Mike Cremedas is the evening traffic correspondent for WAMU 88.5FM, the NPR station servicing the greater Washington D.C. Metro area. He delivers thirty-second traffic updates every fifteen minutes throughout the evening rush each weekday. Pat Brogan, the host of All Things Considered, introduces him in each instance. You can listen to Mike Cremedas briefly here. Over the past week, WAMU has been holding their Winter Membership Campaign, where listeners are called upon to contribute financial support.
Dearest Mike,
I write you on this snow burdened Valentine’s Day to celebrate us. Today, a day reserved for celebrating love, I celebrate me, and you.
My reasons for doing so are unquantifiable. They resist being counted or otherwise measured, by virtue of their being magnificently and painfully sublime. They, my reasons, are really very deep.
Mike, the mind is your medium. It is your canvas and your painter’s brush, equal parts marble and chisel. It is through this medium of the mind that I experience you, day in, and day out. Each weekday evening, in fifteen minute intervals, at the precise and undying frequency of eighty eight five. Me, in the driver’s seat of my car – you, singing your siren songs over invisible waves from somewhere deep in the realm of forms and ideas. Love is both a form and an idea. The character of your persistence in my life supersedes the physical.
A love without worldly basis could have its drawbacks, were I a lesser suitor. The span of my ownership of you is so limited! Thirty seconds of traffic – thirty naked seconds, suspended in time – and you are gone. With your every departure, you call upon me to maintain faith in your absence. While this requirement of yours is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the life we share, I respond to it just as Abraham responded to God: “Here Am I.”
Your name, Mike Cremedas, confronts me like a work of art. Its verbal manifestation is nothing short of Gestaltian. When spoken (as it ought to be) your name is a singular entity comprised of two impossibly discernable parts. Just as you and I together amount to a whole greater than the sum of its parts, your name blends harmoniously into itself in a way that obscures all thingly barriers, rendering my world void of any and all distinction. When you are there, nothing makes sense anymore.
Mike Cremedas. Mikremedas. Mikera Medas. Mikerem Edas.
It is a whale song, a reflection, and a call sign for the Absolute. It is that it is.
Have you Googled yourself, Mike? I did. There was so little for me to see. I have at my disposal so little of you, I mean, to observe. My better angels inform me that this is actually a good thing when it comes to us. They remind me that if I can’t have more of you, then no one can. My brief but eternally cemented encounters with you transcend the superficial need for biographical information, and pictures.
I should say before closing that if I could take back Googling your name, I would do it. I would take it back in order to more faithfully preserve what we have. I should not have tried to expose you, even to myself, even at all. Your absence from the visual world manages a powerful type of presence on its own.
I must leave you now with this letter, which I mean completely sincerely on this Valentine’s Day. Do please stay warm, Mike, in this cold weather we’re having. It will be spring before long.
With everything I have,
Philip Chevalier
