When was the last time you wrote a letter?
Letters. Photo: Liz West, via Creative Commons, some rights reserved
For Jon at our front desk, it was 3rd grade when his teacher required pen pal letter writing. For Dale and Bill on our digital team, blank stares and no memory of when that last letter might have been written. Ditto for Denise who’s on the janitorial team in our building and said she emails and texts. Period.
Shelly wrote a letter last month to her young son in summer camp. Apparently the camp encouraged email messages but Shelly went the distance: she found the postal address at the camp’s website and sent off a real letter. Her son brought it back in his duffel bag when he returned home. (I guess handwritten letters are collectibles.)
Photo: Birmingham Museum via Creative Commons, some rights reserved
I’m talking about personal letters. Not business letters. Not email letters. Not condolence or happy birthday cards. Letters. David Sommerstein wrote a letter a couple of months ago in reply to a letter he received from a friend in New Orleans. That’s the thing. We reply to email with email. We reply to text messages with text messages. And we may be more inclined to write a letter in reply to receiving one. It used to be we just wrote letters–with or without a prompt.
There’s been chatter in recent years about the loss of personal–and cultural history–with the death of the written-on-paper letter (doesn’t matter if it’s typed or handwritten).
For example, take this letter from Eileen and Shirley Hussey’s foster mother to their mother Mrs. Hussey in 1940. Here’s how the Museum describes this artifact:
“Over 35,000 children were evacuated from Birmingham, England during the Second World War. Children left at short notice with few possessions, and their parents often didn’t know where they were going. Some children were unwelcome, or even mistreated. Letters provided vital contact with home. Some parents either refused to send their children away or brought them home before the war ended. Many Birmingham children perished in air raids.”
In my early years living on the farm–we’re talking way back in the 1970s–I used to write lengthy letters to friends and family, complete with hand-drawn illustrations of my garden, the cats and dogs by the stove, plants and trees I was learning about. Why don’t I write letters (regularly) anymore? Well, there are all those digital distractions, whether Facebook or email, texts or Netflix. In the “old days” we pulled in one or two local television channels with rabbit ears and if we didn’t like what was on, we turned it off…and often, wrote letters. All this media and digital entertainment (okay, and information) takes time.
Will we really delve into digital archives the way we rummage through dusty boxes retrieved from the attic? A few years ago I came across a letter from an uncle who replied to my mother’s request for advice about her relationship with her first husband. Holy cow. Shared with my cousins. Their father had written this incredibly moving and empathetic letter. Somehow I can’t imagine my son finding something as meaningful buried in my digital files.
Magic marker and an air kiss save the day.
Speaking of my son, he’s the reason I felt compelled to consider the issue of letter writing. He lives in NYC and is increasingly more reliable about texting, calling or emailing me on a regular basis. I might even receive a quirky birthday card in the mail. But letters? Not since he spent three years in Japan, and even then I was more likely to Skype with him than receive something on paper. (Remember the old tissue-thin blue-tinted airmail envelopes?)
In any case, he’s been a bit remiss for the past few weeks. Feeling guilty, he texted this photo to me. Made me laugh.
Okay, digital communication has its up side. For sure. But isn’t it fun when you go to the mailbox and there’s something inside besides the grocery store flier and bills?
And, I’ve got to tell you it is much more satisfactory to take a match to a letter from the lover who scorned you than to simply hit the “delete” key on your laptop.
Photo: Howard Hall, via Creative Commons, some rights reserved
Tags: correspondence, letters, mail, writing
This is a great post– you bring up a lot of great points. About a month ago, I opened up my mailbox to find a surprise letter from a friend at school… not a best friend, but definitely more than an acquaintance– a good friend! Anyways, we’ve sent each other three letters each since, with the letters getting more detailed, more personal, and more sincere. It went from talking about our jobs to talking about our dreams and the obstacles we’re trying to overcome in our personal lives. It’s funny, because through this month long letter exchange, I’ve gotten to know someone I thought I already knew pretty well more than I ever thought I would! 🙂
A year ago I found some letters sent to me 45 years ago. I still have one from my father from forty years ago. Is there anyone who has saved an email from even as little as 10 years ago? That would surprise me.
