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Letters to David
by Cynthia Miller Coffel
Table of Contents
Introduction
2 “Letters to David”
3 Interpretive Questions
8 Craft Questions
8 Writing Prompt
9 A Note From the Author
9 This essay is intended for personal or educational use only and is made available as a part of the textBOX anthology of
exceptional fiction, essays and poems originally published in The Missouri Review. Reproduction for non-educational purposes
is strictly prohibited.
“Letters to David” copyright © Cynthia Miller Coffel
Supplementary materials copyright © The Curators of the University of Missouri.
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Introduction
For many people, their twenties, a time of life Coffel describes in this essay as “those playful, makeshift
years when nothing seems serious or settled,” are a time of exploration and self-discovery. The urge to
travel and explore is often irresistible. For young idealists, as Coffel once was, the desire to make the
world a better place may also be very compelling. In her essay “Letters to David,” Cynthia Miller Coffel
looks back at this period in her own life, a time when she traveled extensively, taught English to
immigrants, reveled in being an outsider and truly believed she could change the world.
Passionate idealism is fueled by community with like-minded idealists; it is difficult to maintain in
isolation. Coffel’s correspondence with David, a friend who shared many of her beliefs and hopes, as well
as what Coffel describes as “a particular kind of loneliness,” provided her with an anchor though a series
of cross-country moves and changes of situation that exhilarated but eventually exhausted her. The
distance between the two friends (they met infrequently during these years) created a space for Coffel to
invent and reinvent a self consistent with her youthful idealism, a self that could remain real as long as
there was a mailbox in which to place a paper copy of it.
As she neared her thirties, Coffel’s travels no longer held the promise and excitement they once did. After
more than a decade of traveling from one tiny apartment and low-paying teaching job to the next, Coffel
realized just how much she and David had each changed, and it became clear that little remained of a
relationship that was once central to her idea of self. Living in the Catskill Mountains of New York,
Coffel began to see her life, and the lives of her students, through a less idealistic, almost pessimistic lens.
The “playful, makeshift” years were coming to a close and the turning point felt like an ending. But years
later, looking back at a time in her life when everything seemed so full of adventure and hope, Coffel sees
something in her years of writing to David and of needing a kindred spirit to accompany her through the
turmoil of her youth that brings a balanced perspective to her current life in the Midwest.
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“Letters to David”
Letters to David
by Cynthia Miller Coffel
All through my twenties, those playful, makeshift years when nothing seemed serious or settled, my
friendship with David was the most important constant. I was building what I thought of as my teaching
career, those young days, and I moved to a new place every two or three years: I worked in a daycare
center in Live Oak, California, first, then in a school for teenaged mothers in Ogden, Utah; next I taught
English as a second language at a Catholic college in my home state of Indiana, then high school English
in a little town in the Catskills. All through that time—through each new job, through the cardboard boxes
and the packing string, the maps, the too-heavy-for-California coats and the not-right-for-Indiana halter
tops, the cross-country Greyhound trips and the flights on United, my friendship with David was steady. I
wrote him long letters describing each new apartment, each new group of students. In his ugly hand, in
ballpoint pen, he wrote back about his yearly rafting trip with friends from high school, how everybody
was changing, taking grown-up jobs, getting married, and why wasn’t he? Long-distance on the phone we
talked late into the night about ex-lovers and sexual guilt, about the hostages in Iran or Reagan’s election,
about the ways we were each going to improve our own little corners of America. I read The Untold Story
of the Unions because David told me to, and Chuck Colson’s autobiography (“Don’t you believe people
can change?” he asked); he learned about the Catholic Workers and about Pippi Longstocking from me.
We first became friends in 1975, during the summer of our junior year of college, a minister’s son and a
religion professor’s daughter lifeguarding and working in the daycare at Ghost Ranch Presbyterian
Conference Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. At Ghost Ranch, on a moonlit hike up to Kitchen Mesa, we
discovered that we’d both just broken up with Jewish chemists; we discovered, on a Jeep ride out to the
Monastery of Christ in the Desert, that we’d both read Saul Alinsky; around a campfire by Conjillon
Lakes (my boyfriend playing banjo under the stars), we learned that we shared a particular kind of
loneliness. I recognized his mixture of egotism and insecurity. He may not know it, I thought, but this boy
needs me. When I left Ghost Ranch, David came out into the rain in his long green poncho and hugged
me, with tears in his eyes.
