Dear friend

In 1999, you gave me a list of movies to watch.

I still have not seen “Seven Samurai.”

I think there are a bunch of others I haven’t seen.

But I bought a copy of Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography at a beautiful bookstore in Oklahoma City.

What was I doing in Oklahoma City? I always traveled. You never traveled, apart from occasional visits home to Kansas. I always traveled. That was our arrangement.

I like the sound of his name, Akira Kurosawa.

Did you read this book? Maybe. Last I remember you were passionately engaged with Game of Thrones, and I don’t fantasy book, really.

You would like the book, though. Kurosawa is an artsy sissy boy and a daredevil, depending on the circumstances. He has a brother who forces him to look at all the dead bodies after a huge earthquake. You didn’t have any siblings, that is, you had friends who functioned as siblings, and to a one, I found them solid, kind, and generous.

You would like that I went down a rabbit hole of Japanese swimming styles as a result of reading this book.

I miss you sitting at a bar when I arrive, paperback on the counter. I miss sitting at the bar waiting for you to come back from a smoke break. Once I had a phone, I would try to resist looking at it, to just be, watching other patrons, pretending to be interested in the sport on TV, because as you said, if I liked sports, I’d be the perfect woman.

I’m not perfect.

I miss you, and it doesn’t matter, but it does.

I want to tell you that Akira Kurosawa wrote about the massacre of people believed to be of Korean ancestry: “Seeing adults behave like this, I couldn’t help shaking my head and wondering what human beings were all about.”

I met you during my training on teaching the Holocaust. You were there to let me tell someone, to dump out my brain, which was aching.

I miss you being my connection to the art of film. It’s never been my primary love, but every artist has a feeler in every art, seeking frequencies and making comparisons and observing how things connect.

I miss that through the power of alcohol, nothing mattered except the moment we were in and the chat we were having.

I wish booze hadn’t been poison to you. Sober you were a different person, another person I loved.

I would tell you, Kurosawa says he can’t write numbers, or drive a car, or a phone: “my son tells me that when I use the telephone it’s as if a chimpanzee were trying to place a call.”

I miss feeling safe with you.

I want to tell you there are Japanese swimming strokes called “squid style,” and that they are my favorites: sidestroke and breaststroke (sort of). I want to tell you, remember when we went swimming in that apartment pool after a night of dancing at the Granada, on Rod’s 21st birthday, and I was very drunk, and you said, “she swims like a fish,” and I thought, was it dangerous to swim drunk? And the answer seemed to be, not at all.

I wore a long blue ballgown skirt that one of my sisters had worn to prom, and a black halter top. “Let’s go skinny dipping!” someone said, but I only took off my skirt, remaining more covered than I was in a real swimsuit.

I disappointed you with my prudishness, and you admired my stubbornness.

The feeling of wooshing through the water, hair waving behind you, so free, so free, as free as plenty of money and all day drinking through Manhattan.

Or Brooklyn.

I want to tell you Kurosawa descxribes the action serials he loves as having “that reliable manly spirit and the smell of male sweat.”

Thanks to you (and a few others), I feel secure looking at turning 50: I had my time. I got after it. I’ve missed. I’ve fallen hard. I’ve had too much whiskey.

I want to tell you, I was just in New York, your heart’s home and mine, and my brain misfired so hard I ended up in a fetal position on the 8th floor of a Times Square hotel with HGTV playing for hours, my mom sitting next to me, afraid for me.

“What the fuck were you doing in Times Square?”
“I’m a visitor now. Visitors like to stay near Times Square. We can get around.”

I didn’t get to drop by my favorite bar. I introduced you to the opera, and Marie’s. You gave me many other places. But my places really kicked ass, didn’t they?

I want to tell you I have nieces who love musical theater. I want to tell you one of them just revealed she has watched “The Sound of Music” over and over again.

“‘The Sound of Music’?” you’d say.

“She’s a complete weirdo, don’t worry,” I would say.

You would look skeptical.

“No, the kids are all right,” I would say.

“What are we going to do?” I would ask you.

You were in the moment (too much) and I was mercilessly making meaning (too much).

I wanted you to be hemmed into something safe. We both wanted to be safe. But also we both could not stand being constrained.

The longer a person is gone, the more you replace what was them with what you imagine they were, what you imagine they knew, or thought. Like the way Lenin’s body was slowly replaced by wax parts in its formaldehyde bath in Moscow.

But maybe that doesn’t matter. The shape of the person is still there.

I want to tell you the first sentence in Kurosawa’s book is, “I was in the washtub naked.”

I want to never watch “Seven Samurai,” because if I did, I would cut off this connection I still have with you, the one where you say, in 1999, “You have to watch ‘Seven Samurai.'”