The writing style and penmanship of a person is as unique as their fingerprint. A part of them is with you when you read that letter. An email has no dimension beyond your screen. If it is truly personal and important and from the heart, then write. I am not a font and the person I am sending it to is not an ISP.
Mr. Kent: Love your observation about penmanship. So true. In my mind’s eye I can still conjure my father’s and my mother’s handwriting–more clearly than hearing their voices in my mind’s “ear.” My father, artistic as well as a skilled draftsman and engineer–had a style of writing that looked absolutely exquisite on the page but was very nearly unreadable. I learned over time to decipher it, but not without effort. My mother’s handwriting, equally illegible, was not aesthetically pleasing…just impossible to read. My handwriting, sadly, is genetically linked to my mother’s.
I’ve been thinking lately of starting a letter writing campaign, once a week pick a person and write a letter to them. As a family historian I have lots of letters that I have saved from family members updating information for my files, birth dates, marriages, etc. But some of the more treasured letters I have are exchanges between my maternal grandfather and his two brothers, one in Canada where they were born and the other brother in England where he emigrated while a young man. The letters were infrequent, once so far apart that my grandfather wrote the local constabulary to determine if his brother in England had died. My great uncle regarded that with some amusement. The letters stopped with one last one after my grandmother informed my great uncle that grandpa had died but grandma kept them all and they are now in my files along with the photos sent from England and Canada and it was through the Canadian brother’s letters that I found a cousin and his family that I had not known existed. I shared copies of the letters with him.
Letters are important. While I confess that I too have largely circumbed to email, Facebook, etc. I know that letters are a time machine, a link to the past that are the source of much of our individual and collective history. Biographies rely very heavily on letters as a source. They are gold to genealogists. Emails continue to exist (unless you are one of those privacy paranoids who immediately deletes them after reading them) but they are behind passwords and not easily accessible after you are gone. They are also usually short and on matters of little consequence, not thoughtful communications composed at leisure. They tend not to be as revealing of the writer as a hand written letter. We should write more letters.
The Letter-The Box Tops. Joe Cocker and his great rendition. You could substitute ” Sent Me An E Mail” for “…Letter “and it fits, but just not the same.
I wonder if receiving an email will inspire some artist to sing about it?
“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
I ain’t got time to take a fast train
Lonely days are gone, I’m a-goin’ home
‘Cause my baby just wrote me a letter”
A few years ago I was in Great Sand Dunes National Park hiking around the dunes and found a suitcase, a big one – not a carry on, full of letters and some photos. Just glancing through the stacks they all appeared to be from the same person and reading a bit from one it seemed they were love letters from a man to a woman.
It was an eery thing to find out there in the waste of sand and I reported it to rangers at the visitor center. A ranger asked me to guide him to the site which was a little over a quarter mile in from a camping area. After taking photos and GPS coordinates the ranger, a tall sinewy westerner gathered the suitcase to carry back but it quickly became apparent he needed help so I took one side of the suitcase and we lugged it together toward his truck. We had to stop several times to rest, but finally reached the parking area. It was a sad and disturbing thing finding such personal items that had obviously been saved over a very long time.
Some weeks later the ranger called to let me know the outcome. A young woman from Pueblo, CO had brought the suitcase full of memories to bury after a breakup. She was fine. She had thought she buried the suitcase permanently but the dunes had shifted. I don’t know how she ever dragged the suitcase out there alone but apparently she did. And she asked the ranger to please throw it all away; which he did. One small service by the Park Service. Probably the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
Knuckle: That is an amazing story. The image of a suitcase full of letters and photos adrift, as it were, in a sea of sand. Wow. Thanks for sharing that.
Mr. Kent: I think I’ll play “The Letter” on this week’s Blue Note. I love that song.
Jim: Thanks for sharing your story. I think letter-writing is basically personal story-telling. And, think of all the novels that use fictional letters as a means of advancing the story line.