Kliban Cats, and an August 5, 1987 Postcard

The picture showed two young men with nearly identical beards standing in a driveway leaning against a red car with ample foliage behind them. Tito was wearing a T-shirt which said, "Sex, Mice, and Rock and Roll," that showed a trio of Kliban cats playing musical instruments. His brother was wearing a shirt which said one word, "Sumo," and displayed the ample backside of an even heftier than usual Kliban cat wearing a mawashi (a special thong worn by sumo wrestlers). It was raising one leg in preparation for a traditional stomp. Tito was wearing shorts and his brother was wearing jeans. Both were very thin. Tito was wryly smiling and his brother's expression made it seem as though he'd be caught saying, "Take the picture already!"

This picture was included in a "photo history" that Tito sent me to tell me about his life and family. I remembered the shirts because I liked Kliban cats, too. The concept and execution reminded me a little of Robert Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'" art, though it was better because it showed big, fat, striped cats - my favorite kind of cat.

I sent hundreds of postcards to Tito, but few of them probably had artwork he enjoyed as much as this one.

Train Tracks, and a July 21, 1987 postcard

It took about two minutes to walk from the mid-point of the hill that our house was on to the train tracks. Freight trains carrying coal noisily traveled those tracks several times each day and night when I was a child. The traffic slowed down greatly as I got older and the strip mines around us had lower yields.

When I was a kid, my cousins and I would wander around the tracks looking for random items of interest. There was a lot less trash in those days, so we were mainly fascinated by rail road spikes which looked like nails on steroids. At one point, we collected over a dozen of these heavy and useless objects and deposited them in our dilapidated barn. They stayed there in a pile until the structure caved in many years later. Aside from the highly collectible rusty spikes, we occasionally found some wires or large bolts, but nothing exceptionally fascinating came of our trips to the tracks.

In my teens, I started walking the tracks alone and would sometimes follow them for as much as an hour outbound in each direction. I didn't know where they lead when I started walking them. I just knew that I couldn't get lost if I followed them and, having a poor sense of direction, this was of no small importance to me.

One day, I was about 10 or so minutes from home walking along the tracks and a man was following at a distance behind me. I'd never seen anyone else walk those rails and was afraid he might do me harm. I hustled forward until I'd gone around a turn and was out of his line of sight then climbed an embankment that was overcrowded with bushes and cut up through fields and woods in a long diagonal back toward my home. I don't think he meant me any harm, but seeing anyone out there with me filled me with adrenaline. I went home scratched up and shaken.

Though that experience scared me, I didn't stop walking the tracks. Aside from that lone experience, I felt very free on those walks. It helped me spend time away from my family and to escape my emotionally abusive mother. It was also a way for me to be outside, but for other people not to see me since no one (aside from that lone man on one occasion) tended to walk there. It was a rare situation in which I could be free of public shaming and bullying about my weight by strangers so I wasn't going to abandon that route.

As I approached my mid-teens, one of the biggest reasons that I kept doing it was that following the tracks all the way to town lead me very close to where the post office was located. It took about a half hour or so, but it was the most direct way for me to get to our post office box without my parents' assistance. Even after I got a car and lost weight, I would sometimes take that walk because it was so peaceful and exhilarating.

After I got into my long distance relationship with Tito, I used that walk to tape him a few times. It was the only way that I could walk and talk in public and not be seen as a lunatic because the only "risk" (aside from errant wanderers following me) was that a train would come along and I'd have to step aside and let it pass. I could also just pack up the tape I was working on, seal it in the padded mailer, and send it off when I reached the post office.

Of course, as I detailed in my book, the post office was a place that I became ambivalent about because the workers were nosy and sometimes withheld my mail. I spent no small amount of time on those treks thinking about whether or not I'd be able to retrieve goodies from my pen pals when I reached it both because of random delivery schedules and the postal workers' behavior.

This card from Tito, which had a Japanese theme but was not sent from Japan, tweaked the workers who may have tampered with my mail.

Butler, PA, and a July 27, 1987 postcard

My aunt and maternal grandmother lived together for the entirety of the latter's life. When I was a child, they lived in a neighboring small town called Rimersburg (which was where my high school was located). During their time there, my grandfather was bedridden with black lung disease. He had worked all of his life in the coal mines and was repaid with a disability payment and days spent in a hospital bed in the sitting room in their home.

It was always strange for me when I saw him. He laid in that room with no TV and a sofa which he could never leave his bed to sit on. Occasionally, the radio would be turned on, but mostly he just laid there and waited for people to feed him, give him coffee with a straw in the mug, or give him a bed pan. I never saw his wife or my aunt meaningfully interact with him. I didn't say anything to him myself because he struggled to get out any reply when I did speak and I don't think he really "knew" me.

We most often visited him when my aunt and grandma needed to take a caregiver's break. During that time, my mother would sit with her father, feed him, and sometimes have quiet and forced exchanges with him. My mother felt her father favored her when she was younger while her mother favored the aunt who lived with her. She'd sit next to him and prattle while he struggled to reply at all. This would go on until her sister and mother returned. My sister and I would read my cousin's books or get into their shed and pull out croquet equipment and play a little, but we were mostly bored and anxious to leave.

The only book I remember reading from that time was a little picture book about the pilgrims. The native Americans were shown as being friendly and caring about the survival of the people who showed up on their shores. It was one of the lies I was told as a child which was exposed when I grew up. It turns out that the Wapanoag were indulging in a little of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" diplomacy. The Iroquois were in a position to annihilate them and they sought to annex themselves to anyone who might help them in a fight.

When my grandfather passed away, my aunt and grandmother, who seemed to be fused in many respects, decided to sell their nice home in a small town for a nicer home in Butler. It was after this move, which plunged them into a life a hefty multiple mortgages and continuing to live even further beyond their combined means, that saw me accompanying my mother to Butler on a regular basis. It was a "big town" by the standards of people who grew up in a town of less than a 1,000. It was also the only place where I could find work after college and where most of my written correspondence to Tito was composed in the office of the halfway house there.

I made many pilgrimages to the Butler post office, where my uncle worked for a time in the back room sorting mail, to send missives and parcels to Tito. The people there didn't know me and didn't read my outgoing mail as the people at the local post office did. I sent Tito this card to show him the streets I was traversing to buy him goodies for care packages, stationary for our exchanges, and mailing things to him. In this card, I say that I learned the population was 33,000. That was either incorrect or it's been seriously depopulated since then.

This was the first postcard that I sent Tito in Japan and it was addressed to his workplace.