Long before I ever wrote Letters from the Questhouse, I filled notebook after notebook with letters to myself. I have schlepped them from home to home with me, adding to the trove along the way. When we moved to La Selva Beach, I stuffed four boxes of old notebooks, along with sundry letters, keepsakes, reports I did in the fifth grade, and other artifacts, into what we call “Hermione’s Cupboard,” an old pine armoire in the garage that seems, magically, to hold an infinitude of stuff, much like Hermione’s bag in the Harry Potter series.
We are getting rid of the armoire to make room for other things, most importantly a ping pong table, so I am now working my way through the boxes, which are piled up on our dining room table. The plan is to organize and digitize the stuff I want to keep and send the rest (which, so far, consists only of the 2007 Cape Elizabeth High School English Department curriculum) straight to recycling.
Over the last few days, instead of writing this essay, I kept dipping my hand into the boxes and pulling out urgent calls from 1990, from 1993, from 2002, from 2008, messages too compelling to ignore. Now I find myself staring at a blank laptop screen (a miracle I could only have dreamed of when I wrote in my first notebook), struggling to express what a strange, emotional trip I’ve been on.
For four decades, I’ve spilled my heart onto the page, desperate to confide in someone. I’ve written about feeling lost and alone, ashamed, fearful, defiant, remorseful, twitterpated, proud, jazzed. I had to tell someone, so I scrawled secrets to my future self, a person who experienced those feelings, knows how all the stories turned out, and yet is so surprised, so moved, by these tender confidences. I would be unrecognizable to those earlier selves in some ways, and deeply familiar in others. And my past selves are both familiar and alien to present-time me.
I have filled steno books, legal pads pilfered from the storeroom at school, sturdy Moleskines and Leuchtturms almost too pretty to mark. Usually, the current notebook (or notebooks - I have four or five going right now) is right at hand, on my bedside, or in my backpack, or lost in the cushions of the Questhouse couch.
But all week, I’ve been absentmindedly scattering my old notebooks around the house as I unearth them, so now, when I reach for the notebook by my side, I often find myself yanked through a wormhole into the past. It makes me wonder if there are future-self notebooks in this fog-shrouded house, just beyond my grasp.
In one notebook, circa February 1990, I’m holed up in my bedroom in Hallowell, Maine, crammed into too close quarters with my parents, Bruce, and infant Skye, pouring my heart out about my father’s worsening alcoholism, my mother’s untenable situation, my ambivalence at imposing on my parents at such a difficult time, and my hope that I can give Skye a better life. Shortly after I wrote that entry, Mom found my notebook and read it, and I know it broke her heart, but I also now know that hearts break and heal and break again.
In the next notebook, I’m in Bowdoinham, Maine, in our drafty 200-year-old fixer-upper, stealing moments as Skye naps to pen long letters, never sent, to faraway friends living glamorous lives in Prague and Borneo and San Francisco.
I lovingly describe Skye’s delicate features, her neck nuzzles, her baby talk and milestones. I consider taking a photo of her every day at the same time, (“I would have to develop a 24-photo roll of film every few weeks, but that wouldn’t be too expensive.”), and creating a time lapse film of her babyhood. The thought both thrills and disconcerts me at the time. Now I wish I could write in the margins of the journal to my young self: “Do it!”
The letters inevitably turn to mounting frustration at being broke, isolated in rural Maine, and jolted into a life so radically different from what my friends are experiencing. I ask myself (because by this time it’s clear I will never mail the letter) if I will have to wait “until my forties” to write or travel or have a career, and I remember how remote my forties seemed to me at 23.
I pick up another notebook, and I’m in Scotland, cozy in front of a gas fire. Skye is visiting her friend Lucy at the castle where she lives. I’m both excited about my first Scottish Christmas and Hogmanay (which is also Skye’s 13th birthday) and melancholy to be far from home and missing my Gramp, who died that October. My 23 year old self would have been dazzled by the grand seaside house and epic travels I describe.
Back home, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on January 4, 2003, I write: “The best part for me was writing the speech and then delivering it. I loved it—while I was writing, hours went away. They just disappeared, and I was in the zone, in the magical, poised, perfect right place…I want to be an essayist.”
