Dear You- Know-Who-You-Are,
I don’t know who Widdie is.
I don’t know who “Rainbow” her high school friend she visited in Chicago just this past summer is. I’m sorry to hear that “Rainbow’s” tumor got as large and unwieldy as it did, but I’m glad she had a strong support system just on general principle. I have no need to meet Widdie no matter how important she may be to you in your life and I don’t need to know if “Rainbow” is a man or a woman.
Your classes in Tai Chi come across not nearly as life changing as you would like them to. They read a little flat on the page. My advice, give it up.
I resent you imagining I have been charting your family tree along with you over the past several generations. For example; Auntie Fez and Uncle Dexter in Annapolis, Lester and Maxine recently re-located from Twin Falls, The Blattgart twins outside of Orlando or the Mormons, Blyth and Simon and all members of your mother’s family.
The college reunion you described in such detail sounded like a ragingly tedious waste of time allowing you to continue in your pathetic and sophomoric attempts at denial that you too, are growing old and further, that anyone at all who went to school with you has any investment in seeing you again, except by way of comparison.
Your staggeringly elaborate description of your Labor Day weekend, along with your Memorial Day weekend, topped off by the President’s Holiday extra long weekend, your volunteer work and your recent love affair with couple’s therapy make “The Bridges of Madison County” read like a classic.
As for the exacting reports, (plus scores,) of your children’s Little League, soccer teams, ballet lessons, swim team, high jumps, jazz classes, science fairs–even their pithy sayings over the years have done nothing but bring me to my knees in blinding despair.
I care nothing about the entire state of Wisconsin.
And never, never dare to “share” a recipe again. I was foolish enough to be attracted enough to your last year’s decorative centerpiece constructed out of licorice ropes, rice balls and pine cones to have created a disaster in my kitchen from which I’m still recovering. Your follow-up cautionary note about the danger in the sudden heating of licorice was too little, too late.
I don’t care about your addition to your house, your contractor and his family, and dramatic as it may have seemed to you, I could simply not connect with the freak accident involving the pool heater and your dog Irene, who I remember with fondness.
In the future, please do me the courtesy of leaving me off your list. Your letters make me feel obligated, small-minded, guilty, bored, and an overall radical misfit whose life is completely without meaning.