Our little family drove out to the far edge of the Olympic Peninsula last week.
I know you are an especially big fan of movies like Twilight, Wuck, so I trust you’ll recognize the tiny fog-and-evergreen-wreathed logging hamlet of <quote-01>Forks<quote-01>. Its name made sense as we passed through the town on our way to the campsite: all the rain from the deep forests makes for braiding salmon rivers that fork and join their wide ways toward the ocean, disappearing into the fog, driftwood, and pounding surf up and down the epic coastline. There’s the Hoh, the Sol Duc, the Calawah, the Bogachiel, and the Quillayute. It feels good to learn the names of things like rivers. And birds. And suburban trees. And baseball pitches. And New York city streets.
Those street names in your last letter, Wuck—<quote-02>the specific landscape you navigate on your way home<quote-02>—stood out to me, felt new. Like when Murph tells us about the sycamore and sweet gum that canopied our shared Upland memories; we all know those tranquil, warm-sidewalked channels of our childhood, but the naming of the trees is new to me.
<quote-03>Maybe naming is the beginning of relationship<quote-03>. You have a relationship with those streets you name and bike, Wuck. Murph has one with those winding pillars and leafy shadows, the natural architecture of his First Avenue sanctuary. I want to introduce Abram, and myself as well, to the rivers that wide-ribbon around us up here. It’s instantly less lonely to know by name the places holding you.
It was out on our epic coast, then—out on, believe it or not, First Beach—sitting inside a fortress of silver driftwood after a lengthy <quote-04>stick duel with Abram<quote-04>, that I read the first half of your letter. This has become my outdoor reading, these letters, on my phone. Rachel knows that half the time my head is lost downwards into my phone, it’s neither email—which I removed from my phone last month, a massive mental health breakthrough—nor social media—my next problem to cut out—but “those letters with Murph and Wuck.” I finished your letter, Murph, while nestled snug inside my sleeping bag later that night. I was hooked by your devastating self-survey of how slowly discovering your dad’s death, how bearing intimate witness to your mom’s despair, might have shaped that inner realm Wuck and I only partially know. I can see how those losses shape your affections toward us, toward baseball and its stadiums and heroes with varying vulnerabilities. When I finished, in the quiet of Rachel’s and Abram’s breathing in our little nylon womb, the screen light on my face, I became aware of how your letter lit the red dome of our tent aglow in the immense and dark expanse of fern and timber all around us.
Our surroundings as we write to each other are looming larger and larger for me in our braided conversation. They are lighting up the worlds immediately around us.
<quote-05>On the drive home Sunday, I asked Rachel to read aloud your letter for me, Murph. Because she’s a therapist, and the subject lands in her domain<quote-05>. Because I wanted to re-read it myself—and reading aloud on road trips as we did with Holden Caulfield weeks ago is a delight. <quote-06>Because it was a gift of self-offering from one of my best friends, and you want to share gifts like that with others you love<quote-06>. And because it gave me a sense of awe. And because, as Abram is discovering as he learns to recognize birds—“Whoa! Brown thrasher!” from the back seat—<quote-07>awe is something you can’t keep to yourself too easily<quote-07>. Anyway, on the drive home, as Rachel read one of our letters aloud, my eyes were on the road—a significant road in my life.
It’s a two-lane highway that crosses the flat top of the Olympic Peninsula, all the way from the ferry terminal at Port Townsend to what’s often been my principal destination for this voyage these past fifteen years: Clallam Bay Corrections Center.
It’s one of the two maximum-security facilities in our state. The other—Walla Walla—is in the opposite corner, far southeast across the Puget Sound, over the Cascades, beyond the high desert plateau, past the Columbia and Yakima Rivers, and through the hops fields, apple trees, and stone fruit orchards: a big old prison at the bottom of Washington wine country. The actual facility, however, is miles away from the little downtown, and nowhere near any rolling vineyards—just scrubland. Prisons are normally in desolate places, far flung. As for Clallam Bay—perched way up here atop the Strait of Juan de Fuca with its evergreens and bald eagles and views of Chinese freighters passing through the waters between us and British Columbia, the everblue and evercold down there interspersed with humpback and orca dorsals—at least the desolation is terribly beautiful.