After that summer we only met occasionally, and almost always, in my memory, in romantic places. We
both moved to California to work as volunteers after college—I worked up north at the Live Oak Church
of the Brethren Preschool; he worked as a legal aid for the United Farm Workers in Salinas and LA. In
1978 we met in San Francisco, and as the sun came up, wrapped ourselves in blankets and walked along
windy Ocean Beach near the Presidio; we fed each other greasy noodles at the Peacock Café. That
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summer we watched night fall from the second-floor porch of the UFW house on South Alvarado Street
in LA.
Later, older, before he started graduate school and after I’d gotten my first MA, we met in far-flung
places: one hot Fourth of July in 1982 we sat on a blanket at Point State Park and listened to the Boston
Pops play “America the Beautiful” from a freighter on the Monongahela; in 1983 we watched wild ponies
from his little green tent at a sandy campground somewhere on the island of Assateague. By the time we
broke it off—I would like to say that I was the one who ended it, but he had shown his disillusionment
with me long before I stopped writing him—both of us, and the world, had changed.
Some people can anticipate the endings of things, I suppose; they hear the swell of violins before the
crackling film fades black, notice the long shot of the coming snowstorm signaling that the heroine is
about to meet her match, change her ways and lose what little bit of optimism is left to her. In those early
days I didn’t see any endings. I thought it would always be David and me together against the world—not
in the same state, maybe, but in the same spirit—working against all that was cruel in our country. David
isn’t the man I left behind, exactly, or even someone I vaguely wish I’d married. Instead he’s the one I
associate with my youth, with certain beautiful, carefree Western years, with a pleasant unsettledness,
with pot kept in little plastic film canisters, with the feel of hard dirt under a sleeping bag, with Fleetwood
Mac’s “Sentimental Lady” playing from his stereo at two in the morning, as well as with a few
particularly painful discoveries. If this were a letter to David, in it I might explain to him, as I want to
explain to you, why I am no longer traveling, no longer teaching, no longer sure that one ordinary person
can make a serious change in the world, and where I have found my home.
In early letters I wrote David about the beauty of Live Oak, California, about the strange excitement of
getting off the plane in Sacramento in my long red winter coat, and about the pleasures of—finally!—
being away from my parents, away from the Midwest, on my own. At twenty-one I imagined no one had
ever felt that way before, had ever looked at the glorious world stretched out before her, full of
possibilities. I could do anything: go to Scotland and study for the ministry; teach English in Chiang Mai
or Seoul; move to Cambridge with my boyfriend; hop a freight train and travel to Kansas, to Chicago, to
Seattle; write a novel in my spare time. It seems funny to me now, and a little sad, that I thought I was
proving my independence and my feminist credentials by working as a volunteer in a church-run daycare
center out West. But like my friend David, I was a young person with ideals. There was a saying that was
popular just then that told me that if I wanted peace, I had to work for justice, and that was what I wanted
to do.
At the Live Oak Truck Stop Café, near Gum Street, across from the peach orchards and the railroad
tracks, I’d write David about the worn-down Mexican mothers who laid sacks of tomatoes on the
director’s desk in payment as they dropped off their toddlers, Rosie and Jorge and Zoomie, at the Live
Oak Church of the Brethren Preschool. I’d write David about the good old farm wives, Nellie and Violet
and Fern, who pieced quilts every Wednesday in the church lunchroom, and about the farmers who built
the turquoise cross over the fireplace near the sanctuary. I’d write, always, about religion, about Pastor
Will with his big ears, who told us that he was a pacifist, a Brethren, not because he thought he was better
than anybody else but exactly because he knew the capacity for evil, for sin, was in him, as it is in all
human beings. Being a Brethren meant being humble, Will would say: as well as asking Christians to live
simply, to serve others and never, never, to take part in any war, Jesus Christ had asked his people to walk
humbly with their God.
I wasn’t humble myself those days; I was certain that David, Dorothy Day, Jim Wallis and I could, in
time, bring a certain peace to the land. That was what I told myself, at least. It was what I gave as my
reason for all the moves, the tearful airport good-byes, the overlong hugs whenever I left David (“All that
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sexual tension I felt in Ghirardelli Square,” he asked in 1979, “was all of that me, or was some of that
you?”), the lonely and triumphant drives into fresh new towns.
