Letters
When I was a child, I used to spin a wobbly globe and let my finger come to rest on exotic places: Borneo, the Gobi Desert, the Bering Strait. Then, using the thin whispering airmail paper my father brought home from his office, I would pen letters to imagined people there. I would stuff them into old envelopes and stamp the outside with rubber stamps marked “Rush” and “Fragile,” affixing the date with one of those old rubber stampers that librarians used on Due Date slips before everything was computerized.
I remember the sound of the fountain pen slurping thirstily at the trough of ink and the feel of the thin naked paper that I clothed with words and the efficient power of the blotter as it trailed along behind, like my mother on a muddy morning, following behind our footsteps with the mop.
I considered these my letters to the world.
They are a powerful memory for me, and I mourn their loss.
I still get mail, much of it dropped into the waste can unopened or piled on the buffet. But I rarely get letters, the thick, old-fashioned kind full of homely news set down in the personal scrawl of someone known and loved. Receiving them is still an event, something rare and magical. When I open a real letter, I imagine the letter-writer composing while the muffler was being replaced or the clothes were spinning in the dryer, but the spirit of the letter, like a pebble dropped in a pool, is still making waves.
What I value about letters is that they require time; they affirm that someone has decided you are worth an investment of it. It is cheering to imagine friends at leisure, letting the press of the day pile up ignored around them like shirts to be ironed. They sit at the kitchen table, sip tea, eye the children in the sandbox. A lapboard spans their knees, their fingers grasp a pen, and thoughts of you are on their mind. That they are gathering wool to be stitched for you is a high mark of friendship.
Letters also endear the writer to you. Some words come quickly, melting like butter across the page; others come slowly, after much deliberate chewing on the pen. No matter what timbre, the voices that you love resonate on the page in a way that is lost through a Smartphone: “Your mother and I are bearing up valiantly under this heat”; “It is so hot that little pools of sweat keep smearing this ink”; “Geez, it’s hot here.” Errors in grammar, loose logic, and the crazed tracks of a hunt for organization are not disturbing in letters from people held dear, for, like an ardent suitor, they are blunders made in pursuit of you. Thus, mistakes in a friendly letter are easily excused. Like a son bursting in with good news and a smudged dirty face, the ungainliness is somehow doubly endearing.
I miss receiving letters, the kind faint with feminine perfume or sealed with a bead of wax, the kind bearing the fading memory of mucilage, the impressive weight of vellum. More than all this, I miss having huge piles of them to tie up with string and store in a dusty attic for my granddaughter to discover on a rainy Sunday. For her there will be scant evidence of my self and my time, no fingerprints from the present sent as clues to the past.
We write little history any more; we leave few monuments. There is less and less of us for future taxidermists to pad and mount. Our words are stuffed by science into signals through a chip. Incorporeal, they vanish. The future seems a distant place on the globe, and we bear it few postmarks.
