“Look at this,” I might begin if Mr. Kansas ever comes to visit. I will enjoin him to notice, think about, or just hear the interesting points I can make about his situation and the parallels I’ve gathered like flowers, not only to gladden him but also to show that flowers are there—there for the gathering. Beauty is real.
Were he here today, my first point would be that Miranda July, writer and filmmaker, once did what he does: hold conversations with aspects of the self. July did it as a teen, experimenting, expanding, as people do when they have a future somewhere that they want to arrive at. Mr. Kansas, sorrowing widower, has no place to go toward, so his motivation is different. He does it as an octogenarian, desperate to combat loneliness and isolation. To speak and be heard. Even so, the habit isn’t sad or pathetic. It’s resourceful and imaginative. It’s interesting, like life. Like the people in life.
Mr. Kansas, however, seems not to care too much about the people in life. Especially now, in the winter of his discontent. Every face he might read, I imagine, must be a disappointment because it is not his wife’s. He’s polite and considerate when he crosses paths with one of the breed (as I can imagine he might say), but in general, he is not sympathetic to people; they are not even curiosities for him. He does not like to speculate about them or spend hours observing their habits. He already (I suspect) knows all he wants to know.
I barely knew Mr. Kansas or his wife during the time before—the summer of their satisfaction. But I believe he and his wife must have shared a happily aloof notion about themselves: that they were united in being different from the striving and noisy mortals around them. They would have wandered hand-in-hand through a garden, gladdened by the peace and quiet they encountered and that they knew how to value. Nobody interfered with their enjoyment of their heightened pleasures—or of each other. They were, I’m suggesting, snobs.
Or people of refined taste.
And now, in the face of his loss, I suggest he turn to those others that he shunned. Too strong a word? He would think so. But every day I feel a little more certain that if you don’t walk through life with an open face and open arms, then you are keeping people at a distance. Shunning them. To be human is to be needy, and people need people ready to embrace them. You’ll have a million reasons to turn away from any given person, and you will exercise your right to refuse: you’ll sidestep him or her, or look the other way, or at your watch. Or just not look. The least we can do is make a gesture toward the ones we have not yet decided about.
So of all the crazy ideas I’ve had for attaching this twisted human being to the misshapen lives around him, writing to prisoners might be the strangest. Mr. Kansas, who is so courteous and kind, but uninspired by the trauma of the masses—to correspond with a common thief? A murderous villain?
Being courteous and kind, Mr. Kansas has never told me I’m a fool for suggesting it. And suggesting it more than once. But Miranda July in her youth wrote to a convict, told him about driving lessons and heard back from him about prison riots. What she got from it I’m not sure, but the inmate got someone to talk to. He did not have only facets of his own character to work with. I imagine that he would’ve been grateful. And Mr. Kansas can likewise make somebody very thankful by sharing his life such as it is, in his lonely cell, with another person in another lonely cell.
Mr. Kansas may never visit. I have invited him, and he has said he’ll come, but he has also said he doubts that he’ll ever come. He has nothing to lose except the thin rag of loneliness. But he may think that he has nothing to gain, either, as he considers the prospect of the coming years, which stretch ahead as one long bleak winter. But who even talks about a season—a time that naturally gives way to the next season—if you are caught in an enduring weather system of sorrow, loneliness, and despair?
Richard III emerged from his winter, schooled to fight for what he wanted. He didn’t get it, true, but at least he had a reason to fight, and his doom was not a foregone conclusion. What about Mr. Kansas?
Winter gives way. Mr. Kansas may not see the first flowers. But he might, if someone keeps pointing.
“Look,” I might say, and point. “Flowers.”