I was simply in love with travel, with being an outsider, with feeling a little off-kilter all the time and
always just about to move on. I loved not knowing what my next address would be—Live Oak Boulevard
or Beethoven Street or Maple Avenue—and I loved not knowing what kinds of faces would greet me
when I walked through each schoolroom door. I felt virtuous and purposeful to think that I was helping
Carla Ortega and Sunday Brown and Ester Martinez, those young women to whom I tried to teach
English on the top floor of the old brick Washington Junior High building on 20th Street in Ogden, Utah.
The real thrill of being in Ogden, though, was that I was far, far away from home; it was to look up as I
was reading Waiting for God in the Arctic Circle on Washington Boulevard and see the snowy Wasatch
Mountains out the window instead of flat, green land. It was thrilling to learn about the Mormons (not the
boring Presbyterians), who wore holy long underwear to church; to visit the house where Brigham Young
had brought twenty-seven of his wives; to feel that the moonstone roses curling over the railing of my
shabby apartment porch were mine and mine only. Just around every corner lay something I had never
seen or done or known about before. It was thrilling to see moose during a ski trip on snowy Alta in the
rose-colored evening; it was fascinating to learn about Ogden’s seedy underground market for
Vietnamese women; it was romantic to throw my clothes into a pillowcase whenever I had the urge to do
so, hop on a Greyhound and head downstate or across the States to visit David.
At the same time I was proud to be making my way in the world, and even though in those early jobs I
barely earned enough to live on, I never felt poor. If I didn’t have enough money on a certain day, I had
the sense that I could always get it. I could steal and sell the walnuts from the orchard across the highway
from the Diet Frostie; I could hawk my copy of Notes from Underground; I could work nights teaching
English to those refugees—You Phet and Mai and Tra Dong—who came to Ogden from Vietnam and
Cambodia and Laos during those years. Even if I only earned a few pennies, it wouldn’t matter. I would
make enough money someday, I knew; there would be years for that, and in front of me I had all the years
in the world.
“It’s the college syndrome,” my boss, Patrick, said when he offered me a job teaching English as a second
language at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana, a little bit closer to home now but still far
enough away. “It feels natural to move every three or four years because you’re still in that college frame
of mind, but it starts to look bad on your résumé. After a while it makes you look flighty.” He should
have known, I guess: he’d spent three years in Tehran; then three in Washington, DC; finally four or five
in the ugly little city of Terre Haute, where I’d met him and where I remember thinking he was wrong,
wrong, wrong.
During those years I couldn’t bring myself to buy pots and pans, and I worried about that. I didn’t know
how to make a Thanksgiving turkey, as all the teachers I worked with did; I certainly never washed any
windows. I was preoccupied, instead, with larger matters. My letters to David from Indiana are all about
El Salvador and the Maryknoll sisters: Should I, like the laywoman Jean Donovan, join them? Wouldn’t
that be the right thing to do, to move down there? Just because I didn’t wear a white habit didn’t mean I
couldn’t be in touch with God, courageous, and helpful—what did he think? In California I had taught
migrant children to speak English; in Ogden I had counseled teenaged mothers. Wasn’t it time now to
move into the wider world, to do more serious, daring good?
Instead I moved again, to New York this time, and for the first time in my life I noticed my lack of
furniture and thought it odd. In California, my little one-bedroom place on Highway 99 had been
furnished by the good people of the Live Oak Church of the Brethren, who lent me an aquamarine La-ZBoy, a card table and three broken TVs, which I stacked on top of each other, under a painting of the
Sutter Buttes. In Ogden I put silk roses on my cardboard-box bookshelves; in Indiana, African violets and
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hanging spider plants brightened the furnished rooms. In New York I had to buy my own things for the
first time. I slept on a futon on the floor, settled little jade plants under the windows, and piled books in
stacks nearby. The four rooms of the apartment looked—how shall I say it?—bare.
And then it all started to go bad, started to seem like a mistake, or a series of mistakes. I was closer to
David geographically than I had been in a long time, and I was closer to thirty, too. When I looked out the
window and saw the blue Catskill Mountains, I didn’t feel that thrill anymore: I longed for flat, green
land. From my next, and last, teaching job I wrote David about Oneonta, the City of Hills, with its shabby
beauty, its Black Oak Tavern, its cozy little Autumn Café. I wrote about my students, the learningdisabled boys who worked in their parents’ barns from four in the morning till ten at night and saw
joining the marines as the only way they’d ever manage to leave town. In the structure of that school they
were, like all the students I’d ever taught, the unimportant ones—not for them was the fancy technology
bought, not for them the expensive football uniforms, the cheerleading squad—not for them and not for
me. The stories they told—of an uncle burning the barn for insurance money, of fights with their fathers,
of failing farms—seemed all too familiar, and the things I was trying to teach—To Kill a Mockingbird
and “To Build a Fire”—seemed as tired out as I felt. I began to see how things were set against us; I
wondered what I was really teaching those boys, and whether I was doing any good at all.
