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So You Know

Ma and Pa,

We’ve been having so much fun around here! Uncle Luke says we can’t tell you about some of it, though, because he’s afraid you’d never allow us to come back again until we were all growed up.

We been riding three up (me, Rickey and Uncle Luke) out across the split and right up to the edge of the gorge. Such things we’ve seen. Things like you wouldn’t believe them if you seen them. Shoot, I’ve seen them and I can’t believe them, and if there’s one thing I’ve come to know out here, it’s how much I’m like you and Pa or you and Ma, depending on which one of you is reading. Me and Rickey are much more like both of you than we are like Uncle Luke, and we’re more like him than we are like Aunt Bonnie. But we’re more like both of them then we are like the people in Gladwater. Funny, I just got to where I know that. It’s like I learnt it out here somewhere, but I didn’t come to really know it until I thought to write it out to you.

Are people like who they live with because they live with them, or do they just tend to live with people they’re like? I could just have easily been born to people I’m not at all like, but I wasn’t. I don’t know what to make of that.

Another thing is that we’re gonna go into town on this weekend to see the shows, and Uncle Luke says times are hard but not so hard we got to stop living. I know he doesn’t mean things aren’t so hard we have to die, but what other kind of not living is there? Some kind of in-between? Like the way zero is between having an owing?

Sometimes I get to wondering on questions like that and they begin to seem bigger than anything else and I just have to put them off to one side of my mind so I can see around. Anyway, that’s what it’s been like out here. Lots of sights, lots to do, but a lot of keeping to myself, too.

Your kid,

Rob.

P.S. So you know, Rickey got his foot stepped on by a horse. He says he thinks it’s broken, but Uncle Luke says it’s just mashed. So you know.

Letters from Underground