Anyway.
As I drove along the familiar road to this prison, <quote-08>Rachel from shotgun reading aloud Murph’s twofold loss<quote-08>, I remembered talking to a seven-year-old Corita in the rearview mirror on this very stretch, remembered singing with her a year later, and laughing with her a year after that—always on our way to visit her incarcerated father, Lulo.
I was, perhaps, the only other person in the world who loved her father. That was our bond. We both believed in him, made this pilgrimage together to visit with him. And we knew that he would come back some day. <quote-09>It’s easier to talk with a kid directly about her father returning, I imagine, than talking directly to a kid about his father dying<quote-09>.
We prepared things she wanted to say to her daddy each drive. Because the weeks of excitement leading up to the visit—whispering to her classmates in the back of class, setting out her clothes the night before, gushing to me at the first McDonalds pitstop—sometimes didn’t translate in his presence. Whether it was through solitary confinement glass or in the ordered visiting room where daddy emerged from the armored door, she’d freeze up. Lulo normally began with big smiles, tilting his head, trying to get her to say something. <quote-10>The first couple times she’d just beam at him, holding her breath, nodding or shaking her head and ponytail at each question<quote-10>. So I started helping her during the long drives there, thinking of things she could say when she froze.
“Want to ask him to be your Valentine?” I suggested one cold February drive.
“Ok!” Her pigtails bounced in the rearview mirror.
Then, hours later in the cinderblock cell, <quote-11>bulletproof glass between us<quote-11> and Lulo, she froze again.
“How was your week, mamas?” Lulo asked her through the intercom box, his dark hair huge and ungroomed from months in the hole without barber visits.
“Um...” she began, her daddy—dead to most people in her life—right in front of her. She put her face in her hands.
I whispered to remind her of our idea.
“Oh yeah,” she perked up. “Daddy, will you be my Thanksgiving?”
I remembered this years later only when Lulo, at the pulpit of a medium-sized Episcopal church, shared the anecdote to help explain what it was like to have someone believe in him, want him back from the grave. He never made a public show of emotion, but I saw his eyes were a shade pinker that afternoon, his nose rosier, when he stepped back from the mic. Taking my turn in the presentation, <quote-12>I said something about our work: how we’re not just helping men reenter their communities after prison, but digging deep for buried fathers and empowering them to become the Thanksgivings their sons and daughters always needed<quote-12>.
That’s where my mind wandered, at least partially, as Rachel read your reckoning with your father’s—and childhood’s—impending burial, Murph.
And now I’m thinking of that memorial tree at Sierra Vista park where we set up blankets for the kids before last December’s Pre-Guy-Night kickball game. Were a portion of your dad’s ashes tucked into the soil with that sapling, years ago, Murph—his bones now the unseen roots running beneath us, the bare branches reaching over us? I know most of his ashes are in <quote-13>an urn<quote-13> in Conch’s room downstairs, there where Rachel and Abram and I have stayed on recent visits. Where Andy, Ashley, and Renzo currently reside, since COVID upended their careers.
I remember your mom saying not “remains,” years ago but instead: “I keep Pat in my room with me, under the bed.”
She names him.
Of course, naming is how we remain in relationship.
“Whoa! Blue jay!” Abram chirped from the back seat. “Whoa! Bald eagle!”
“We’re crossing the Sol Duc River!” I announced as our Subaru cruised over the bridge. Then, “There’s Crescent Lake, bud. Where we swam the other day with Mama. Say, Bye Crescent Lake!”
