love languages

Tonight I was sitting in the computer lab trying to write my story and this guy came in and sat down at the computer beside me and asked if I could tell him how to type a letter on the computer. So I pulled up Word on his computer and told him to type it in the white area and then push the print button when he was done. He had the letter written down neatly on paper beside him but was having the hardest time typing it. He asked me several more questions like how to start a new paragraph and how to capitalize letters and how to erase, and after a while he was getting so frustrated and only had one line of his letter. So I asked if he'd like it if he dictated it to me and I typed it. At first he said no no I won't bother you. So I thought he just didn't want me to hear the letter, which was perfectly understandable. I told him it wouldn't be a problem, and he siad "well the thing is my daughter wrote me a letter on the computer and I'd just like to send her one back on the computer."
And so I typed up his letter to his 18 year old daughter. I gathered that he hadn't seen her in a long long time and that she didn't really have much to with him. He wrote about how he hoped that she was getting in to all the colleges she wanted to go to. He told her about his new job and how he was learning how to work machines. He said that he thought about her all the time and wished that he could be there for her. He talked about how wonderful her letter had made him feel. It was so tender and raw and beautiful though, and I completely got this feeling that however different I am from everyone around me, it seems like we're all just trying to get by the best we can and love the people that we need to love even if we don't get it right. Everybody has a story. And we are all just fathers trying to learn how to talk to our daughters. I don't know. I was just incredibly moved, and I keep thinking that this is the story that I need to write, the one about that father...or maybe about that daughter, instead of this one.....

Even Ian didn’t know the girl’s name until she spelled it out to him when she applied for a post office account at the West Barnes Bureau de Post and Convenience Shoppe, even though she had passed by almost every morning and afternoon for three weeks. The Biddles most likely knew her name but they never used it, and he didn’t dare ask it, knowing that the Biddles would have all of East Lothian County thinking that he fancied the American over their girls.
The first time he had seen her was on a long rainy afternoon in late May. By then the rumor had circulated that Graham Bell’s au pair had arrived after great anticipation, and so he knew it was her when he saw the two Bell children, Hamish and Lucy, walking along each side of her. She had just picked them up from school, he presumed, and crossed the street in his direction. He felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to busy himself with something, or to crawl into the government issued mail bins and hide. So he slid slowly into that Postal Service half of the store where he could stand behind the glass, excused from being sociable, permitted to speak formally when spoken to through the steel vent in the glass. Truth is, he was and never had been good at talking to people. He felt that whenever he opened his mouth, he was trying to prove himself. It was only the Biddles that he spoke to with any ease, and only because he knew that they weren’t really concerned with anything he had to say.
He heard her footsteps on asphalt outside the door and he started arranging papers and found some sticky notes and began to scribble on them and stick them on various items on the counter: the stapler, the telephone that rarely rang, the corresponding phonebook that he never needed to use, and his Absalom, Absalom that he read during the long breaks between customers and mail pickups.
When she came in he looked up and acknowledged her presence giving a little nod. Hamish and Lucy headed for the sweeties counter, and although normally he would have told them something silly like “look, don’t touch,” he could not imagine doing so in her presence. After all, it was her job to keep them out of trouble, not his.
“Can I help you there?” he asked from behind the glass. The girl looked up and smiled a little.
“Do you have any postcards here?” she replied, looking around as if she had just arrived in a train station and was trying to orient herself. Her accent, the way she pulled out the word hear into two complete syllables, made him uncomfortable because he could not recognize it from any of the movies he had seen or the Simpsons or Friends. Postcards, he thought to himself, why would I have postcards? Who the hell wants to send postcards from the middle of a cow pasture.
“Afraid not,” he said. He waited for her to say “thanks anyway” and take the kids and leave, but she just stood there. Reluctantly, he moved into the shop half, noticing that she had no letter to mail.
