Dear 6-year-old Lemongrass,

When I was your age, I first held a book about music. It was entitled “Music on our Way.” The very first song that I learned for myself was “This Old Man.” If you were familiar with the Barney’s song, it has the same tune. I played it on a toy xylophone and was surprisingly pleased at what I heard. I could make a fortune out of it.

 

Dear 8-year-old Lemongrass,

 

 

Dear you-who-thought-that-the-letter-number-6-was-for-him,

For more details, please be my friend for the next 357 days.We'll figure out together what will happen next. Thank you for visiting. :))

Tis me.

Dear Stranger,

Let me share with you a beautiful allegory about chance.

“You are a go-ahead young marketing executive. A bachelor. It is Saturday morning and you are of to do your week’s shopping. About to get into your car, you decide to go back and check that you locked the door. By going back, you leave a minute later and miss the parking space you would have found at the supermarket and are forced to park in a nearby street instead. There are parking meters in this street but drivers are only allowed to leave their cars here for thirty minutes at a time. While you are placing a ticket inside the windscreen, someone calls your name. It is a friend you haven’t seen for a while. The friend introduces you to a neighbor of his, to whom he has given a lift into town. Call the neighbor Helen. You and Helen are mutually attracted but as she’s married, you part company.

  Having left the friend and Helen, you go to the supermarket, fill your trolley and join a queue at the check-out – a longer queue than the one you would have joined if you’d parked in the car park instead of the street. By the time you get back to the car, you find a sixty-two year old recovering alcoholic (a traffic warden) writing a ticket. You have a go at him, ruining his day. When he gets home after work, the traffic warden takes it out on his wife. His wife has been feeling very put-upon of late and her husband’s cruel words are the final straw. She packs a bag and goes to stay with her sister two hundred miles away. in the weeks that follow, the lonely traffic warden starts drinking again. He takes booze to work and loses his job. One night at home, very drunk, he decides to do himself a fry-up. The frying pan catches fire, the fire spreads, the house is gutted. So is the ex-traffic warden. His widow collects on the insurance and passes the rest of her life in comfort, praising his memory.

  And all because you went back to check the door.” (Excerpt. “A Crack in the Line”)

I saw you across the room. Almost immediately, everybody became tensed. Nervous whispers were heard. Yes, you brought with you an air of superiority. If by any chance you read this letter, think about the girl who faced you that day. And if time permits, maybe we could meet again in a different circumstance.

Tis me.

 

Dear God,

Please teach me the essentials of life. I learned from a stranger just recently that we should never waste our time doing something we do not love. If I am already doing something that I hate, how can I stop? He never told me how. He just said that I shouldn’t.

Please tell me something about fear. Once, I passed a girl crying because she didn’t want to go to school. I don’t understand. Is grade school that terrifying? I think not especially if your first teacher is your mother. Could you please tell her that school is a place where she could meet her best friends? And there are a lot of other things to be afraid of, like never seeing your dad again or floating in the Pacific Ocean with a 450-pound Bengal tiger on the other side of the boat. Am I making any sense God?

Please teach me how to value other people’s feelings. I don’t want to walk into someone else’s life and mess it all up, then leave them with nothing but a fraction of their torn self. I should know. I saw my friends gather up themselves only to be crushed into pieces again. People are too precious to be treated that way. Or so they say.

Please tell me what friendship is all about. I’ve been a good friend to those who deserve it and I’ve been an asshole if I needed be. But there are friends who can be an asshole more than I can and they act like one at all times. It really gets through my nerve that’s why I tend to say things I never meant. I think those words hurt them. They may not know it but I felt bad. Please tell them I felt bad and that I am so sorry.

Tis me.