Dear _______,

You want a letter – in longhand! – on paper! – in an envelope! – to bridge our years apart. So sad our split but enough. Injury is the price of love.

When last did I write a real letter? The phone destroyed literary intimacy before the Internet – it and mobility. Engines made it much easier to meet in person – easier than composing a letter.

I’d just begun my daily missives when we said goodbye. It wasn’t goodbye, it was an explosion – that took us both by surprise. Does your memory return to that dreadful instant? Mine does. I feel the explosion nearing, I warn myself, “Don’t! Stop!” – only I cannot hear myself across the gap of time – or will not listen.

Losing you may have been my only anguish during our decade apart. That can’t be true but it’s how it feels. There were losses, of course, and disappointments, but the inevitable isn’t regrettable. The miracle has been the glow of this interval. All previous decades I shudder at – heaven keep me from returning there – even my school years – but the past ten years I’d be delighted to revisit – again and again.

The difference was Jane. As you know better than anyone, I’d had little experience with love. My childhood was icy. My first marriage was icy. My stretch of bachelor solitude was bleak. The kids were grand, of course, I had pals, you especially, but I didn’t know how to hug – or, more importantly, how to be hugged. Intimacy benefits from example and practice and I’d had neither. I had a heart, I felt it beating, but outwardly I was more mannequin than man, manufactured to resemble the man I had in mind. Expecting rejection, I shied from closeness.

Then Jane came along and took me as I was – actually – not on approval. For our first years together, as you may remember, I didn’t believe it. Me? Loved? Impossible! Any day that damnable dangling Damoclean sword would drop, I just knew it. Only it didn’t. Jane smiled at my jitters. My whole life I’d had to arm myself each dawn to meet the day. Now I didn’t have to. No need for armor if you never fight. This amazing woman liked me OK as I was. I began to relax.

Then came retirement. I didn’t have to win anymore, I’d already won. And I had all this glorious time to write. I was no longer rushing through life on a bullet train to nowhere, seeing only blur. Every day was an adventure to recount, even the grim ones.

Then I began my daily missives – by accident, as you may recall – thus commencing a continuous conversation with a widening throng. Now I lived my life to tell my friends about it, to amuse, console, discover, to enliven our daily stroll. “The habit of expression,” observed Henry Adams, “leads to the search for something to express.” Unemployed, I’d never been busier or more fulfilled. Publishing six hundred words daily will do that to you!

Then Jane retired and we decamped to Rome for four years for the dual adventure of a glorious new country – the oldest new country in Christendom! – and the joy of being unbusy together. Meanwhile my congregation of subscribers – I think of us as a secular congregation – grew from dozens to hundreds to tens of thousands – and the pleasant pressure intensified not to let my pals down.

So there’s your letter – in script – on paper – in an envelope – and if I stick to six hundred words and redact your name, I can repurpose it as a missive.