My Life Will Look so Good in Death (I Hope)

When I went to visit my parents earlier this week, my mom unexpectedly gave me a big box containing all the letters and cards I'd ever sent her. Being the phone-phobe that I am, when I moved to rva in 1986, our primary means of communicating was letter-writing and unbeknownst to me, she'd saved them all.

I've only begun to look through them, but I can already tell what an in-depth archive of my life and what was happening culturally they're going to be. I wrote her about everything that interested me, it would appear. And as has been noted by more than one person in my lifetime, I never use a sentence when a paragraph will do.

Which brings us to the trunks of Mary Custis Lee, the second child of Robert E. Lee and the topic of today's Banner lecture at the Virginia Historical Society. "Hidden Treasures: A Short History of the Mary Custis Lee Trunks" was about the recently discovered trunks containing over 6500 items, such as journals, letters, invitations and tickets of a woman who held a crucial role in archiving her famous family's ephemera.

The letters from her father during the Civil War were fascinating for their honesty; as early as 1861, he wrote her advising that people should "plan for a several-years war." In an 1862 letter he was quite adamant about his troops not considering themselves beaten at Sharpsburg, although I'm not sure the Union troops would have agreed with his assessment.

About getting the government to return the Lee family possessions taken from Arlington House during the war, he wrote about the delay in getting things done in Washington, D.C., "But in Washington, it often takes many days to accomplish a little." The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The lecture was given by long-time VHS staffer E. Lee Shepard, who closed the talk by saying, "Thank you for coming and thank you for staying." It was a reference to his talk being a replacement for the originally planned speaker, a U.K. resident who was trapped at home by the volcanic ash ramifications. Shepard's closing quip was especially appropriate because there were some attendees who, on learning of the change in topic/speakers at the door, actually turned on their heels and left. My nerdy friend and I were glad we'd stayed for such an interesting and poignant talk.

Afterwards, we lunched on the patio at New York Deli and I had their excellent Southwestern Cobb salad, a tasty take on the traditional version with its guacamole, salsa and baby corn in addition to the usual Cobb suspects. I shared the contents of some of my letters to my mother, but it was tough to compete with what Mary Custis Lee had accumulated in her trunks. I mean, the woman had invitations to hang with Queen Victoria.

I can only hope that when I die, my letters, tickets, journals and what-not tell a story of a life half as well-lived as hers. Believe me, I'm working on it.