<quote-14>“Bye, Crescent Lake!” he waved from his car seat at the body of water he’s begun building a relationship with on this trip. “See ya next time.”<quote-14>
There’s also the refusal to name:
Yesterday I spent the morning at my desk working on a clemency petition I’ve supported. The inmate, Gus, killed a young woman in a drug-addled stickup over thirty years ago. Since then, Gus has dealt with himself, his own childhood pain, his father’s murder when he was eight, his abuse at the hands of other adults, his layers of hate, his teenage crack addiction, his time in prison at age seventeen, and his homelessness upon release. He has come to both understand and deeply regret the aimless fury he decades ago channeled at the pet store clerk who didn’t have enough money in the till.
He’s also grown old. While living with the uneasy peace of a life sentence, he’s become a lead mentor in innovative programs co-sponsored by prison staff, facilitated restorative justice workshops and victim panels inside the walls, and helped me start the first gang-exit class in the Washington State Department of Corrections. Seattle’s top clemency lawyer says Gus’s is the strongest case he’s ever seen, told him to start preparing a re-entry plan and building community support. Months ago, he applied for our pilot One Parish One Prisoner program and has been writing letters with seven members from a Presbyterian church in the small town he and his new wife want to release to when he gains clemency.
But just before entering the final hearing with the state clemency board, <quote-15>the family of the woman he murdered long ago was notified of his intentions<quote-15>, of his clemency petition. Their letters came in fast. Their pain and opposition, I was told, were atomic. Gus and his attorney pulled their petition just in time to escape a courtroom loss. You only get one shot.
Then came Christmas. Then came COVID. Because Gus has continued writing letters with his OPOP team, his attorney has asked me to get more involved, specifically, to initiate some kind of mediated process for the victims and perpetrator. After all, this murder happened right here in Skagit County, in Mount Vernon, a mile from our house. I’m a local pastor who can appeal to the prosecutor in the name of better options, better programs, and better offerings to help heal the wounds of our community; that’s the hope, at least. Of course, Gus has had some thirty years of programming and process to grow. But something’s not right when the victims, as we see in these letters, can summon the pain of yesterday unabated. What do we offer these families?
This was my thinking before reading the family’s letters. Then I read them.
I read the husband’s—the widower’s—letter first. It wasn’t what I expected, not some armored hate editorial. In the first paragraphs, he switched from talking about Gus to addressing Gus directly. His pain turned toward Gus, and he named him. This former US Marine and single father of a murdered wife wrote electric, misspelled, terribly vulnerable paragraphs telling Gus what it was like raising two sons on his own, about the pain he carried dropping his small boys off at different friends’ houses, daycares, babysitters in the early dark, working two jobs to support them through his own grief, picking them up late at night, never seeing them, missing their baseball and soccer games, blaming himself for years as his boys became distant, withdrawn, hostile, mistrusting, bad. He named his losses. He named his sons. He named his lost wife, Charlene—“Charlie”—his best friend, who was funny and stubborn and disciplined and exactly what his boys needed, what he himself needed all those <quote-16>years<quote-16>.
I couldn’t help but look up this man on Facebook. Finding the right man among all the small avatars with his rather common first and last names felt a bit like bird identification. Finally, I picked him out, still in Mount Vernon after all these years.
<quote-17>I have hope for this beautiful man<quote-17>.
I turned the pages of this thick packet from the prosecutor and read the letters his grown sons—in their early thirties now—were asked to write.
One of the sons, the youngest one who never knew his mom—he was barely a year old when she was <quote-18>stabbed to death<quote-18> at the little pet store—never named Gus. His letter was cold. Whenever his sentences of opposition—the blow-by blow of how his family and childhood were taken from him—required a reference to Gustavo Linares, he insisted on typing “the person who will not be named.” This youngest son is just as mindful of the relational power of naming something, naming someone. He prefers to keep his mother’s murderer in the blur of the past, in the ashes. Keep him dead.
Which brings me back to Lulo. I don’t like typing his name. There was a time last year where my peripheral vision could quickly detect his name in the forest of words below the first line of any email or text, when I could feel my heart beat faster in my chest, my breaths narrow. But if I’m listening to my own letter here, I’m learning something about my own desires, my own hopes, in naming him now.
