Correspondence of a Class Clown

Here's a love letter someone wrote to his beloved:

My own sweet bright light, Sally:

These trees are still young and new but already strong and sturdy -- and with a long life-span ahead of them. JUST LIKE OUR LOVE

They are also bathed in a golden glow -- as I am, when I'm in your presence. Your love bathes me in warm, golden wonderfulness.

Here's another, from the same fellow to the same lady:

The King loves his Queen -- and decrees that she shall receive all his kisses, touches, hugs and love forevermore

In return, he wants her to hold him in her heart for every moment they're apart

This same love-sick gentleman left notes for Sally, on post-its and index cards:

It you were any prettier, the Sun would be embarrassed that you outshone him.

I'm so in love with you I could burst -- but I promise to clean up the mess.

They're not all like that, though. Some of them are a bit more adult in tone, and some are downright dirty.

You're the Queen Kong of my heart.

You can climb my skyscraper anytime!

So, who is this guy? Who on Earth could have written love letters and notes like that? Well, by way of a clue, on the very first letter up above, I omitted the fact that he signed it "Pumpkin Balls".

Turns out, it was this guy:

George Carlin wrote these, and many many more, to his second wife, Sally Wade. Carlin's first wife (of more than 30 years) passed away in 1997; a year later Carlin married Sally Wade, and he remained married to her until his untimely death in 2008. Apparently they met in a bookstore, when Sally Wade's dog Spot hit it off with Carlin (who loved dogs and once claimed that "Life is a series of dogs"). Carlin would then apparently express his love for her by constantly writing her little letters, notes, postcards, and whatever else he could get his hands on.

A lot of it is goofily sentimental; a lot of it is downright odd; and a good portion of it is -- well, you still can't say a lot of that stuff on teevee. Wade has gathered a lot of this together in a book called The George Carlin Letters: The Permanent Courtship of Sally Wade. It's all very sweet, and very Carlin. What's nice about this book is that the actual notes are reproduced, in Carlin's writing (which is sometimes very difficult to read), along with occasional doodles. Read in sequence, the book forms a portrait of the other, non-public side of Carlin's final decade. I personally found it more pleasurable to dip through the book at random.

Carlin's humor took a decidedly darker tone in his later life, but he wasn't all gloom and doom, as this book shows.