I have a confession to make. If you send me a letter, you can trust that I will read it. But while I have noble aims, I don’t always get around to responding. This realization was brought home to me more than ever recently, as I cleaned out my office in preparation for G&G’s move to our new headquarters a couple of miles away in the heart of downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Stashed in various spots were all the missives I had meant to answer, not quickly but with intention. And that’s the problem. Intention takes time, and that’s usually at a premium these days in the media biz.
To be sure, some letters don’t require a response. Like the one from the fellow who wrote to tell me it looked as though I were wearing a “$20 redhaired toupe [sic]” in a photo from one of my Editor’s Letters. And he even proffered some advice: “Photoshop; visit your barber; replace the photo.”
Still, there’s plenty of correspondence that delights. Like a note from Cooper Manning (sent long before he would become known as Arch’s dad) thanking me for the boozy lunch and great oysters we enjoyed at Leon’s in Charleston. And nobody does a better thank-you than Laura Vinroot Poole, the owner of the ultrachic boutique Capitol in Charlotte and Los Angeles. Even her cursive is stylish.
I’ll certainly never part with a letter from the late G&G mainstay Julia Reed, who surprised me with a bound and signed copy of Walker Percy’s 1975 essay “Bourbon” while she was battling cancer. “I’m not sending you this because I have cancer,” she wrote. “When my parents went through their vast Southern library, there were two of these. I kept one, of course, and I couldn’t think of anyone more deserving of the other.”
For a few years, I did have a bit of a pen-pal relationship with a woman from Virginia named Sybil. She had grown up on a farm and regaled me with stories of the dogs of her youth, especially one named Seti. “I will keep in touch with little tidbit writings I think you will enjoy,” she wrote. “Past memories in my old age now are my salvation.”
Beyond the letters, I’ll be toting everything from a turkey foot to a gorgeous vintage blue glass telephone pole insulator over to our new spread. The bar cart is coming, along with a couple of prized dusties (a gift from the retired South Carolina game warden and author Ben Moïse), as are my treasured decoys from three of the South’s notable living carvers, Jerry Talton, Charles Jobes, and Tom Boozer. And to everyone who has written me a letter over the years, your thoughts and advice are not lost on me (except maybe the note about the toupee). Thank you for taking the time to put pen to paper. Here’s hoping you love this issue.
Plus: Fish Tales
New reads that draw on the power of the water
I love a good fish story, and two G&G contributors have delivered a couple of whoppers this summer. In An Exercise in Uncertainty, Jonathan Gluck recalls how he got on with life after receiving a typically fatal cancer diagnosis. Gluck not only defies the odds as he faces the disease head-on, he also goes fly fishing. Meanwhile, the stories in Monte Burke’s collection Rivers Always Reach the Sea take you from the Florida flats with arguably the world’s greatest tarpon guide to a Russian outpost where the salmon are thick and an oligarch proves elusive.
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