When was the last time you received a letter? I’m not talking about the latest fund raising appeal from Greenpeace or the water bill. I mean an actual handwritten letter. When did you last write a letter to someone? I bet it’s been a while for both.
The ubiquity of email and texting has relegated the handwritten personal letter to the dustbin of history alongside house calls from your doctor and pre-dawn visits from the milkman. In our increasingly cold and impersonal world, letter writing is just one more thing that I mourn the passing of. A couple of years ago, I decided I would singlehandedly try and revive the lost art of letter writing. I sent long personal letters to seven close friends. I recieved one reply. Of course that hasn’t always been the case.
In the spring of 1979, a close friend of mine and I drove cross-country to relocate to California from New Jersey. With our minimum wage Tower Records salaries we were barely able to eek out a living. During our first three months here, owning a telephone was a luxury that we could not afford. We’d use the corner phone booth (ahhh phone booths, another dustbin relic!) to call our families on the east coast…collect! So for me, letter writing then was a lifeline, a way for me to keep in touch with those who I’d left behind. I worked mostly 4pm to midnight shifts at Tower so I’d come home late, smoke a little pot, listen to the late, great Americana radio station KFAT and write letters into the wee hours of the morning. It was an exhilarating and liberating period of my life but also sad and lonely at times too. I’d fill yellow legal pads with words; my hopes, dreams, and fears pouring out through my fingertips and onto the page. Writing is such a tactile experience. I love the feel of a pen as the nib drags across the paper leaving a trail of blue in its wake. Writing a letter requires time and patience, both being in short supply nowadays. Letter writing is the ultimate in delayed gratification. If I send a letter to someone on the east coast and they reply immediately, the fastest turnaround time I could hope for would be a week. The ways we communicate now often require instant replies. Letter writing also requires thought and a basic understanding of spelling and grammar. My Pilot G-2 .07mm pen does not contain spell check or auto correct. It’s up to me to catch my mistakes and to correct them. Every essay that I post on this blog begins as a handwritten piece.
During my seminal first years in California, I wrote countless letters to family and friends. If you could arrange them chronologically, the trajectory of my life at that time could be traced through those letters. There’s an old box in our garage which contains hundreds of replies I recieved during that time. Every once in a while I’ll dig that box out and rummage through it. Each one of those letters is unique. The sizes, shapes and colors of the envelopes are all different. There are so many cool stamps and postmarks too. My mom used to send me a few brightly colored leaves from our backyard trees every autumn. A letter from an old girlfriend still retains the faint scent of patchouli oil. With each letter, you get a little piece of the person who wrote it. Emails? They’re nothing but 1’s and 0’s, meant to be read and deleted. I doubt anyone prints out emails and saves them in a box.
It’s an uphill battle trying to retain a little of the personal touch in a world that grows more virtual every day. So writing letters is my way of pushing back; a small, personal rebellion against tweets and texts and automated voicemail. Keep your eyes on the mailbox, there just may be a letter from me tucked in there between the bills and junk mail.
I miss them too, and recall those days with fondness. We’ve definitely lost something, though of course the immediacy and easy connection is also a blessing. It puts me in touch with so many people I wouldn’t otherwise hear from. I hope someone saved the letters you wrote! Thanks for this Louie!
I agree! For the birthdays of distant family members this year, I crafted handmade cards layered with images, words, feathers, pressed leaves, you name it!, in hopes that the receipt of a multi-dimensional letter in the mailbox would feel like a visit with an old friend. When the pandemic started, I then came across an organization asking people all over the country to write letters that they would deliver to elders in nursing facilities who’d been cut off from family visits due to the virus. I wrote a series of Hawaii-based dispatches to my invisible new friends and tried to picture each of them sitting by a window, or out in a courtyard, or at the communal breakfast table, turning the pages of an unexpected letter from an island-dwelling stranger, and I imagined I could see them smiling.
Louie, It’s not entirely true that no one prints out and saves and shares emails. I don’t do so often, but recently a friend of mine, after finishing a recent novel of my authorship, wrote to me in such a kind and persuasive way that I printed out three copies: One for my daughter, one for her mother and one for myself. I too have boxes of letters from years gone by, some of them yellowed with age, many of which I had forgotten I had saved. Old love letters, expressions of rip-roaring passion that lost its way, nearly broke my heart a second time when I revisited them. I too continue (about half the time) to write in longhand, which I then transcribe onto my laptop. But I confess that I have ceased to send hand-written letters to friends. I settle for sending many emails, short and long, to a great many people. I have, I suppose, become a slave to the convenience. Though I can try to pretend it’s so I don’t impose my wobbly penmanship on my near and dear. Thanks for this piece. Our lives overlap at so many points, it’s as though your memories have blurred into my own. See you on Quietude. Happy trails, AH.