You look for signs of life in the sand. Small indentations of movement, breath. Then you dig and dig as Grandma Kathy taught you.

You pose next to Grandma with your tools for digging. Emily wears her Middle School Choir shirt. Anne holds a clam in her hand. Next year she will join the middle-school band. Mom wears her sweatshirt from the Monterrey Bay Aquarium where we watched an Octopus write its poems on glass, where no one forgets the rarely seen seahorses, where trombones slide their tears down long white sleeves to the sea.

Love,

Dad

Dear Anne,

We played Mozart to you in the womb.

If you play Mozart for your child, the synapses in her brain will forge new connections. She may become a doctor, a data scientist, a professor who explains Mozart: how every note fits, what balance and symmetry is, how masculine and feminine might be balanced within any imaginative narrative or musical form, within any one psyche or culture. When tragic elements appear in any Mozart work, they also contain the seeds of hope: not for Mozart, sadly, who died a pauper, but for your child. So if you repeatedly play one of Mozart’s great tragic works like the G minor symphony, your child might learn to fit all the messy emotions of life into greater and greater wholes. If you play Mozart’s last 17 piano concertos from the final decade of his life (1781-91), your child will learn that she, like the piano, has a unique individual voice that must express itself in response to the orchestra, the societal whole. If you play enough Mozart, your child’s attempts at self-expression may become as natural and immediately comprehensible and well-received as a Mozart melody. If you play the seduction duet from Don Giovanni, your child might learn how alluring surfaces—an advertisement, a beautiful face, a Mozart melody--may lead you astray if you do not understand what lies beneath them. The learning never stops if you play enough Mozart. If you play enough Mozart. If you play enough Mozart.

Love,

Dad

Celeste

Dear Anne,

Mom chose your first name, “Anne.” I chose your middle name, “Celeste.” Anne more practical, more worldly. In mom’s head, perhaps, that long list of queens. Queen Anne of this country, that country. Anne of Cleves, Anne of Denmark. Anne Boleyn, too.

I chose “Celeste” because I liked its sound, both the sound of the word and the sound of the musical instrument. The celeste sounds like bells, but softer, more nuanced, than the bells of church or government or clocks like Big Ben simply marking time as it marches along.

The celeste most famous for its role in “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” Every Christmas, we listened to Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” while you danced piece after piece on our kitchen floor.

Mom’s feet firmly planted. Anne of the earth. I was a dreamer. Celeste of the sky. Somehow you combined them both.

Love,

Dad

I cry when I see that picture of me as a little girl. Helpless and alone after the surgery, she must lie on her stomach for a week. No one told mom or dad she might need a wheelchair. Alone in the bathroom after another gold medal, I must produce for the mandatory doping test. I need a catheter to pee for the rest of my life. That’s worse than losing your legs.*

How to feel, how to think, about Esther Vergeer, the greatest female wheelchair player of all time, posing nude for the cover of the ESPN Body Issue in 2010. I love how Marielle Durand makes her blonde hair a little blonder, her eyes a little brighter, more open. Is Vergeer engaging us and our thoughts? Is she looking off into the future when posing nude in a wheelchair will no longer be a big deal. I want to read Durand’s portrait from where I sit now, fourteen years after the fact. Or better, perhaps, a century after the fact: Women accepted. Disabled people accepted. The body accepted. Bodies are bodies. Nothing more, nothing less. Bodies are bodies unless you’re an athlete like Esther Vergeer:

Injury worries performance pressures opponents improving faster faster . . . Gold medal time. Best thing is to hit high spinners to her. Make it hard to slice. Doesn’t look impressive to all those watching, but it’s what I should do to win. Why worry about how it all looks. Battle of my life. Year after year without losing. An increasing pressure of being expected to win. New sponsors, too, who only know me as a legend who never loses. I double-fault, miss shots. Family in the stands. Dutch television, too. Why do I feel shame?

Easier to pose nude than perform as an athlete? When Donatello sculpts David as the first male nude for over a thousand years, everyone had different ideas about what the nude body might mean: the body as beautiful, the body as pride, the body as sensuality, the body as shame, the body as consciousness, the body as the seat of sin. But what about the body as a vehicle for performance. David beats Goliath, after all. He stands with one foot on his head.

I played with dolls, fought with my brother. My father taught me to ride a bike. Taught me taught me taught me even after we both knew I would never be able to ride a bike.

*All the sections in italics are based on the language and thoughts of Esther Vergeer from her biography: Fierce and Vulnerable.

Artist Bio for Marielle Durand: Artist, teacher and active member of Urban Sketchers, Marielle follows a red string: drawing. She watches, analyses and shows in her sketchbooks life and people she has met for more than 25 years. In Sarajevo, on the top of the Rockefeller Center, down in the Algerian desert or in her special “Blue from Auvergne”, she tries to capture beauty and moments. Since 2022, she is invited by the French Parliament to draw the debates and received an Urban Sketchers grant for this project. She takes part in many projects with people in need. Her work can be seen in Europe and the United States. Marielle is represented by Garance Illustration in North America.