I visited David, driving down the long Pennsylvania highways past the ugly industrial towns, Scranton
and Wilkes-Barre and Reading, to Washington, DC, where he lived in a house with other professionals in
a leafy neighborhood near Silver Spring. While I’d been getting my master’s degrees, he’d finished law
school. He’d become more aggressive than I remembered him, and even a little boring; he talked about
his relationship with Jesus in ways that made my shoulders tense. In between visits to the National Air
and Space Museum and trips to see shadow puppets at the Indonesian embassy, he showed me pages in
his address book, the names of places he’d lived all crossed out and scribbled over, and told me that he
was tired of traveling, too. He worried about his dad, who had left home to set up a storefront church in
Harlem. He worried about himself: Maybe he really wasn’t capable of intimacy? He was looking for a
church to belong to, a woman to commit to and a place to call home. I was surprised to find that he didn’t
always understand me, that when I was with him I missed writing to him. I missed describing my
adventures and creating a brave, merry version of myself that was better than I’d ever really be. It became
clear that David missed my letters, too. He seemed to like me best as I was on the page: entertaining, but
easy to fold up and put away.
Even though I told myself it didn’t matter, that I was strong and independent, that I would carry on just as
I always had whenever there was a bump in the road, I found myself crying all the time as I drove home
from school past Neahwa Park, alone over Red Zinger tea in a corner of the Autumn Café, at the Good
News Bookstore where all of the titles were Christian and ratty and hopeful, and sometimes in my sleep.
I stopped going to work. I called in sick day after day and curled up on my futon in my little apartment
that looked out on the Center Street store, with its blinking pink-and-green Christmas lights and its
cardboard Santa waving on the roof year-round.
I suppose I was in despair. I had never understood what despair was before, but I understood what it was
during those days. I realized then that I had been wrong: all of those moves, all of those choices had made
a difference. They had been serious, every single one of them. I learned something, there on the futon in
my empty room, about the conflict between my desire to do good and my desire to live well in a muchless-than-good world. I know now that everyone experiences something like this at some point in their
lives; I know now that growing up means leaving behind certain illusions: that the person you love most
is wiser than any other, that one person’s actions can make society more just, that anyone’s motives are
pure.
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During those days, hiding out in my little apartment, I began to read as if reading might save me. Slowly I
read my way through Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of Henry James. How I wanted to be with
Henry, on Bellosguardo or at Lamb House in Rye, writing those long, slow, witty sentences in a brick
house with an oak-paneled parlor and stone steps leading out to a garden room. I treasured the milkywhite pages of those books, their heft, the way their spines broke and the pages opened in my hands. I
loved the vulnerability of Henry with his obscure hurt, his pain over Constance Fennimore Woolson, his
pain over his art. By the time I stopped going to work, one by one by one, seven other teachers had
resigned from that small high school; when the department chairman knocked on my door and asked for
my letter of resignation, I typed it up and turned it in.
I moved again, then, back home this time, driving across New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio to my
mother’s house, helped by the man who is now my husband, whom I married years later among azaleas
and rhododendrons at the courthouse in Seattle in the rain.
The last time I heard from David was twenty years ago; there was a letter in my mailbox, in his ugly
hand. I don’t remember what his letter said. I only remember that I didn’t answer. I told my husband that I
had nothing in common with him anymore, but I don’t suppose that’s true. What is true is that I was very
young when David and I were friends, when I was traveling the country, when I believed that I had an
answer to the problems of the world, and I am not so young anymore.
My husband and I moved again, and finally, back to the Midwest, to those flat, green fields that have
somehow become my home. There were years when I thought I’d always be writing to David, always
moving from state to state, always convinced that one lone person could make a serious change in the
world. I remember those years with affection, but they seem like a long time ago.
