The Daily - The Sunday Read: 'Letters of Recommendation'

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

Our worlds have contracted; once expansive, our orbits are now measured by rooms and street blocks. But there are still ways to travel. Today, escape to the worlds contained in three letters — one about the summer of 1910, another describing an upended misconception and a third about how superstitions can offer release. We hope they can offer you some meaning — or at least a distraction.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

Hi, I'm Sam Anderson, and I am a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, which normally means I spend many weeks or many months doing deep reporting on subjects and writing about everything from the fragile ankles of Michelangelo's David to profiles of basketball stars like Russell Westbrook, or more recently, a profile of Weird Al Yankovic that you may remember from a few weeks ago. But I've also helped to develop this column that appears every week in the magazine, which is called Letter of Recommendation. appears every week in the magazine, which is called Letter of Recommendation. I always get credit for inventing Letter of Recommendation, but I really have to give the credit to my wife, Sarah, who came up with it one day when I was going on and on and on

about how wonderful I found the guitar solos of Lindsey Buckingham, the songwriter and guitarist for Fleetwood Mac. I just wouldn't stop. And she, I think in like self-defense said, Hey, why don't you have a column where you can just pour out your deep, happy love of various things in the world, and then you wouldn't have to say them out loud to me ever. And right then I remember thinking, yeah, I could call it Letter of Recommendation and just like really go crazy with enthusiasm for something out in the world. And it could be absolutely anything.

something out in the world, and it could be absolutely anything. And in the years since, it was six years ago now, it's really just expanded and expanded. And it's brought in all these voices that I could never have predicted writing about all these subjects that I would never have thought to write about. That's kind of the beauty of it is it's this incredible diversity of joy and enthusiasm. It's this incredible diversity of joy and enthusiasm. I think the best columns are the ones that start with a subject that seems pretty straightforward, but then kind of overflow the boundaries of that subject and turn into something really revealing and personal about the writer. There have been letters of recommendation about, like, bunk beds

and crickets and hangovers and just things that you would never, ever expect someone to recommend to you. I guess one way to say that would be, here goes my dogs. Letter of recommendation, yelling at your dog for barking all day long. That's my little wiener dog.

His name is Walnut. Walnut, that's enough, buddy. We heard you. I think my wife may be just arriving back home, so he'll bark for a minute. So here are three letter of recommendation columns from the last several years that might help you find a little bit of distraction and also maybe a little meaning in this time when we're all looking for those things. Ballerini. My parents recently found five journals in one of those listless cardboard boxes that leaves an attic only when somebody dies or the house is sold. Don't worry, everyone survived the sale of the house. The journals were written by my paternal grandmother when she was living

with her widowed mom in Gloversville, New York. It was July 1910. She was 16, an only child. It was July 1910. She was 16, an only child. The first entry begins, Dearest Anybody, which I took as permission to start reading. Each of my grandmothers died before I was born. I've seen a few austere photographs, but I don't know what their voices sounded like or how they moved through a room. My family is small, and its history has never been part of my identity. I can probably name more ex-members of Black Flag than I can Reese ancestors.

I assumed being disconnected from the past was just part of the modern condition, a liberating byproduct of cosmopolitanism. Well, the modern condition, a liberating byproduct of cosmopolitanism. Well, the modern condition is a scam. Leafing through your family's antique media makes every subsequent moment spent clicking through social media feel like saccharine connectivity, a feast of empty calories. We should smash our computers and throw our phones into the ocean, then open every cardboard box in every attic on Earth and read whatever falls out. These are the most euphoric books I've ever read.

At first, I could handle only a few pages each night. The experience was just too intense, provoking in me an ecstatic, wandering melancholy and a familial pride that felt both intimate and alien. My grandmother finally came rushing into my life with an adolescent whooping vitality that felt as if it had been building for the entire century since her diaries had last been open. I assumed the diaries would be dark, astringent, and antiquated, like sipping vinegar through an iron lung. But my grandmother had as much fun as any molly gobbler at Coachella.

