December 7, 2014
Sunday

If I could lift
    My heart but high enough
    My heart could fill with love:

But ah, my heart
     Too still and heavy stays
     Too brimming with old days.
              — Margaret Widdemer, 1884-1978
                   American poet and fiction writer

I never heard of Margaret Widdemer before this morning, when her poem landed in my inbox via the Poem-a-Day service I’ve been pretty much ignoring until this week. Perhaps I did once learn about her and just don’t remember. She was a Pennsylvania poet, born in Doylestown and educated in library science at Drexel. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1919, along with Carl Sandburg, a particular favorite of mine when I was in high school. She continued writing into the 1960s, including two how-to books for fiction writers. I never heard of those either, nor any of her novels. I suspect her prose has gone out of fashion, as has her poetry, along with that of her co-honoree, Carl Sandburg. As I said the other day, they just don’t write ’em like that anymore.

Margaret Widdemer married Robert Schauffler, a cellist who wrote biographies of Beethoven and Brahms as well as a book about American holidays that concluded that Santa Claus is real. They lived in New York, where Margaret maintained friendships with many notable literary figures of the early part of the 20th century, including Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay is another poet whose work I was drawn to in high school, for its sighing over the difficulties of relationships.

Yesterday afternoon, just a little before 5:00, I was contacted online by someone I knew during those sighing-over-relationships days. The approach came in the form of a Facebook friend request. The face, not seen since 1965, was familiar, as was the birthdate a few days before mine, and the career in aircraft design fit what I knew had been his ambition. “If this is the S____ B____ who lived on Garber Street in Pacoima, I am going to faint,” I wrote. “Start fainting,” was his reply.

We met, virtually anyway, before Facebook, before cheap cross-country phone calls. He was the friend of a friend of a friend, and from the time we were in ninth or tenth grade we corresponded, via handwritten letters sent through the mail. We talked about school, about our families, our friendships, our struggles to make sense of who we were and what we were about in our lives.

We met, very briefly, in reality in June of 1965. The written exchanges must have continued for a time after that, but then, as our lives became more and more complicated with school and the friendships we were forming there, contact was less and less frequent, and the connection was lost.

He said it was a song on the radio that brought me to mind. He quoted part of a poem I sent him, written about the boy I was sighing after at one point. I asked him what song it was, guessing it was “Sherry, Sherry Baby,” the name of a girl who had snagged his attention. She was a surfer and had her own car. I wanted to be her. I never hear it without thinking of him.

I still can’t find my copy of Late Wife, a book I have been looking for since Thursday. But in the time it took me to walk downstairs after our initial flurry of get-reacquainted messages, I put my hands on the book pictured at left, a birthday gift from him almost fifty years ago.

Margaret Widdemer thought that “brimming with old days” was a sorrow that weighed her down. I can’t read the last line that way tonight. I am brimming with joy at this wholly unexpected reconnection. I lift my hand to my new old friend and say, welcome back. We have so much more to tell each other.