open letter
Dear Nobody’s Doll,
I don’t know what to say. What can I say? You were my first blog. My very first. And the simple fact is, you never forget your first.
By now, as you’re leaving, I’ve found other blogs that keep me company and make me laugh and make me think, plus a host of others that belong to actual flesh-and-blood friends. I even have my own, obviously—but all the same, you were my first, which makes you special and irreplaceable.
I’ll admit to being terribly, terribly curious about what thing has happened to, as it sounds, so transform your life.
I’ll admit, also, to finding myself feeling sad that you and the former mister aren’t together anymore.
And I’ll definitely acknowledge that I’m going to miss you. More than I should. There was a while there, when I first fell for Nobody’s Doll and spent some time perusing the archives to get better acquainted, when I could often hear your “voice,” in an authorial sense, in my head.
But all of these reactions and feelings, I realize, only make a small amount of sense. I don’t actually know you. I don’t deserve to know what’s going on in your private life. I have no idea if you and he were actually well-suited to each other, or whether or not you split amicably. Maybe this was the best thing in the world for both of you. And, really, how can I miss someone that I’ve never even had contact with? (Because, despite fred baby’s urgings at the beginning, when I spent quite enough time raving about your writing, I never sent any fan mail.)
On the other hand, I feel like I know you. And you did share with me, and all of your other readers, quite a few details of your private life—as most bloggers ultimately do. The result being that, after all this time—after all we’ve been through!—I feel some kind of weird entitlement, as though on some level I do deserve to know more. And here’s where that persistent beast, which Mimi has discussed before with intelligence and insight (not to mention ever-surprising metaphors), rears its amorphous, shape-shifting head—the whole Nessie-ish creature of online identity. The question of who I know you as, as opposed to who you present yourself as, as opposed to who you really may be. In many ways, it’s as though I’ve been reading a novel or other work of fiction that just happens to be about real people and events. As both author and subject, you’ve made artistic and personal choices about what to present and how to present it, and I as reader have made my own interpretations and seen things through the filter of my own experiences and drawn my own conclusions.
And really, in the end, all this brings me nowhere except to wish you well, good fortune, best of luck, and all the rest—pretty nice things, really, to wish a stranger.
Sincerely,
no name slob
quote to go:
“On Sunday, I went to the Civic Center Farmer’s Market. It is properly autumn now I guess, we skipped right over summer, and it was gray and bitter-cold on Sunday morning. I have never seen the Civic Center market in finer fettle: there were tables overflowing with eggplants and bell peppers and sweet potatoes and onions. There was bitter melon and bok choy, there were persimmons and pomegranates, there was a heaped-up bin full of chestnuts. There was a stand that sold only honey and honeycomb, there was a stand that sold nothing but mushrooms, all sorts, wild and cultivated. At the stand that sold apples, twelve varieties (and one bin of summer quince), I bought three fat Fujis. I bought a pound of sweet dates like toffee from the man who sold nothing but ten kinds of dates. I bought a pomegranate and three persimmons, and got a sackful of garlic for a dollar and nearly three pounds of onions for fifty cents. And at one table I had to stop because they had the japanese eggplants stacked up in a shining purple hill. Japanese eggplants, if you don’t know them, are the long thin curved ones, jewel-purple, and they stir-fry beautifully with ginger, nice and sweet. So I stopped when I saw them, and the two kind Asian ladies behind the table weighed five of them up for me and charged me twenty-five cents for my sackful. I was putting them into the shopping bag with my other groceries when a young blond Abercrombie & Fitch sort of guy strolled up to the table, picked up one of the eggplants, and said to the two kind Asian ladies, “What is this?”
They both just looked at him. Neither of them said anything.
He held it out and asked again, “What is this?”
No response.
So I said, “It’s a japanese eggplant.”
The two Asian ladies recoiled as though I had just spat a live reptile on to their clean table. One of them drew herself up another foot in height, and then they both began to shout at me at once. “Is NOT Japanese! It is Chinese! Chinese eggplant! Not Japanese eggplant! CHINESE EGGPLANT!” People turned and stared. I beat a hasty retreat, as the Abercrombie guy looked on, bewildered, and one of the women shouted bitterly after me, “Japanese! Hah!”
Eggplant ethnicity is a hot-button issue.”