“Becca,

Tom from NST mentioned this book and I immediately thought of our little music curriculum. I envy the way the author describes their relationship, how much he loved her and how she put a hitch in his git-along. I am really enjoying the hitch you’ve put in my git-along recently.

Happy Birthday!

Dan 3/7/08”

I’ve been having some awful boughts with my agoraphobia as of late, which means I’ve settled into ordering books via the internet instead of leaving my house to spend hours in the bookstore. This has been depressing on it’s own because there are few places where I feel the most comfortable spending leisurely hours drifting amongst shelves of objects that are going to eventually lead to me being far poorer in the wallet than I was when I arrived. It’s been hard not being able to hold my panic attacks at bay, even for some quiet hours browsing books, but this is what it is and eventually it’ll all even out.

This letter was written on the title page of the Rob Sheffield memoir that I ordered a couple weeks ago (Love is a Mix Tape) and I have to admit it was a nice surprise on top of the excitement of receiving something in the mail that wasn’t a bill. For those of you that haven’t read Shefflied’s memoir, it’s about his wife and their courtship and marriage and then his grief over her untimely and sudden death. Sheffield wraps the narrative together with mixtapes he’s made and been given throughout the years. It’s a really lovely book, sweet without being terribly mawkish and sad albeit not hopeless.

When I finished the book, though, I didn’t go back to my favorite chapters or my favorite lines, I flipped back to the letter that had been inscribed to some Becca from Dan on the title page and I felt terribly sad. It didn’t seem to bode well for Dan and Becca that this book had found it’s way to my hands. He’d also gone through the novel and had underlined his favorite parts, even made a few scribbles of exclamation in the margins. I found it cute and also sadder. Did Becca even care about these things? Maybe Dan was just some creepy guy she didn’t actually like all that much and this birthday gift had been her dealbreaker.

But if not, did Dan and Becca stay together for awhile? Did he make her mixtapes? Did he even know much about the music that Sheffield wrote about? Did he feel elated, as I had, to read that Sheffield and his wife had met because he’d noticed her excitement over a Replacements song being played in a Charlottesville bar? Did Dan and Becca ever get far enough to have their own song? And who was this mysterious Tom from NST?

I wish I knew.