It’s fascinating to watch huge lightning bolts out my living room window as I sit here writing to an old family friend.

An hour or so ago I sat down to go through some of my email that’s been piling up. I’ve been collecting email, ever so gradually, for the last several months. I haven’t quite managed to dig out from under that whole fiasco that I wrote about in February. However, it’s gotten so that the truly urgent and important things get taken care of, the important things get filed into the system for later attention (like writing friends), and the simply urgent things get left on the back burner where they belong, for now. The good news, though, is that I’ve had some quality time to go through my lists and slog through a bunch of the pending items. It’s good to be under control again.

To the matter at hand… Deanna, the daughter of a good friend I made while employed at the roller rink he and his family owned and operated, wrote me back in March. You know, the month in between going to Raleigh and Boulder, and before training in April. The month I spent simply trying to catch up in general (and failing to do so). She gave a nice snapshot of life and what her family’s up to, and mentioned that she’d like our families to get together again. It’s been over a year… hard to believe, especially since we all used to be together at least every weekend back when Michelle and I were first married. Soon after that we moved to Wisconsin, and they moved to Virginia… but we have made it a point to get together with them any chance we get since they moved back to Minnesota several years back. We always seem to pick up where we left off, except for the fact that their girls are all so much older than we remember!

While I was writing back to Deanna I was thinking about how the nature of letters, whether it’s a handwritten letter or an email, is really like a lightning bolt in some ways. It’s a connection between two people, just as a lightning bolt connects sky and earth. Sometimes it’s a bright and clear flash, an instant of light that connects them. Other times it’s rambling, meandering across the void, but even then a fleeting juncture of two minds. Just as a lightning bolt on the whole communicates electrical energy in one direction, so too does a letter communicate information and emotion in one direction. Finally, unless you have two very rigidly scheduled, deliberate people, communication in this form is rarely predictable… you never know when another flash is going to illuminate the bond between them.

Here’s hoping that I see another lightning bolt soon.