The Norman Letter
by Fly Girl
The light shined delicately on the back of his shirt as he marked his score
sitting at the piano. The old photograph has the look of Vermeer, as light
gives peace to study. Your mind can wander. What was he thinking? How was
the music shaping up in his head to bring to the stage? My father was a conductor and a dreamer. He gave his life to a vision of an
integrated orchestra, the Symphony of the New World, he called it. It was a
world where people from all cultures played music on the same stage. It died
in a fight. It died when he contracted pancreatic cancer in 1974. I think
tobacco killed my father. I stand here without a family because of cancer. I
am one of the children survivors. “I’m home early for a change and my thoughts turn to mental images of stucco
homes of California sunshine, of you, Pearl and myself, and many other
things. Somehow it just doesn’t seem possible to coordinate them all in any
one picture. I think it is quite hopeless for me to even think of
California. If I had more, it might be possible, but even then, it would
just mean a gamble at best. “And yet, it is very important that we three should live our lives in the
closest possible proximity to eachother. For we are truly fortunate, you and
I; -- we have a friend! I don’t think it possible that I shall ever have
another besides yourself. And to our dual friendship we have added Pearl! In
so vast a population, we three people are, to be sure, a mere drop in an
ocean; but when I think that of all the people I have ever known in my life,
not one, ever had been blessed with even one friend, according to my own
profound concept of the word. I realize more fully how infinitely great is
our luck merely to know eachother.” Written January 30, 1939. Benjamin Steinberg to Norman King, his best
friend. The first time I saw that letter was in January 1999 when I found it
hidden among old papers. He wrote like me. I stood on his shoulders as a
writer and I didn’t even know it until that moment. At 40, I made the move to California myself to pursue my own dreams. I bask
in the sunshine 60 years later still listening for the words of my father,
the dreamer who understood friendship, and my mother, the woman who saved
the money to enable me to have a chance at life. Lung cancer took her, too. I remember going to NYU hospital with her. We
went through a painfully slow bone scan, a cat scan, a battery of other
tests, and when I finally got home, I got a phone call. She had broken her
leg and we went to the emergency room at midnight. Lung cancer had eaten
through the bone. She died two months after. What do we owe our parents when we have watched them die like that? Is it,
possibly, to reach out and hold the hands of the other children and say we
are a family of man? We will stand with eachother and live good lives and
share so you can be proud of us because we know you are watching. We know
you will never let us go, as we will never forget you. In this community of storytellers, I wanted to reach out to the children --
those who are watching their parents die now, those whose families are a
memory. It doesn’t matter what your age is. We are all the same. We are
slowly losing our best friends. My father wrote before computers that he realized how infinitely great is
our luck merely to know eachother. That is what online community is, a place
where we can all be lucky merely to know eachother. Far away from our family piano, from the light that shined in my living room
window, I await the words of others. | 