I can’t bury Lulo. I can’t drive my family—even write my letters—along the farthest coast without driving through chapters of our story. They wind around me like all these rivers up here. And they will likely fork into my future.
We found a way for him to keep his position, by the way, the Board of Trustees and I. His decision was to come on a sunny Friday afternoon in October, and I—anxious but hopeful—was stretched out on the couch with Abram, unwinding from a trying week by turning on the Dodger playoffs. Game two of the 2018 NLDS against Atlanta; the boys in blue were in LA with a 1-0 series lead. We were just getting on a roll to take that year’s World Series, I figured, after the Game 7 loss to the Astros the fall before. Second time’s a charm.
Abram was happy to have me back on a normal evening, tucked into me as he named the pitcher on the mound: “Look! Maeda!” Just two months earlier, in Seattle with you guys, I’d lifted his body above the mezzanine crowd for Kenta down in the bullpen to look up and see, see his own last name and number on the back of this toddler’s jersey—Abram’s belated birthday gift from you, Murph, given the same day of the double baptism. Abram sees <quote-19>his beloved Maeda<quote-19> in every pitcher, even to this day.
“No, not Maeda,” I said. “It’s . . “
<quote-20>“Kershaw!”<quote-20>
Yep.
The world felt right—recoverable—for a moment. Just then I got a text message and sat Abram up to pull the phone out of my pocket. An unidentified number.
<quote-21>“chris call selena plz. Its me lulo. I’m in a jail in mexico.”<quote-21>
<pull-quote>the specific landscape you navigate on your way home<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>the b&b we stayed at during my bachelor week is on one of the main bike-lane veins of brooklyn, so i pass it often. i love biking around new york. in the busy city, it’s often the fastest ways to get around, and one of the best ways to see the changing neighborhoods. when pat arrived a day earlier than everyone else, we road bikes from bushwick out to prospect park, where i caught my first pokemon on pat’s phone!<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Yes, that was the summer of Pokémon Go! We spent countless wee hours just driving around in Pat's convertible hunting Pokémon. What a hilarious embodiment of life before children those nights were.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yeah, when I visited a buddy in Paris in my twenties, I borrowed his bike the whole week. Wow: big city on a bike is like living in a music video (headphones help).<p-comment>
<p-comment>And Pokémon Go: never done it yet. But my friend with two kids posted on Instagram last week how birding, which his boys are really getting into this summer in Michigan where they just moved from Seattle, is a lot like Pokémon Go. I was like, Wow nice transition for them Dad! And he was like, I was the one into Pokémon Go, not the boys.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>We were out playing Pokémon Go the night you called to tell me about Abram's birth.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i sent pat a photo last week of a manhole painted like the red and white capture ball.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>It's called a Poké Ball, Wuck!<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>Maybe naming is the beginning of relationship<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i think of murph’s emotionally cautious sentiment concerning the birth of his son: not until you draw your first breath will we give you a name.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Absolutely. Learn a thing's name and begin to love it.<p-comment>
<p-comment>One of the most important things I do all semester is learn my students' names the first day of class. Because it works both ways: how can someone care about you if they don't know you?<p-comment>
<p-comment>"What a wonderful thing it is to feel seen," right, Wuck?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>stick duel with Abram<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>we need for rachel to capture for murph and me a minute or so of one of these famed duels.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>They are mainly me playing a character—Darth Vader tonight—that he bossily assigns me, and I approach with large slow-mo two-handed swings so he can make a solid and fierce connection. He spits light saber sound effects without fail, every movement. We were in a convenience store this week, and I forgot his little mask. So I tried to get us out quick. But he had his lightsaber (Murph sent extra for his birthday last month) and was spinning around in line spitting the most pandemic-spreading sound effect until I paid and picked him up like a baby Yoda and bounced, apologizing to the cantina crowd.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>(slow clap)<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>On the drive home Sunday, I asked Rachel to read aloud your letter for me, Murph. Because she’s a therapist, and the subject lands in her domain<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Hm.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>Because it was a gift of self-offering from one of my best friends, and you want to share gifts like that with others you love<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Hm.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Hm?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>awe is something you can’t keep to yourself too easily<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>nice one.