Love, Eva

The perfect breakfast: Berry crumble. You take 4 cups of fruit (I used strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries), mix with a tablespoon of flour in a baking dish. Then you combine 1 cup of oats with 1/4 (or less) brown sugar and 4 tablespoons of butter. Sprinkle this mixture over the berries, and bake for 45 minutes in 350F. As a dessert you may want to use more brown sugar and serve with ice cream, as a breakfast dish, use a little less sugar.

My very first pen friends were two girls in Brighton, England: Truda and Tracy. A visiting student teacher at our school had just come back from a year in England with a bunch of addresses to British children looking for pen pals. I picked, or was perhaps given, Truda and Tracy. I spent hours at our kitchen table with an old Swedish-English dictionary in my lap, trying my best to create what I thought would be good letters. I learnt to sign off  my letters with “Love, Eva”.

The stationery back then came in cardboard boxes with transparent covers showcasing the writing paper and the matching envelopes, which were bound together with a pretty ribbon. 

Truda and Tracy were just the beginning. Eventually we grew apart and stopped writing. I decided to look beyond England for pen friends. I have vague memories of a Sandra in Düsseldorf, Germany and of an Özlem in Istanbul, Turkey. Neither lasted long.

With Pia Latupan from Manila in the Philippines, I traversed the boundaries of Europe, I had gone global, and my English was improving. Pia Latupan’s handwriting was like nothing I had ever seen. It was beautiful yet original, and it never faded, no matter how long her letters were. Pia wrote on pink, tissue-thin airmail stationery. But the most wonderful thing about receiving letters from her was that she included flowers; fragrant, pressed flowers, utterly exquisite. Opening Pia’s letters was lovely, like opening a beautiful gift.

Then came Sethu Muthu. Sethu sent postcards featuring air views of the Maldives Islands in the Indian Pacific, where he lived. These glimmered tropically in bright turquoises and parrot greens, colors nearly vulgar in the depressingly gray Swedish winters. I sent Sethu cassettes with his favorite ABBA music and handmade wooden butter knives. He sent me a burgundy sari and a monkey carved out of a coconut. If you shook it, you could still hear the milk splashing inside.

But my absolute favorite pen pal was Susan in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Susan was obtained through an international pen pal organization. I had ticked the box for Malaysia, after having watched Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice on TV. Malaysia was wonderfully exotic, and Susan and I were a good match, born the same month and year. Susan produced nice, juicy letters, and she introduced me to the wonderful and addictive world of Sanrio, by including the most amazing stickers in her letters. Nothing like that existed in Sweden in those days. Many years later, I met Susan in New York, and we still keep in touch, albeit not by snail mail.

I want to close this entry with Melvin. I met Melvin on a flight from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Minot, North Dakota eight years ago. At the time, I was a traveling reporter living in Brooklyn and Melvin was a retired librarian living in Amherst. Just before the plane touched down in Minot, we exchanged addresses, and that was the starting point of what may very well be my last correspondence of this kind.

Melvin and I type our letters on plain white paper. We write about the weather, concerts we have been to, books we have read (or plan to read or realize we will never read), we write about faith and politics. In short, we write about everything. Melvin’s letters are immaculate, the products of an academic, and adorned with footnotes. I have shared my highs and lows with Melvin; when I admit to feeling a bit grim, he sends words of solace, often in the shape of poetry. I guess we both subscribe to the belief that comfort is to be found in words.

Every year I say “I want to visit Melvin”. I imagine we will go see Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst. I imagine we will have tea. I imagine we will take walks and talk about books, reading, and the importance of writing.

A dolphin that changes color depending on temperature. A gift from my pen friend Susan in Malaysia, it came to me in an envelope some time in the early 1980's.