Ya know, I don't need this. The guilt. Why do I have to open two letters, right in a row, from mothers. This one's from mine. "I just hope you are worthy of our trust in you and that you are behaving responsibly."

Well, of course she assumed I probably was not worthy. That assumption is implicit in the statement. This is May of 1963. She asks again about my scholarship papers that I need to sign and send to them. I didn't do it. I don't remember why. I had other things on my mind. Irresponsible things.

Earlier today, when I saw the next letter would be from my mother, I thought it might be a nice segue into something I was thinking about on the yoga mat this morning. Contemplating religion - now what brought that on? Oh, yeah. Something in last month's National Geo - a scientist/Christian apologist (and a fairly intelligent one, at that) implying that our sense of morality, our sense of right and wrong, is some kind of clue to the existence of a God. I capitolize it to distinguish it from all the other gods we know exist. The ones we swear to, at and by.

So I got back to a notion of mine, that if indeed there actually is NO god - I mean God - then our sense of right and wrong comes from ourselves. But how? Why? And suddenly the phrase "we the people" popped into my head, and I thought oh, of course. Explains why so many people get so religious about the Declaration of Independence. We the people don't want bad things happening to us. Axiomatically, we need to assure the right of all beings to exist and to exist as well as possible. Because it is the only way we can assure that right to ourselves. The suffering of others is proof positive that suffering is possible for us as well. We the people do not want to be murdered. We the people do not want to be hungry. And if some of we the people want to murder others of the people, those people do not want to be murdered. And that desire, the desire of both not to be murdered, outweighs - totally knocks out of the park - any right of another to murder. Self defense - that's another story.

And the music goes round and round...

Am I behaving responsibly yet?

A lovely letter from his mother saying they were "very pleased when [he] wrote home and told us you were the one and only." I could go into a little guilt trip here, but I'm certain you're all sick of that and we all know by now that I was never anyone's "one and only." I'll concentrate on the rest of the letter.

She talks about their store. They owned a hardware store. My fiancee' was going to go into business with his father, upon his release from the army, and we would get married and live happily ever after running a hardware store in this lovely little town within spitting distance - well, a little further than that, but hardly worth mentioning - from Chicago.

I wasn't interested in this store. I liked jazz (to which he had introduced me) and the big city and sophistication (of which I had none) and days of wine and roses (without rehab). When she talked of him taking over the toy department when he returned home, and of an old buddy of his who recently came to work for them, and of getting ready for Santa to visit the store by Thanksgiving, I'm afraid I found it somewhat embarrassing. Business was beneath me. If I had been born British, I would have shunned the merchant class. My father was a merchant - no, worse. He was a manufacturer. I was trying to shun my family, and probably his. Although I liked his better. Probably because they weren't mine.

I wasn't a money snob, however. It was not as if I pretended to landed or moneyed aristocracy. No, not at all. It was iintellectual snobbery at its worst, with not much more intellectual property than land or money. I probably held it against them that they hadn't read Toynbee. Neither had I, but at least I was planning to.

Talk about an item with no clue, no idea, total disconnect. Well, we weren't talking about that at all, but here it is. A postcard of "Fountain of Three Graces on Sun Room Terrace at Arden House, Harriman Campus of Columbia University, Harriman, New York, 10926."

I have never been there. I didn't know there was a Harriman Campus. I never thought about going to Columbia at any of its campuses. And when did I stick it in the file? There is a zip code. There are no zip codes on any of the letters. We are pre-zip here.

None of the above is very interesting, I know - not even to me, except to wonder what the hell it's doing there? Why did I keep it? Why do we keep these things? Things that have no meaning, no reference to anything, place, person, event or hope. Nevertheless, there they are. Three graces on a summer day, in the middle of a green lawn, surrounded by a flurry of flowers. In front of some singularly graceless stone buildings. Maybe that's the only meaning it has - now, if not then. Somewhere in the midst of the mundane, one can sometimes find grace.