It's as if you are still writing to me...and I, to you.

Dear Walter:

Hey, Walter, have you found Eden yet? I’m still looking. My journey has taken me to, of all places, a seminary, where I’m auditing a course called ‘Anger and its Consequences.’ The reading assignments include Kafka, Freud and the Book of Job.

Of course, you know I’m more comfortable seeking answers to philosophical questions by walking in the woods and pretending to be primitive man. I imagine I’m living before books and theories and seminary professors. Before civilization. And it’s only me and god. I’m talking to god. And I’m trying to persuade god to consider my input in fine-tuning the cosmos. I want to be god’s partner. Is that a bit presumptuous? I don’t think so. I think god wants his creatures to voice their opinions. Such as maybe god created mankind because he was lonely. And he wanted partners, associates, confidants.

Of course, god wanted places where we could confer. Meet. So he created conference rooms. Magnificent woods and seashores and mountain tops. Among other places. Where I walk and talk. With myself. And to god. Directly.

In these settings, Walter, I come closest to knowing myself. I am able to utter the words, ‘What the hell, that’s me!’ It’s a place where I shut out the rest of the world. Oh, maybe not the whole world. But at least I try to turn back the clock to the days before we were brainwashed by educators and psychologists and scientists.

It’s as if I am Adam, and my only discourse is with a god that allows me to feel like a unique being, one of a kind, and with a free will that makes me unpredictable. And here, Walter, I ponder what made us friends. Maybe it was that we were both primitives, and believers in a nonjudgmental god who, for instance, didn’t hold it against you for walking out on your first wife, Laura, for another woman, in time of Laura’s greatest need, I suppose, when she was dying of multiple sclerosis. Our kind of god proclaims, ‘What the hell, that’s Walter!’ Our kind of god accepts us despite our foibles and sins here and there. Or for that matter, a whole barrage of wrongs. Our kind of god looks at the big picture and concludes, “Walter is my kind of guy. Long live Walter!’ Our god, Walter, gives you credit for getting on with life and having never lacked passion. You sinned passionately. And you loved passionately. The loving made up for any shortcomings, 10 times over. No, make that 10,000-fold in the eyes of god.

Meanwhile, Walter, I’m thankful that you were a prolific letter writer. Because that was one way of spreading your creative and poetic spirit. Granted, occasionally your words sounded angry. But that was your fierce honesty coming to the fore. Your handwritten epistles to me, particularly the ones from the 1960s, a time of turbulence and anguish for both of us, did much to shape my spiritual being. To this day I read those letters over and over. They are timeless. It’s as if you are still writing to me...and I, to you. --Jim