She records three primary passions, eating ice cream. In the afternoon, we had ice cream. Oh, delicious memory. Going to church, the minister preached on cheerfulness, and it was awfully good. And singing with her friends, that is, when they weren't laid up with the mumps, or the grip, or any of those other mysterious old-timey diseases. But my teenage grandmother's great genius was flirting. Those amazing boys, the peachy, dandy, charming boys of Gloversville, anointed with adjectives now reserved for Yelp reviews of bed and breakfasts.

I can barely keep up with their crushes or their fluctuations in status. But what do you suppose Peggy told me? That Bill was mad at me because he thought I was mad at him because he talked to Velma Thorne. And there I didn't even know he had been talking to her. Wasn't it funny? So I told Ralph to tell Bill I wasn't mad, and it didn't bother me how much he talked to Velma.

It turns out poor Bill, being stout and a cigarette bummer, I hate to see a fellow smoke when he's with a girl on the street, don't you? Was no match for Grant. Or Jonesy. Or the mysterious Sunshine,

who, if my grandmother is to be be believed was for one summer in 1911 the most alluring young man in the universe one grand rower fisher and sportsman really i never saw anybody like him emma and i are both dippy over him arguments with adults are referred to but never detailed she doesn't resent her mother's discipline, even when she gets a lovely scolding for finishing someone else's ice cream. In contrast, I used my own teenage diary as a petri dish for cultivating ever more potent strains of bitterness, in part through recording every injustice I suffered. We're having a party in Latin tomorrow.

I got mad at mom because she only got normal chips. She said everyone likes normal plain chips. I mouthed off at her. I like to think my teenage grandmother's superior personality was due to her being 16 before the invention of cool as a virtue, or even, for that matter, teenager as an identity. Being surly is a challenge if it's not expected of you, or if you're too busy eating ice cream to bother. I also acknowledge that she was objectively a better teenager. I haven't finished reading the diaries.

I don't want to be done. But my favorite passage so far, the one that finally made me cry, was this, recorded in a moment's happy aftermath and left as an unwitting legacy. It was a Monday evening in 1911, near the end of summer. My grandmother was sitting on the porch with friends after dining on egg sandwiches, pickles, and peaches and cream. Delicious. A neighbor started playing a hand organ. The music was irresistible. The girls flew across the street to listen. And when the neighbor started up with,

Put your arms around me, honey, something magical happened. We all began to dance, right on the street. The people on the corner were dancing on their porch, and we couldn't help ourselves. Eventually, the dancers stood still in the evening air to catch their breath. We all felt so sweet and nice. Eventually, the dancers stood still in the evening air to catch their breath. We all felt so sweet and nice.

And then, just when my teenage grandmother thought things couldn't get any sweeter, Harvey walked by. Oh, baby, who's your oldie, my? I said, hide your side of life. When they look at me, my heart begins to float Then it starts a-rockin' like a motorboat Oh, oh, oh, oh I never knew any gal like you Thank you. Letter of Recommendation, Superstitions, written by Karen Russell, read by Samantha Dez. Hey, a new acquaintance said to me shortly after I moved to Portland, Oregon.

I think I saw you running by the river yesterday. He was frowning a little as as if fact-checking the memory. Did you jump up like Michael Jordan to touch a leaf? Indeed, I had. I was aghast that this had been visible at rush hour from NATO Parkway. Nobody wants to be spotted in mesh shorts, certainly not while petitioning a birch for luck. I was probably stretching, I offered. Yeah, he said doubtfully. It really looked like you were high-fiving a tree. A few months later, at the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, a friend waved me over. Hey, I thought that was you. Were you praying back there? She'd seen me kneeling in mud, touching a solar yellow dandelion. Yes, I said, to expedite my day,

