writing letters
I was musing on how many emails i’ve written in the last 10 years. While I’ve had many memorable ones from some great friends, and I’ve written many to my wife and others, where are they?
now, if you go upstairs at our house, you can pull two shoeboxes: one is full of letters that I wrote to Amy when we were engaged, and the other is full of Amy’s letters to me. We can hold them, read them, remember the place and time when they were written. There is something about holding something physical (imagine if the Constitution was electronic first…).
I have letters from my mom, who is in Heaven now. My grandma, who poured into my life.
I remember what triggered this. No one wants to check the USPS now. It’s only bills and junk mail. When I was a kid, and we moved to Alaska, I couldn’t wait for the mail to come. We lived off of the main highway from Anchorage to Fairbanks. No telephone, not even electricity or running water. Each day, we would drive to the highway, and there were a line of mailboxes right off the highway. We were box 113 or 139 or something like that. I remember always being excited to look and see if there was any mail in the box. Typically, I would get something if I wrote something (my Grandma Helen reminded me of that).
Anyways, we need to write letters. bottom line. more later.
about 5 months ago
Hey Steve, you know there is a handy little function in your e-mail program called “print”.
For all the hand-wringing over digital communication and the loss of ‘physical’ communication, in many cases the difference is the effort we put forth in preserving that communication. You took great care to preserve the love letters from your wife, collecting them, storing them in a box, dragging that box along every time you move. You could do the same with e-mail if you just hit print. Or a little more complicated, ctrl-C and start a Word doc of correspondence.
One Valentine’s Day a while back I collected the e-mails my wife and I had sent back and forth when we first started dating, formatted them coherently in Word and printed out a book of sorts.
You can have the same keepsakes with digital communication, it’s just a question of whether or not you’re going to put forth the same effort.
about 5 months ago
Good points Kevin,
Maybe my generation (40+) has too many old habits from our upbringing that we can’t break.
I am referring to my kids mainly, who have never written a letter in their lives (except to Santa), BUT do communicate regularly thru technology. Most of their quick burst twitters or facebook chats will never again see the light of day UNLESS THEY PRINT. Which, getting teenagers to do anything is a challenge today.
You understand the importance of preserving communication, cause you are a writer. I understand it NOW that I’ve had the blessing of holding my grandma’s letters in my hands. Incidentally, my Grandma Helen at age 80 taught herself how to use a Commodore 64, in order to keep communicating cause her handwriting had failed her. She kept doing that until her death at age 94.
So, because of your posting, I’ll go home and harass Cori and Joel to start printing out the important communications to them. Guess I’ll have to take stock in Lexmark printing cartridges…