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>Rachel from shotgun reading aloud Murph’s twofold loss<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Hm.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>You nervous that I had Rachel read your letter with your thoughts on therapy? For the record, she really enjoyed it. Helped her better appreciate your and Conch’s relationship, which we observe every visit to Upland together.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>It’s easier to talk with a kid directly about her father returning, I imagine, than talking directly to a kid about his father dying<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>You think?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I could have said that more assertively.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i don’t know. you got me thinking about situations where the reverse might be the case. i’m sure they exist.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>You think?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>The first couple times she’d just beam at him, holding her breath, nodding or shaking her head and ponytail at each question. So I started helping her during the long drives there, thinking of things she could say when she froze.<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>There's something deeply poetic in all of this, how her excited expectations crumble in his presence, whether she is more like you or him.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Say more about that last part. More like me?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Like him in that she doesn't, in the end, deliver on what you've both planned.<p-comment>
<p-comment>Like you in that she blissfully anticipates their time together but is, in the end, let down.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>bulletproof glass between us<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>on the set of orange, the fixed, bulletproof glass of the visitation room was built to pivot a few degrees in either direction, allowing the camera to shoot the subject more directly without getting picked up in the reflection. let's say the camera is on lulo, over your right shoulder; pivot the window by pushing the left-hand side of the glass away from you and the camera can squeeze in closer to you and more directly on lulo. neat huh?<p-comment>
<p-comment>what looks right on camera does not always seem right in the space. i know, it doesn’t feel right, but trust us, it is--it's a line said at some point to every actor on their first set.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>So cool!<p-comment>
<p-comment>Can you please write a letter about your stint on the cast of Orange Is the New Black? I mean, you played a prison guard on one of Netflix’s biggest shows ever. And other than your coy research questions to me before you could disclose the gig, we’ve never really talked about this fascinating overlap of our worlds for two seasons. Pretty please?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>coy research questions. haha. as if, for hoke, the privatization of the prison system were a shy approach to sex.<p-comment>
<p-comment>but yeah, orange. you got it.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>I said something about our work: how we’re not just helping men reenter their communities after prison, but digging deep for buried fathers and empowering them to become the Thanksgivings their sons and daughters always needed<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>touchdown improv hoke! i’m picturing a comedysportz team of sorts, made up of parishioners competing to intuit the most profound spiritual connection to mundane life events as offered them by the audience. hoke’s dmm as python sketch, if you will.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I was never quick enough on my feet with humor, so I never joined ComedySportz. Nor do I say much when we are all together with the guys, for the same reason. But if they started a farm league for this lame subset of improv interests, I’m down. <p-comment>
<p-comment>What’s DMM?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>DAZZLING MEANING MAKING!!<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>an urn<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Just a cardboard box.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Is there a story there? That surprises me.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Whatever the mortuary sent him home in is where he...remains.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>(slow clap)<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>“Bye, Crescent Lake!” he waved from his car seat at the body of water he’s begun building a relationship with on this trip. “See ya next time.”<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Great. Very early on I would carry Grammar wrapped in his post-bath towel into the frontyard to see the moon before bed, to say good night to all the things he could name. "Good night, moon. Good night, stars. Good night, trees. Good night, car. Good night, grass. Good night, other car."<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>the family of the woman he murdered long ago was notified of his intentions<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>by whom? for what purpose?<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Due process, I'd imagine.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yeah. The clemency board very much considers the family/victim’s position. Which is odd, because other than weaponizing the victim's pain to hand out harsher prison sentences, the adversarial legal system that convicted the criminal years earlier so soundly keeps victims OUT of the process. Now the unhealed pain of victims is called upon again, reopening wounds, only to justify denying release.<p-comment>