because this seemed less bonkers than explaining what I was actually doing. Touching leaves and flowers for luck, which I've done since earliest childhood. Superstitious people are often dismissed as irrational, stunted thinkers. Mental children who never outgrow a scrambled understanding of causality. Even those studies that confirm improved performance for superstitious athletes can sound patronizing, hypothesizing that rituals like Serena Williams' five bounces before her first serve work by conferring the illusion of control. To the skeptical observer, superstitions must look like blind adherence to a stupid rule, an automated naivete. And I'll admit

that several of my own feel less like a conscious act than a fearful reflex. I recently bought an extra Coke Zero to avoid a $6.66 charge. Stand down, Satan. But those of us who carry charms and sidestep ladders will tell you that superstitions can have an undeniable power, not because they change the future, but because they articulate a wish. Superstitions are a special syntax, the ellipses we use to bridge the present and the dreamed-of future. Humble, hopeful, fearful, human. My dad, a Navy veteran, and the most superstitious person I know, would throw salt over his shoulder to reverse bad luck, occasionally hitting a Denny's waiter in the face. Don't worry, kids, he would call out as he went diving into the bushes

to avoid an inky kitten. I saw a little gray around the paws. From him, I learned that superstitions can be a form of prayer, as well as an exorcism in miniature. You release the fear that comes from feeling responsible for everything that happens to you, and especially American delusion. You acknowledge the mysterious convergence of forces sustaining you, and you make your humble petition for more of the same. More light,

more love, more life. Safe passage to the next moment and the one after that. Safe passage to the next moment and the one after that. After Hurricane Andrew destroyed our home in 1992, a nine-foot storm surge seemed to choose us, leaving the other houses on our block largely untouched. I developed a repertoire of new superstitions overnight, like mental mushrooms sprouting out of the salt water that had flooded up to our ceiling. These feral rituals compelled me to pay a kind of exegetical attention to the sky and the sea, to look for signs of mercy in the

natural world. They felt authorless and calmed me. Cross yourself if you see the white heron on mile marker number seven. Pause on your bicycle to touch the lucky hibiscus, moon blue inside its orange petals. When the hurricane set off a domino rally of misfortune in our family, I thought we must be cursed. Through the cracked binoculars of childhood, I filtered events into rewards and punishments. But my father returned from volunteer work at the Homestead FEMA trailers with stories of families scattered to the winds without a stick of luck, which in America is synonymous with money in the bank. Will touching a leaf or carrying a charm bend reality? Disperse the storm before it makes landfall, or failing that, ensure that a net will catch and hold you? Certainly not. That net simply does not exist for millions of people in this country, and

superstitions won't weave it into existence. What these ritual acknowledgements of life's precariousness can do is wake you up to the breath filling your lungs and the sun on your face. To that antiquated binary of good and bad, I would add strange luck. Here we find ourselves, after all, hurtling through space-time together on this weird spinning rock. In the aftermath of the hurricane, I needed superstitions to remind me that we are buoyed on the mothership, with a consciousness that can imagine its way into the future. Touching the blue swirl inside the blossoming hibiscus,

I remembered how little was mine to control. I felt free to move into an unknown future, carefully and even hopefully, having just connected with another life form that was flourishing against some astronomically long odds. Fear does animate certain superstitions, but even this becomes a kind of thanksgiving. Flip the coin of fear, and you rediscover the everything you have to lose. The one fate we all share is so overwhelming that we need to carry it together, the pallbearers of a terrible heavy certainty. Superstitions might not ward off suffering and death, but they can draw a dream into focus. Our baby daughter is due this August, I have finally been able to tell people,

after the tenuous early months when this felt unutterable. It's a sentence I always punctuate by knocking on wood. Ancient people did this to summon dryads, the benevolent spirits inside trees. Far from conferring the illusion of control, the sound connects me to everyone who has ever dared to hope for anything in this life with its single guarantee. Superstitions are a gentle knocking at the doorways to the future,

your heart open to every possibility. The End Read by Robert Fass Our windows keep shrinking Our vision narrows and narrows Mine roams for much of the day In a space roughly the size of a playing card The rectangle of my phone's screen The view through that piece of glass Is not out onto the actual world, but inward, down a digital depth over which I exercise near-dictatorial control.