“Hamish, Lucy, don’t touch the candy, please!” she said, picking up the Lothian Gazette, which she must have been getting for Graham, for it was made up mainly of classifieds for old fishing boats and livestock and not much else. The sound of the word “candy” made him cringe. Candy was the name of the neighbor hood slut in his mother’s daytime drama shows.
“Can we get a sweetie? Dad always gets us a sweetie.” Lucy said, swinging her school pack over her shoulder, knocking a box of chewing gum from the counter. The girl quickle went to pick up the gum, apologizing, flushing. Lucy looked for a minute as if she would cry, but then decided against it. Hamish went to the girl’s side and clung to her trousers leg and stuck his thumb in his mouth so as to disassociate himself with the actions of his sister. She put the paper on the counter and fished in her pocket for a pound. Ian smiled at Hamish
Ian like Hamish Bell more than he liked any of the other kids that he saw on a regular basis. Although Hamish was older than Lucy by over two years, it wasn’t evident, partly because of Lucy’s five going on thirty complex, but mainly because Hamish was what they called “delayed” which made him seem much younger. Antithesis of the perfectly clear and articulate Lucy, he also had a severe speech impediment that made him practically incomprehensible. When he was younger, when Graham and Stella were still together, before the need for au pairs, he would babble along not noticing that no one, with the exception of his mother, could understand him. But since he had started school, Hamish had become aware of the wall between him and others and stopped speaking in public. Ian noticed these things. Hamish and Ian were but two of the same breed.
“No,” she said, taking Hamish’s thumb out of his mouth.
“Why not?” Lucy asked, poking out her lip a little.
“Because I said so.” Ian laughed inside because this was the sort of thing you say without thinking and then realize that you have unconsciously become your parents.
“That’s not a proper reason.”
“Seems proper enough for me,” she said, as Ian handed her the change for the paper. She looked at him again and leaned on the counter, casually. “So, you know where I could find some postcards?” Again Ian didn’t know how to take her accent. It was like a slow waltz, rhythmical, sharp at times, and incredibly patient, as if nothing was or would ever be urgent.
“At the Dunbar Post,” he said, “Or at the Tourism Office down there. They get plenty of folks down from Edinburgh. Its just we don’t have visitors in West Barnes.
“You got one now,” she said, pulling the kids towards the door.
“Guess so,” he said. She opened the door and walked out and Ian just stood there relieved and watched as she disappeared down the cobblestone sidewalk towards Hedderwick Hill Farm, her head, sporting a jet black pixie cut, bobbing up and down with her dance-like stride. She had Hamish by the hand and he practically ran to keep up with her long stride. Evidently still pouting about the sweeties, Lucy lagged behind, stopping completely at times, and then running ahead when they other two got to far ahead for her comfort.
Ian had seen lives pass in front of him before in this manner. He had been sitting behind that counter for more than a decade, longer if you counted the long years of his childhood playing in the mailroom while his father worked with all the fervor that Ian himself would never be able to bring to the job. He had started working part time in the place when he was fifteen and his father was first diagnosed with lung cancer. He went to school in Glasgow for a year but came home when his father passed and took over as postmaster. Since that time he had watched babies turn into teenagers from behind that counter.
And he had seen American girls before, of course, when he was at university and sometimes when he would meet exchange students in the pubs in Edinburgh that his best friend, Kieran had introduced him to. But in the last few years, the night out in the city had grown few and far between. Kieran had, in the course of only three years, settle down in a small blue house in Portobello, gotten married to a Frenchwoman named Danielle, and had two babies, two girls, Olivia and Estelle, whose pictures Ian had pinned to his refrigerator. He was almost thirty now, and he wanted pictures of his own kids, or if not, he at least wanted a life that would convince him that settling down and making a family was undesirable.
He couldn’t comprehend the girl though, couldn’t even think of a way to ask her what her name was, couldn’t understand the way she made him feel unsettled and anxious to be someone different. He knew that their story, if there was to be one at all, would not be a love story for more reasons than he could tell.