Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

know about the planet Vulcan and the politics of the Federation and I couldn’t care less about the family life or previous roles of an actor named Leonard Nimoy. But one feature in the newsletter caught my eye—a list of fan club members looking for pen pals.

Sonny had shown me that pen-friendship allowed the bridging of otherwise unbridgeable spaces. But I had failed to interest her in my “Star Trek” obsession. Sonny had obsessions of her own: the theater, tap class, ballet, singing lessons and, increasingly, boys. She planned to leave school as soon as she could, enroll in acting classes for a year, and then head for London. Slowly, our correspondence had worn down like an unwound clock.

A hot prospect in the fan-club newsletter was an American girl named Joannie who listed her interests as science and reading. She was just three months older than I. An American pen pal would see “Star Trek” episodes months before they were screened in Australia and would be able to fill me in on the plots. And she might be able to answer other questions as well. I was curious about the United States. I wanted to learn something about the world my father had inhabited when he was my age.

My father said very little about his California childhood. The few stories he did tell were so sad that I could hardly bear to listen. Slowly, I pieced together the outlines of his early life from stray remarks in adult conversations; things said and quickly hushed, hints dropped before the exchange of meaningful looks and brisk changes of subject.

My father’s parents each had a wild streak. His mother, the daughter of an attorney, had been allowed to leave her home in New York’s Saratoga Springs at the age of seven, to tour as cornet soloist with a band called the California Brownies. “Little Louise,” as she was billed, developed an opium addiction and was married for the first time at sixteen. Soon after my father was born, the marriage ended when her husband caught her in bed with another man.

Lawrie’s father was a doctor’s son who split with his family to become a baseball player. He was a gifted athlete, a talented artist and a fine singer. He was also an alcoholic who would die young and indigent in a Salvation Army home.

Lawrie, six years old, was in the courthouse in Santa Barbara the day the judge in his parents’ divorce case found both of them guilty of “moral turpitude.” The judge awarded custody of the boy to his grandparents.

From sleeping on the veranda of his parents’ tiny one-bedroom cottage, he found himself in a spacious house on the corner of Broadway and Main in Santa Maria. In those days, Santa Maria was a small farming town, but its tree-lined Broadway was a hundred feet wide, so that horse-drawn carriages could turn there.

I didn’t bother to check an atlas before I wrote to Joannie. Otherwise, I might have learned that Maplewood, New Jersey, was a continent removed from my father’s childhood haunts in Santa Maria, Pismo Beach and Fullerton.

Her first letter arrived in the yellow mailbox in late August 1968. It was plastered with stamps of Thomas Jefferson and the Statue of Liberty. In careful printing, Joannie wrote:

“I’d like to be your pen-pal.… I just turned 13 on June 4.… My favorite subject is, obviously, science (biology).… I, too, am crazy over L.N. My closet door is overflowing with pictures. The U.S.S. Enterprise, Jr. reposes on my bureau, and Mr. Spock, poster-size stares down from the wall! … Coincidence! I play recorder, too.… I’m an avid reader. I devour science, science fiction and fantasy.… Please write soon, and I’m glad that you’re my new penpal.” To my delight, she signed her letter with the Vulcan salutation, “Live long and prosper, Joannie.”

Joannie, like me, was a late-life child of older parents. Her two brothers and one sister were in their twenties. I had a beloved dog and cat; Joannie had a menagerie—dog, cat, kittens, mice (named Mr. Spock, Desilu, Constellation, Eugene McCarthy and Leila), guinea pigs, even water snails. She wanted to be an astronomer. Clearly, that ambition didn’t raise anybody’s incredulous eyebrows, since her eldest brother was a molecular biologist at Stanford University.

“I’m having some photographs developed and if there’s a good one I’ll send you it next letter. If you want a general description though—I’m five feet three inches tall, weigh 98 lbs., hair dark blonde, eyes green-brown. Okay?”

It certainly was okay. Everything about Joannie was okay by me. We were so much alike, even down to our height and weight. When she sent me her yearbook picture, it revealed an oval-faced beauty with long, honey-colored hair and a black velvet choker around a swanlike neck.

We wrote to each other every week. Instead of a mundane date such as Dec. 13, Joannie would head her letters 6812.13—a pseudo-star date like the kind Captain Kirk used for the log entries that began each “Star Trek” episode. As I’d hoped, she gave me the rundown on upcoming adventures: “Here’s another Star Trek: ‘Plato’s Step Children,’ a study of power induced depravity. The power is psychokinesis (direct action of mind over matter). Its wielders are arrogant sadists who force visitors to inflict indignities on themselves.… First rate.” (This episode contained TV’s first ever interracial kiss, when the aliens forced Kirk and Uhura to smooch for their amusement.) In return, I filled Joannie in on the plots of episodes from the first season of the series, which had aired before she started watching the show.

When NBC threatened to cancel the program after only seventy-nine episodes, we were among the fans who deluged the network with protest letters. Joannie sent thirty-six. By then, she was signing off her letters not only with the Vulcan salutation, but actually writing it in Vulcan: Lash doro V’Succa.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why this program absorbed us, as it did so many others. At thirteen, we were beginning to