If I want to see a bird on my phone, I see a bird. If I want to see a manatee captioned by a motivational slogan, I see that. This means, of course, that my phone is not really a window at all. A real window is something that frames our fundamental lack of control. Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool, a patch of the world arbitrarily framed from which we are physically isolated. The only thing you can do is look. You have no influence over what you will see.

Your brain is forced to make drama out of whatever happens to appear. Boring things become strange. A blob of mist balances on top of a mountain. Leafless trees contort themselves in slow-motion interpretive dance. Heavy raindrops make the puddles boil. These things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world. They were there before you looked. They will be there after you go.

None of it depends on you. Sometimes what you see can be astonishing. One day I was taking a nap in the red chair in my office when I woke up to the sound of a car crash. I sat up and looked immediately out my window. Across the street, in a parking lot, a car had just backed into a chain link fence. The car must have been moving fast because it was in bad shape. Its hood had popped up, its windshield wipers were snapping back and forth under a perfectly clear sky, and part of its bumper was sitting on the ground.

The fence was mangled, bent out in exactly the shape of the car's back end. The fence was mangled, bent out in exactly the shape of the car's back end. I couldn't believe I was seeing this on an otherwise ordinary weekday morning out of my office window. I watched the driver get out of the car. He was stocky with a shaved head. He wore cargo shorts and a flannel shirt, unbuttoned to expose his chest hair. I disliked him immediately. After a few seconds of assessing the damage,

he walked around the car and opened the passenger door from which a very small child scrambled out. A toddler in the front seat. My disdain for this man increased exponentially. As the child ran around the parking lot,

the man tried to repair the damage he caused. He attempted to tug the ruined fence back into place, but it wouldn't move. He tried to shove the fallen piece of bumper back onto his car, but that only made the rest of his bumper fall off too. I sat in my red chair, looking out my window, silently cheering. The man tried a little harder to fix the fence.

He grabbed its vertical support pole, which was wickedly bent, and pulled against it with his full weight. The pole suddenly broke, and the man fell hard onto the blacktop. The entire fence fell on top of him,

and one of his sandals flew off and landed ten feet away on the sidewalk. I think I laughed out loud. This was a slapstick masterpiece. It was brightening my whole day, the failure of this terrible man. He climbed out from under the collapsed fence and limped back to the apartment building above the lot,

rubbing his elbow. That, I thought, would be the end of it. The man, that villainous man, was going to leave all the chaos behind for someone else to clean up. It was only the middle of the morning, but I imagined him sprawled out on his sofa with a case of beer, eating horrible snacks, while his child played with fire and broken glass and battery acid near a malfunctioning electrical socket. But this is the power of windows.

They contradict your easy assumptions. They scribble over your mental cartoons with the heavy red pen of windows. They contradict your easy assumptions. They scribble over your mental cartoons with the heavy red pen of reality. The man emerged a few minutes later with some tools. He got to work immediately, detaching one of the fence's bent support bars and hammering it straight on the asphalt. For the next hour, I watched out my window as he doggedly fixed the fence, straightening and reattaching its support bars, scrupulously unbending its bent chain link. He even improved it. He stole a support bar from another fence farther back in the parking lot and added it to this one. Now the fence would be extra secure, stronger than before, impervious to damage.

This odious man was actually a hero. I was the lazy one, with my knee-jerk judgments and distant clichés, my superiority from three stories up. My window had taken a break that day from its usual programming, crows and squirrels roaming over a dead tree, cars piling up at a stoplight, to put on a little passion play for me, an allegory about the nobility of the human spirit. My ugly assumptions, I realized,

were all about myself. I would never have fixed that fence. I would have panicked and run away. My window had woken me up from a nap to teach me a lesson in humility. The incident changed my entire day. I went back to my shallow screens with new determination. Years later, I still look out my window at that fence almost every day. It still looks brand new. It makes me wonder what else that man has improved

and how I can make myself more like him. This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as the New York Times.