On January 16, 2003, I write: “I’m willing to disappoint, or even hurt people, but not because I exploited their stories to make something cheap or sentimental. I want to get it right—not to be flip, or coy, or reductive. I want to be true, never to pander to my readers. And I want readers.”
In my notebooks, I confess to feeling old at 24, at 30, at 37, at 40. I make resolutions at 24, at 30, at 37, at 40, that resemble the resolutions I make today. (Go for a run! Write that story! Get organized!) I describe an “epiphany” and then watch myself have the very same epiphany again, seven and a half years later, with no awareness that I’ve been struck by the same lightning twice (or more - I haven’t made it through all the journals yet).
Often, I write about feeling stuck, and yet, looking back, I can see the decisions that moved me forward. Vestiges of old ideas drop away, and new ideas are born. I don’t become the anti-sprawl activist I had hoped to be (and would my 35-year-old self be horrified at my suburban lifestyle? Maybe not, if she knew I had an electric car and solar panels!). I don’t pursue teaching at an international school or go to law school. I do become a singer in a rock n’ roll band, and it’s so fun to relive the joy of my first real gig. And I thrill to read my vivid dreams of a faraway California beach I can now see through my window.
I have been feeling so reflective, so immersed in my past, in part, because I recently attended a memorial service for my dear friend and bandmate Tom Leitzke. Tom was an incredibly important influence in my life, instrumental in helping me find both my California family and my voice as a singer. His epic, three-hour long service, which included five speeches, a slide show of photos, a gallery of his concert posters, and many musical tributes, made clear what a profound impact he had on hundreds of lives.
Tom and I exchanged emails during the early days of the pandemic, as he was battling a recurrence of his cancer. He had had a horrible reaction to his latest round of chemo, and he wasn’t sure what treatment options remained. A long-time warrior (he had been diagnosed with stage-4 bile duct cancer a decade earlier) he had done the work of facing his mortality, and he knew he wanted to live the rest of his days on his terms, with the best quality of life possible.
I wrote to him: “I have never been anywhere near as sick as you are right now, and even if I had been, I know everyone has a different experience. But when I had melanoma [in 2008], and I was worried that I might die, the thing I wanted most was to know that the people I loved were going to really miss me, that they valued me and loved me. I want you to know that I feel that way about you. You will always matter to me, and I'm grieving that you're suffering, and I'm going to grieve when you have to go. I know I won't be alone in that--there's a huge community of people who love you.”
Tom knew how deeply he was loved, by his amazing wife Roxanne, by his children and grandchildren, and by his musical family. His memorial service was, in part, a narrative of his growth over the decades, a subject he shared with me in one of his emails. “It is amazing how much the serious threat of death in 2008 made me understand the importance of making each day meaningful, to be a better husband, dad, gramps and friend. I was always the lucky one and full of gratitude and had great relationships, but many of my best years have been since diagnosis.”
Another thing Tom shared with me, this time in response to my 2022 Questhouse essay about having been bullied as a kid: “Tough experiences either make people more resilient or leave a lasting negative impact they are unable to overcome.”
That’s the biggest epiphany I have had in the last few days of celebrating Tom’s life with dear friends and revisiting my own life, captured in piles of yellowed paper. Though I have uncovered countless treasures - poems and essays and wry little descriptions that bring memories flooding back - so many of my letters to myself were about wanting things to be different, about worrying over a problem or longing for the next milestone. These days, I am much better at being present, at being grateful, at telling people how much I love them and letting myself feel their love.
Though I still scribble in notebooks, and though I haven’t stopped having dreams and regrets and ambitions, and though I have lost two generations of my family and many dear friends in the decades since I kept my first journals, my tough experiences have made me more resilient.
The time-travel magic of my journals only works in one direction - I can’t write back to that younger Hannah - but if I could, I would let her know that she will have a wonderful life, that she can worry less and love more, and that she is definitely going to be an essayist.
And, though Tom is gone, the good vibrations of his beautiful spirit continue to resound through our community. I’m so grateful to have been his friend.
Beautiful. I do hope Roxanne reads this❤️
What a beautiful letter to your friend Tom, and a reminder of what matters in each of our days.