<p-comment>This illustrates to me exactly why our current model of justice offers very little healing or closure for the victims of crimes.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>years<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>This is a gut punch, man. Maybe some people are delivered blows from which they'll never really recover--maybe at all. Maybe sometimes a thing happens and every day afterwards is just plainly and irrevocably worse than it would have been.<p-comment>
<p-comment>I feel just awful for this guy.<p-comment>
<p-comment>In this case, only "naming" him--learning about him, knowing the exact nature of his personality, his many flaws, etc.--could function to sway me from his side.<p-comment>
<p-comment>And what a shitty thing to endeavor, even for an enthusiastic critical thinker.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yeah, I felt dizzy when reading and had a hard time continuing my day. I emailed the clemency lawyer and said I needed more time, without sounding like I’ve turned or cooled. It just brought up deeper empathic ruptures, as a father myself with my own fears of losing Abram into such a slow slide away from me, etc.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>i think this is the case, murph, more often than we recognize—and from blows less forceful than the murder of a spouse. and i like your take here on naming. he is indeed an individual, capable of holding more than the miserable honor, quote/unquote, of weathering such tragedy. or, maybe he’s not, i don’t know.<p-comment>
<p-comment>i can’t imagine, at least initially, your relationship with gus won’t be a blinding distraction for the victims, hoke. i’m curious how you see their role in all this. i can’t see how they owe gus a good-goddamn thing. i can’t see how gus can expect a good-goddamn thing from them.<p-comment>
<p-comment>i mean, these letters didn’t come from the victims signing up for therapy in order to better process the trauma. fuck the system for the impossible position it puts these folks in.<p-comment>
<hr><hr>
<pull-quote>I have hope for this beautiful man<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>This is interesting. There is miserable honor in preserving such overbearing tragedy. Did he ever remarry? This matters a lot to me.<p-comment>
<p-comment>From a certain perspective, making him forgive Gus without face-to-face sobbing catharsis at this point in his life might border on cruel.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>From what I read in his and his sons' letters, I don't think he ever remarried.<p-comment>
<p-comment>The face-to-face sobbing catharsis is not something you can force, but indeed it is part of the reckoning that the greatest wrongdoing needs in order to heal.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>stabbed to death<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>jesus christ. i pictured a shooting, it being america and all. this changes the optics.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Yep.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>his beloved Maeda<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>when and why do you think the initial affection for maeda was sparked in abram?<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>One game on TV early in Abram’s life—one and a half?—he stood and stared at the screen and listened. Maeda was pitching. The commentators say the name a lot when that’s who’s on the mound. I must have clapped and shouted his name at the screen in encouragement. Toddler Abram pointed and repeated this name he kept hearing. Seeing the excitement this immediately produced in his father’s voice and eyes must have cemented an important feeling. Then, of course, we started making that a thing and it snowballs.<p-comment>
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<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>whom will baby wuck take to, i wonder.<p-comment>
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<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>Early money on Dustin May.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Lol. Grow your hair out Wuck!<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>“Kershaw!”<pull-quote>
<avatar-murph><avatar-murph><author-name>Murph<author-name>
<p-comment>What a spectacular Friday night at the Ravine that was. Kershaw twirled a gem. I remember being livid they didn't let him go out for the 9th. He'd only thrown 85 pitches! A playoff shutout would have been just the thing to wield against his detractors.<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>Just dug it up in my text history. You’re right: Oct 5.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>“chris call selena plz. Its me lulo. I’m in a jail in mexico.”<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>forget about the fight at your wedding, here’s how your friends could torture the shit out of you. every week you get a text from a different dude: hey chris, it’s me lulo. wuck let me borrow his phone...<p-comment>
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<avatar-hoke><avatar-hoke><author-name>Hoke<author-name>
<p-comment>I’d die. I still haven't told HALF the shit that plays out.<p-comment>
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<pull-quote>Forks<pull-quote>
<avatar-wuck><avatar-wuck><author-name>Wuck<author-name>
<p-comment>the fuck?<p-comment>
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