From: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
To: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
Date: Tuesday, April 23 at 21:10
Subject: Cervantes

Hey Babe. That guy was the one my son didn’t care for when he was an infant. I read him Candide first, and he liked that. I always remember how he cried when I started Don Quixote and he just never took to it. He was fine with Robert Frost. When he was one, we would sit in bed drinking beer and reading On the Road. Years later, I read my daughter Hamlet for about twenty-two seconds before she smacked that shit outta my hands.

From: Babe <listentothebabe@mail.com>
To: Gordon Flanders <gordonflanders@mail.com>
Date: Friday, April 19 at 10:20
Subject: writing

ah, but writing is such a terrible thing. Didn’t you say that once? Give it up, if you can. I tried, Flanders, because writing I was a person at sea who never found her sea legs. I suppose I could have written a travelogue or self-help but the steel, they winked. I was a saner person not writing. Still… Maybe at fifty, I am less worried about survival.

Let’s give it a shot, shall we? Like that guy who ran at windmills.

B.