Hi Everyone! Sorry to leave you hanging on the Magical Rock Vagina Cleanse. I'll announce the fascinating conclusion soon. The following post was meant as a Facebook status update for my new business, Deep Cleans by Erica J. Schmidt. Deep Cleans involves me sparking joy in other people's houses. As fate would have it, the post ended up being a little too long for Facebook, and so I decided to publish it here.
Yours til I'm a Post-Modern Literary Genius
Parting with the written word can be difficult. Everyone
possesses at least one shoe box if not several crates of old course notes,
journals and handwritten letters. Certainly going through these boxes later on can
bring laughter and deep joy. Also, everyone wants to channel this material into
the book they’re going to write in all their spare time. And how is that book
going, everybody?
When I opened my boxes from Halifax last week, I came upon a
FedEx envelope of a romantic personal correspondence from 2005. At a CPR
course, upon performing a pretend secondary body check, my partner concluded, “Well,
looks like you’re in pretty good shape.” Once the course was over, I delivered
a rambly verbal machine gun speech. In it I must have mentioned how I believed
that we could change the world by writing letters, by being pen pals. My CPR
partner’s name was Cavan Van Ulft and he was eager to try and change the world
with me.
For the next month or so, we wrote letters back and forth.
He was living with his parents in Nepean, while I was working at an Easters
Seals Camp. Cavan Van Ulft sent each letter in a brown 3 by 5 Manila envelope.
“Miss Erica Schmidt,” he would write in the first address
line. Beneath this, he’d write a flattering and eloquent caption.
“Warning! May be habit-forming or addictive,”
“Post-modern Literary Genius,”
“The prettiest girl on the prettiest street in the prettiest
town in Ontario.”
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| Cavan's Letters |
His letters were always meticulously composed and handwritten on plain white
paper. Both of us always wrote back immediately upon receiving the other's letter. My stationary varied from long
thin strips of cardboard to red and blue paper, in case either red or blue were
his favourite colours. I sealed many envelopes with frog stickers. “Sealed with
sticky frogs,” I'd written on one envelope. Another time I included a lock of my hair.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Dear Cavan,
Maybe your favourite colour is blue, or maybe it is red. Or
maybe I should send you a fill-in-the-blank worksheet for you to send back to
me. So that I will know your favourite colour. I could also ask you whether you
prefer my sentence fragments to be written on stationary with straight lines on
it or on blank sheets of blue and red (or some other colour) My next though
might have been, do you maybe wish there were fewer sentence fragments and more
complete sentences. Or vice versa. Unfortunately,
however, this potentially brilliant series of complete and fragmented sentences
was interrupted by a phone call.
It was you! I had piece of lettuce stuck in my teeth the
whole time and you never said anything! How embarrassing. After flossing and
brushing away lettuce and gingivitis (if I’m lucky), I have laid myself down in
preparation for sleep…
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| My Letters |
8 July 2005
Re: “Money is nice but it can’t hold hands.”
Dear Erica,
Your letter was beautiful! Thank you so much for sending it.
I read it over and over. And the gifts you included in the envelope are
amazingly thoughtful. It is very postmodern. Especially the bumper sticker.
(The bumper sticker was inscribed in blue and black markers,
“Everything comes down to one thing,” it said. “The single key to mastering
human existence is.”)
It is very postmodern. You know by now, no doubt, from my
list of favourite things, that my favorite style of art is suprematism, so I am
very into ambiguous messages that require input from an audience to be
understood. So I think it’s just great. And also very clever…
You are constantly surprising me, exceeding my expectations,
and delighting me. You are pretty irresistible, as far as I can tell. So don’t
you dare stop – ever.
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| The Post-Modern Bumper Sticker |
There are few people in the world who can compete with me in
their eccentricity and intensity. Likely, Cavan Van Ulft was one of these people. The
last time I googled him, it seemed he was trying to become the prince or ruler
of an obscure island somewhere in the arctic.
During one of my days off at camp, I went on a “date” with
Cavan. My parents drove me to Ottawa and dropped me off at the Rideau Center,
where Cavan and I wandered around and he revealed his taste in jeans. Cavan was
nice enough; however, I realized right away that my imagination had gone
overboard, and that our in-person experience was doomed to be infinitely less
exciting than our riveting correspondence. As tactfully as my 19 year-old self
knew how, I told him so in my next letter.
Within a few days, I received a priority post FedEx package
at camp. It contained all of my letters. The frog stickers, the postmodern
bumper sticker, my lock of hair, photos of my dog.
In the weeks that followed, Cavan sent me several emails
with the words, “PLEASE SEND MY LETTERS BACK” in the subject line. I believed
this was ridiculous and have kept the correspondence ever since.
Rereading Cavan’s letters now, I now appreciate that they are
absolutely exquisite.
19 July 2005
Probably as
a result of the intense heat wave that we have been going through, the scent of
your lock of hair has permeated both pages of your last letter and its
envelope. In the slight breeze that's been blowing in my back yard, it has made
everything around me smell like you. It is absolutely delivious. The only
problem is that I frequently get lost in thought while sitting outside
re-reading your letters and I think slightly sunburnt... because I kept taking
deep breaths and zoning out and losing track of time. But it's wonderful
nonetheless...
Everyone should be so privileged as to be the recipient of such generous and
inflating epistles. I feel some regret at writing Cavan off as some crazy nut. I
think he does deserve to get his letters back. After inhaling one last spark of
joy from my favourite missives, I am going to try and track him down, to return
his side of this unreplicable correspondence, and to wish him well.
The End.
