Just when I’d started to think I was writing into the void, I returned home from a long, exhausting trip recently to find two letters waiting for me, forwarded from Angelus News.
Thank you notes, both of them, with enclosures.
The first came from Roland A. Pinza of Brentwood.
Handwritten on heavy cream stock, the note was a response to a column I wrote earlier this year about the beloved children’s author, illustrator, and downtown LA community builder Leo Politi (1908-1996).
“The computer and I never seem to be on the same page,” the letter read. “So I’m attempting to employ the lost art of letter writing with the hope that you will have the opportunity to take a few minutes to read it.
“Each time that I receive a copy of ‘The Angelus,’ I almost always go to your article first. Many a time I’ve wanted to thank you not only for your articles but for the subjects you choose to write about. Finally, your article on Leo Politi sent me over the top and forced me into this communication.
“I really didn't know Mr. Politi except for meeting him for a few minutes during the signing of some of his books. Even then, however, he gave the impression that you were the only person in his world, a gift too few of us have received. Enclosed are a couple of [photocopies of signed title pages of his books] to illustrate his appreciation for the purchases and his dedication to his craft.
“Also included, and probably already recorded in your research, is a copy of his [LA Times] obituary. I’ve now taken your article and placed it within the confines of his Bunker Hill book.
“Many thanks and keep up the good work.
“Respectfully, Roland A. Pinza”
“To the Family of Roland and Eileen Pinza, with gratitude,” each title page read. One was decorated with drawings of exuberant flowers, and the other with charming Christmas tree bulbs.
Both were dated 1974.
How delightful is that? When’s the last time you received a handwritten thank-you note, with enclosures that clearly took some digging, and that conjured a reader who kept archives on artists he cared about, dating back more than 50 years?
The second note was from Gene Saint-Amand, the longtime partner of a woman I’d written about a couple of times in the pages of Angelus News, and who, sadly, he informed me, had recently died.
Deborah Tobola lived on the Central Coast and from 2009 on was executive director of The Poetic Justice Project, an organization that engages formerly incarcerated people in the creation of original theatre that examines crime, punishment, and redemption.
“Hummingbird in Underworld: Teaching in a Men’s Prison” (She Writes Press, $16.95) was Tobola’s memoir about family, the vocation of art, and her nine-year tenure teaching creative writing at the California Men’s Colony (CMC) in San Luis Obispo.
“I remember how pleased Deborah was with [your articles],” Saint-Amand wrote.
“Deborah retired from Poetic Justice in 2021 to care for her dying mother and was subsequently diagnosed with ovarian cancer,” Saint-Amand wrote. “Ever the artist, she interpreted and reported on her final life journey through poetry. One product of this is the enclosed chapbook ‘Pas de Deux,’ published posthumously by her younger son a year after her death in October 2024.
“Deborah’s life work was based on her belief in redemption through art, love, and community. I’m sending this chapbook to you because you understood what she was doing and I think she would want you to have it.”
And I couldn’t be more honored to have it. Let others receive the Pulitzer or the Nobel. I’ll stand on my thank-you notes.
Deborah was the real thing: a daughter of California who, like Leo Politi, gave her blood and her life to its beauty, its spirit, and its people.
The poems in “Pas de Deux” (independently published, $13.99), available on Amazon and selected bookstores on the Central Coast, are stunning.
Her last, “All In,” ends like this:
“I ride into the wind, licked by the desert sun’s red tongue,
ride past Eppie’s Blue Spruce Bar, with its bright blue rebar,
ride toward the sea and the sea sighs like history or desire, ride, ride
to my pirate who will catch the blue bruise that blossoms
beneath his hand --- no, I am Alice falling, spinning, down
and down the dark hole of the new world. I am the red road
to Barstow and the widow and the widow’s tears. I am a sea bream.
I am Penelope, wed to beauty. I am a Fury.
I am Circe. I am Marie Curie.
I am a rain of birds. I am Persephone, aflame
with alchemical passion. I am an untamed river of light.
I am burning with the knowing. I am a poet.”
