October 15, 1992
Dear Everyone:
Well, it took a
lot, but we finally got a
letter out of “Jeannie”.
So, who does that leave us?
Mother has been writing letters
off and on for some time now. I
guess Dad gets in on those. “Frankie”
wrote lots of letters when she was in El Salvador and has recently
started up again.
“Byron”? Don't
be silly. I never even expected
“Byron” to read the Letters
that I sent him when he was getting them.
I just didn't want to leave him out when everyone else was
getting them; and I figured 29¢ per week was a small price to pay for
family unity.
While they were still together, “Diana” took care
of reading “Byron's” copy of the Letters and even tried her hand at
writing some for a while. If Dad
gets in on Mom's letters, then “Byron” gets credit for “Diana's”.
But then he moved and I started
sending the Letters to Beaverton. I
heard through the grapevine that he'd moved again, but I kept sending
the Letters to Beaverton because I didn't have his new address.
I understand that “Byron's”
ex-roommate’s girlfriend has been doing the honors.
However, last week the Beaverton Postal Service
decided enough was enough and send the Letter back.
So I called Mother (who's feeling
much better now) and she gave
me “Byron’s” office address. Thus “Byron” gets back on the distribution
list. For now, anyway.
Me? I've
been writing these weekly Letters since September 1988.
And I have irrefutable evidence that
“Richard” wrote a letter in
1989, consisting of one page, beginning in April and concluding in May
of the same year.
“Alice” and “Kelly” have, of course, been writing
sporadically since they got married.
I even
have a Christmas Letter from “Marshall's” friend “Glinda”.
So that leaves only
“Marshall” to be "heard"
from, a simple oversight, I'm sure, which will undoubtedly be
corrected any day now.
Look, people, we have a chance here to become the
Pastons of the
20th century. Who were the
Pastons? They were a remarkably
literate family who lived in England during the 15th century, around the
time of the Wars
of the Roses and the reign of
Henry VII,
and they wrote a lot of family letters which have survived to this day.
These letters are very important to historians for
two major reasons. First,
they depict what life was like for “ordinary” people, while the
chronicles of the time only recorded what “important” people were doing.
If you want to know what people in Tudor England ate, wore,
drank, thought, did, you read the Paston Letters (or the Paxton Letters,
spelling in those days being primarily a matter of personal opinion).
Second, although they weren't "nobility", the
Pastons were close enough to the action to occasionally sandwich
significant snippets of history in between orders for more pink wool and
inquiries as to how Junior was doing in college.
For instance, one letter mentions
the fact that "the little York boys" were visiting, these being George,
the Duke of Clarence and his baby brother, Richard, who would one day be
King
Richard III.
This is important because it of something Henry VII
did shortly after he became king, ending the Wars of the Roses.
He hired a penniless Italian
novelist, named
Virgil, to write a completely
new History of England, starring (guess who?) Henry VII.
With the King’s backing, Virgil
raided the University libraries of their chronicles and conveniently
"lost" anything they didn't agree with
his version of England's
past. Consequently, most modern
historians are very wary of anything from the Tudor era; and they use
the Pastons Letters to try to verify if something really happened or if
it was just the product of Virgil's fertile imagination.
Now just imagine, 500 years from now, when
historians are trying to sort out the truth about this election year.
They'll be able to referred to
"the Wood Family Letters" to get the
real story.
("According to the Wood Family Letters, ‘Quayle
and Gore were like
squabbling schoolboys, while
Stockdale
looked on like a frumpy uncle who couldn't get a word in edgewise and
couldn't remember what he wanted to say when he could’.") Someone may
even decide to do their doctorate thesis on the infamous vacuum cleaner
incident.
Think about it.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS. As for “Jeannie's” admonition to "consider the
source" in references to her, I have it on the highest authority that
everyone has been doing just that all along.
Please continue to do so.
P.
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