A Letter from Unka Dan
I pull the envelope out of a box of letters from my dad. It is in a long brown envelope repurposed from The Kirkridge Retreat Center. The printed logo and return address were blacked out by Uncle Dan and replaced by his inimitable scrawl. “from: 220 W. 98th Street. NY 10025 Apt 11-L.”
Apartments in this building are now selling for well over a million dollars and the cost of sending a letter has nearly doubled since 1996 when he sent this letter to my campus PO box at Hampshire College.
The letter itself is to my brother and me, with one printed copy sent to my brother’s PO Box at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. It starts like this: “Here it’s the day after your father’s birthday, and I’m here & and not there. I can only console my soul with a presumption; that the party was wild & long as a Polish weddin’or an Eyerish wake.” The letter is dated October 6 and the year was 1996, so our dad would have turned 73 with cake and song and not much fuss beyond that at Jonah House in Baltimore.
Unka’s letter is full of news and movement and community. He’s looking forward to a month that includes a court appearance for an arrest at the Israeli consulate in support of nuclear whistleblower Mordecai Vannunu, who was in solitary confinement in Israel at the time. He mentions the Kairos ”day of prayer” at Deejay and Herb Schwartz’s home in Metuchen, New Jersey later in the month as well as talks in Boston, Minneapolis, Burlington, Nyack and Brooklyn. Deejay Schwartz died last year, Presente!
All this back and forth in the month of October! It brings me back to the many years that Dan was here and there and everywhere: telling stories, cracking open the scriptures, breathing new life and energy into circles of friends and community, teaching joy, prayer and the radical discipline of listening. In this letter, he is literally describing thousands of miles of travel, days in planes, trains and automobiles. I reread these lines and marvel at his stamina at 75, and recall how he was fed and renewed spiritually (even as he was physically worn out) by these encounters with small communities around the country.
But in his letter, he doesn’t just share his social calendar. He is prodding me and my brother on, nudging us along the road. Jerry is starting to plan the next summer’s internship at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker and Dan is pleased. He sends “a blessing & high hope that this will be a great & good time ahead. No doubt in such company it will be so… I allus feel as though I’m in my home away from home in that community.” I was planning a trip to El Salvador and Dan was helping me connect with John Giuliano, a friend who left the Jesuits to stay in the mountains of El Salvador as the U.S. funded war raged through the 1980s.
With these threads, our uncle knits us into this ever expanding scarf of community, where we will be staggered by the beauty and the preciousness of creation, choked by the injustice and pain in our world, intoxicated by the power we have together and nourished by the liturgy of the Word. He leaves us with these words: “ya’ll have a grandiose year, l’arning’ & given’ - as is your wont. Your unk, falling slowly into senescence*, finds youse the staff & sandals of his miles up & over. Know it. Luv you.”
There is really little else to say. I reread and caress this letter 26 years after it was typed and sent. I’m looking at it at the beginning of February, so it feels like a Valentine, dear at the moment it arrived and cherished now that it is so many years later. I hold it close and feel extraordinary gratitude for the love that imbues its pages. My Unka lives on in these pages!
*its ok, I had to look it up too. It means deterioration with age.