To see more of Marielle Durand’s captivating artwork, you can visit her webpage or Instagram.

Dear Anne and Emily,

We never said white trash the six years we lived there.

A trailer next to our chain-link fence. A mother and son, I think. She invited us inside once. Clothes, pans, boxes, food. I thought I saw a bottle of vodka. I tried and tried, but could not see the floor. She apologized for how the place looked.

Cages of fighting cocks in her yard. Cages of fighting cocks in half the yards around us. Cockfighting still legal in Oklahoma.

Across the street, on old single woman who weighed less than 80 pounds. More skeleton, than body. More skull, than head. Her husband dead a long time ago.

A young black couple lived to our right. They loved talking to both of you. On our family vacation, we gave them the key to our house, asked them to collect our mail.

When we returned, the old woman informed me that she didn’t like blacks sneaking in and out of our house. Did we know about them? I said I had given them our key.

A few days later, their dog was dead.

A few years later, they would have a couple of daughters like you.

Love,

Dad

Dear Emily and Anne,

A warm summer morning, wisps of white clouds. Air so still, so quiet, we can hear the Colorado River below. We gaze at layers of rocks--black, pink, off-purple, light orange—as they form for millennia. Geologists or priests might know their names, their ages, their essential truths. “God’s fingerprint,” I hear someone say.

All I know is Emily is seven, Anne is five. All I know is addition, subtraction, metamorphosis. All I know is we travel faster than the Grand Canyon’s slow-moving time.

You wonder how long the river has been carving its sculpture. I listen to the wind. I tell you we are a part of it all.

Love,

Dad

If you had been shipped off to work in other people’s homes to cook and clean and follow orders,

If you had married a man who was sent off to war,

If three of your own daughters died, one in the crib, two others at about your own ages now,

Then maybe you could measure the weight of Grandma’s smile as Emily sits on her lap, and Anne sits on mom’s. Four women, three generations.

Anne is three years old. She will have a college minor in math before she graduates from high school. Emily is five. She will earn a Masters Degree in Data Science. But could either of you calculate all the complex sums of Grandma Ethyl’s life as it morphed into Mom’s as it morphs into Emily’s, into Anne’s? Could anyone?

Love,

Dad

After last week’s substack post, I learned that my last book, Tennis Players as Works of Art, won the gold medal for general nonfiction from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the largest international competition for indie and university presses. I am now in the process of redoing the book cover to add two gold medals to it. Also adding a listing of award citations on the back cover. Last year, Tennis Players as Works of Art won a gold medal for Outstanding Book of the Year from the 29th annual IPPY Awards. I am a little blown away by all this recognition. Quite sure it will never happen again no matter how many books I write.

If you have not read Tennis Players as Works of Art, here’s a link to some of the writing in the book that was previously published elsewhere: https://cagibilit.com/tag/david-linebarger/ The book is available on Amazon and many other places.

Hope everyone has a great day!

Thanks,

David

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to announce that I will be reading from my most recent book, Tennis Players as Works of Art, at Northeastern State University, on Thursday, April 30, from 2-3 pm. There’s a QR code in the flyer above if you want to watch on zoom.

Called “madly ambitious” (PW) and “soaring, lyrical” (Kirkus), Tennis Players as Works of Art, has received numerous awards, including being the 2025 Outstanding Book of the Year (Original Concept) for the 29^th annual IPPY Awards. It includes original artwork from over 40 artists and short prose pieces in a wide array of different styles and approaches to the subjects of tennis, art, music, world religions, etc. Here is a brief excerpt:

Steffi Graf and Mark Rothko

I picture her alone before a late Rothko painting, his darkening palette. Steffi’s favorite color was black. Rothko’s floating color field, a universe for viewers they do not have in the real world. Black a type of protection; a barrier against stalkers, reporters, celebrity, noise. Black a tunnel, a cave, a hole, a portal. The inevitable turning toward light, the quest for tennis perfection. How do you enhance a gazelle-like sprinter’s speed, a skidding knifed backhand that rarely missed, the power and precision of the greatest forehand in the history of women’s tennis? Steffi racing fast-forward to whatever was next: the next serve, the next point, the next changeover, the next tournament. Black the color of mourning, of grief. The father she loves in prison for tax evasion related to Steffi’s earnings, that crazy misguided stalker assailant stabbing Monica Seles to help Steffi become #1. Emotions intimate and human. Limitless space, the sublime. Silence is so accurate.

All italicized portions of quotes from Mark Rothko.

Take care and enjoy the week!

David