Lots of Letters

When I was a young adult, I wrote a lot of letters to my friends and acquaintances. A lot of letters. 

Now of course, very few people write letters since we can email our thoughts for instant access and feedback, or text, or Instagram, or Messenger....

We did have phones back then, those clunky, black, rotary dial phones plus the ones that hung on the wall and had outrageously long cords so you could hide in the closet for privacy. But, while I did use the phone, there were strict limitations as to who you could call. Only those numbers in the same exchange were part of the monthly standard package. Any phone call to a friend away at school, or who lived out of state or even in a different part of Pennsylvania, resulted in a surcharge. So,while the monthly bill was low, there was big restrictions on who you could call and how long you could talk.

Hence, letters.

I very specifically remember having a conversation with the mother of the woman I was boarding with (I almost typed living with but that might connote a sexual relationship, of which there was none) during which I complained that I sometimes became despondent with the lack of return letters. I felt that I was doing all the work in maintaining many of my correspondences. 

Flash forward to this past week when I pulled out the bag of letters I had received during that time, roughly 1979 through 1984 or so, and it is clear that I my complaint was unjustified. I must have a couple hundred letters in that bag, a virtual treasure trove of communications from all the people that mattered during those tumultuous years. And I don't just mean, 'Hi, how's it going?", notes, I am talking multiple page stories about the emotions, activities, fears and philosophies of a myriad of young adults who were part of my life.

While I have only started sorting them by author, and have maybe looked at 10% of them so far, I am starting to think that maybe we need to start a letter writing campaign, and not just among us "older" people who remember writing letters, but for anyone with a pen and paper. 

Certainly it is true that when I send emails to my friends now, I can get wordy. And that I even occasionally get emails back that have substance. But I sometimes wonder if the sender and receiver in this situation might be distracted at the abundance of emails that must be checked. I would like to think that while personal emails are received in the manner they are composed, they still exist in world of quantity over quality.

A letter, on the other hand, especially one written and received today, is much more likely to be considered "special" by the receiver. 

Ah, but how to "write" such a being. Virtually all the letters I have been blessed to have received are hand written. Most in cursive, if you can believe that. My cursive leaves much to be desired at this point, so I would have to print my message. Is that acceptable? I could type it out then print it on my computer, but that seems impersonal to me. Am I wrong to think that a computer generated letter defeats the purpose?

At any rate, I am going to give it a try. I am going to print a brief letter on a blank card to start. I still send out Christmas cards in the mail, so I have plenty of addresses to consider. Perhaps I will even print out this post and include in the letter so the receiver has two things to think about, the letter itself and the concept of trying it on their own.

Some of you may remember the concept of the chain letter that existed a few decades ago. There were various reasons to start a chain letter in those days, for fun, for money, for inspiration, for charity, even to scare people into doing something so as not to "break the chain".

At the least, since it is so very obvious that people spend too much time staring and swiping at their phone, getting a letter in the mail might provide a little respite from the tech that seems to permeate our lives, and maybe even remind us that personal communication, no matter the method, is still worth the effort.

#writealettertoday