Cynthia Miller Coffel is the author of Thinking Themselves Free: Research in the Literacy of Teen Mothers. With
Rebecca J Lukens and Jaquelin Smith she is also the author of the ninth edition of A Critical Handbook to
Children’s Literarture. Her literary nonfiction won The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize in 2007 and has been
shortlisted in The Best American Essays 2005 and 2008. Her PhD in literacy education is from the University of
Iowa.
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Interpretive Questions
1) One of the first things Coffel remembers noticing about David is that the two of them “share a
particular kind of loneliness.” She goes on to say that, in David, she also recognized a “mixture of
egotism and insecurity.” How do these attributes help the reader understand both who Cynthia
and David are when they first meet and the long-distance friendship that they begin to cultivate?
2) During her frequent moves, Coffel sees buying pots and pans and learning to make a
Thanksgiving turkey as symbols of settling down and also of materialism. Instead of caring about
these things she is “preoccupied with larger matters.” Does the reader see Coffel’s unwillingness
to acquire the trappings of adulthood as positive and idealistic or as evidence of immaturity?
3) Writing letters can be a way of both revealing things about ourselves and concealing things in
order to create a not-fully-true version to present to someone else. How do you think this kind of
invention of self played a part in Coffel’s relationship with David?
4) Coffel (the daughter of a religious studies professor) and David (a minister’s son) share a similar
religious background and an interest in ideas and ideals. How do are faith and idealism central in
this memoir?
5) Coffel’s essay emphasizes the writer’s need for an audience: in many ways David is not just a
friend; he is a long-term audience. In the end, which of these two roles—friend or listener—
seems to have mattered more to Coffel and why?
6) The essay narrates Coffel’s journey from young adulthood, when she believed in the individual
power to change the world, to a point in middle age where she no longer believes this. In light of
her grief over “losing” David and her youthful illusions, why does she comment, at the end of the
essay, “I remember those years with affection, but they seem like a long time ago?”
7) The way in which Coffel and David’s friendship endured and sustained them both seems to be
due in no small part to the distance between them. In fact, when they were physically close to
each other, things seemed to shift: “tearful airport good-byes” and “overlong hugs” gave way to
queries about sexual tension, and a visit later on leaves Coffel unsettled. Can friendships based on
long-distance correspondence exist in the same way today, or has technology rendered this
particular type of friendship obsolete? What elements of friendship are lost or gained through the
immediacy of modern communication?
Craft Questions
1) How does Coffel demonstrate the differences between her present self and the woman she used to
be? Are there passages in which the distance between these two selves is particularly evident?
2) Throughout “Letters to David,” Coffel uses lists to characterize place and perspective, as well as
to capture the sense of endless possibility that existed for her at the time. Do you feel that this is
an effective descriptive strategy?
3) In spite of the title, and the importance of his friendship to the narrative, we hear very little from
David himself. Why do you think Coffel chose not to include more excerpts from his letters?
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Writing Prompt
People are constantly growing and changing, but it is not often that we stop and really think about the
changes we have made, particularly those that occurred gradually over a long period of time. Reflect on a
period in your past that seems distant, perhaps even amusing to you now, and try to remember yourself as
you were – your thoughts, feelings, desires and beliefs – as honestly as possible. Write a comparison of
your “selves” now, and at that past time.
A Note From the Author
About her prizewinning essay, Cynthia Coffel says, “I wrote ‘Letters to David’ shortly after reading Joan
Didion’s essay ‘Goodbye to All That.’ I identified with the speaker in that essay, even though I’m not a
Californian who spent her twenties working in magazine publishing in New York City. I think that writers
want readers to respond to their work as I did to Didion’s essay. You want your writing to resonate in
readers’ minds and help them see their own lives in new ways. Didion’s essay helped me see my twenties
as being all of a piece, and I identified with the loss of faith she describes, that disillusionment, that shift
in values that happens (it happened to me, at least) when you move from your twenties into your thirties.
So I wrote my own essay that says good-bye to youth.
“I wanted, in my essay, to honor the generous impulse of my twenties—working to help all those poor
people, trying to make our country better—and I also wanted to treat that impulse lightly, to admit that it
was mixed up with arrogance and exuberance and naiveté. I also wanted to honor my friendship with the
man I’ve called David. I think that kind of friendship is one you can only have at a certain point in your
life.
“I believe that the personal essay, with its exact descriptions of the raggedness of life, can achieve a
directness, an interiority and a strangeness that—for me, anyway—fiction can’t quite match.”
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