh image. The Anne of this newest volume will be an older Anne, a woman I am eager to meet and get to know, especially now that I am in my mid-fifties. I cannot wait to read it.

But for now, I am with the young Anne as she and Charles head north to the Orient. The death of her father, which will happen while they are on this trip, and the murder of her firstborn child, which is only a year away, are still in the future. Her husband is still the great American hero and they are about to undertake a great expedition that no one else has attempted. The hour is golden, the future is bright, and Anne has an extra handkerchief, one with a brave blue border, in her pocket.

Letters with Katrina

Katrina and I have been friends for 36 years, shortly after we were matched (by hand in those long ago days before computers) as freshman roommates at the University of Chicago.

Our friendship has been maintained for that entire time largely on the strength of written correspondence. Not email, not texts, not phone calls, not Skype, but plain, old-fashioned correspondence.

Back and forth, back and forth, for all these years.

We have written about college, about jobs, about life. We have written about romances, about marriages, about divorces, about life. We have written about pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing, and our own children's experiences in college, jobs, marriage, and life. We have written about the death of her parents and about my cancer. We have written about sad times, lonely times, exciting times, boring times, exhausting times, and laugh out loud times.

We are Facebook friends, but we rarely touch base through Facebook except to share photos. We have each other's email address, but largely reserve that for finalizing the details of our occasionally seeing one another (more frequent in recent years with Warren attending the League midwinter managers meeting in New York). Not counting calling for directions, we have talked by telephone less than a dozen times in 36 years.

No, we are snail mail friends of the highest order.

As a result, our friendship has had a rhythm and pace to it that has molded it (and, perhaps, us as well) deeply over the years. When you drop a note or card into the mail and know that there will be a reply not in 10 seconds but perhaps 10 days, you put a little more effort and thought into the whole process. The time lag with written correspondence is such that the superficial "noise" of everyday life drops away. The daily routines, the seasons, and the passing milestones have deepened and have become the framework against which our thoughts and dreams and debates have played out over the years.

In my bedroom closet is a box, maybe 3 feet by 3 feet by 2 feet, that is almost full of Katrina's correspondence with me. There are postcards from almost every place she has traveled as early on we both got in the habit of sending postcards - the more garish the better in some cases - whenever one of us went "somewhere." There are Christmas cards with photos of her children - now young adults - growing up over the years. There are letters in which she chided me or responded to my chiding her. There are political letters (she is a conservative R and I am a liberal D) and there are theological letters. There is at least one letter that caused me to call her in response and the two of us to talk for an hour just so she would know she wasn't alone.

I don't know how many notes, letters, and cards are in that box. Hundreds at this point. I know I am only missing the handful of letters we exchanged in the summer on 1974 before we met in Chicago for the first time.

I believe Katrina has a similar box in her house, holding, of course, my letters and cards to her over the years.

I have left the box of her letters to her in my will.

You can't write that many words over that many years without getting to know someone really, really well. And because of that, when we do see each other, our conversation flows as seamlessly and connectedly as our correspondence has.

There is a scene in The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder where Ma is finishing a letter to send back to Wisconsin:

When her neat, clear writing filled the paper she turned it and filled it again crosswise. On the other side of the paper she did the same thing so that every inch of paper held all the words that it possible could.

That is what Katrina and I have done for the last 36 years. We have written down one side, filled it crosswise, down the other, and crosswise again - not just on paper, but on each other's lives. We have written all the words - and all the love, loyalty, friendship, concern, sorrow, and joy - that our lives have held to date.

Last night I sat at the table and wrote a letter to Katrina, in reply to the one she had just sent, which was in response to the one I had written last week, which was in response to…

Back and forth, back and forth for all these years. The letter went out in today's mail.