What's in your USPS mailbox?
I am willing to bet it's mostly advertisements.
Do personal letters/cards ever appear in that mailbox?
I am also willing to bet the answer is - rarely.
Handwritten correspondence began to fade when emails roared on the scene in the late 20th century.
And, in what felt like the blink of an eye, email began to morph from chatty personal letters into a who's who of businesses carping for more of your business.
Blink once more, and texting quickly became the #1 way of corresponding, offering more efficiency in this time-challenged world.
Handwritten notes were, at best, on life support.
Is letter writing now dead?
A novel published last year by author Virginia Evans offers a refreshing and apparently unintentional return to writing letters. (See the link at the end of this post to Katie Couric's interview with Ms. Evans)
Evans' novel, The Correspondent, celebrates long-form communication, both in emails and letters. We learn about its diverse collection of characters solely from their correspondence with the main character, Sybil Van Antwerp.
The epistolary format is as intriguing as the array of characters.
The novel's letters, initiated by Sybil, celebrate the romance of writing on a sheet of paper, which, until the last several decades, was a staple around the world. I wish the novel's typeface choice included a cursive font for Sybil's letters.
When necessary, Sybil composes emails instead of letters. While her crisp yet heartfelt manner is showcased in either form, it is the letters that keep my attention.
I remember a time when I regularly took pen to paper and now wonder why I allowed that practice to wither.
My written correspondence memories began in grade school when I had a pen pal who lived in England. Her name was Julie. We wrote of our little-girl lives and even swapped comic books. Sadly, those letters and comics have long been tossed.
It felt incredibly exotic to page through those young girl materials from overseas. The tissue-thin airmail writing paper added to the faraway glamour. My box of blank Eaton's Berkshire airmail stationery was a prized possession because it was filled with possibilities.
Another airmail-themed memory is with my friend Joyce, a high school and college pal, whom I continue to see regularly. Joyce did something tres exotic in 1973. She studied abroad in Paris at the Sorbonne for a semester.
We telephoned only once, but we wrote, and wrote, and wrote letters on the translucent airmail paper, squeezing in every drop of news possible. We filled each precious page because adding another meant more weight and serious cost to those international missives.
We howled when reading those letters aloud in recent years, remembering what our teenage minds wrestled with decades ago. They are inky time capsules.
Corresponding did not always require thousands of miles for permission to write. The senders and receivers could live relatively nearby.
My maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and Vincent, split their time living six months in Atlantic City, NJ, and six months around the corner from us in Lansdowne, PA. Just 66 miles separated us in the warmer months, and letters, more than phone calls, connected us.
Elizabeth was a reliable correspondent from South Jersey, making sure one of her newsy notes would arrive weekly at our home. My mom returned the favor religiously. Elizabeth impressively upped her correspondence when I went to college, always reminding me that I was missed and loved.
Here is one of her notes congratulating me upon entering college.
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Letter from my Grandmom Elizabeth |
At college, my mailbox buddy jokingly told me that while I received lots of letters and care package notices, he received dust. In four years, I rarely saw a letter for him in Box 524. He would marvel at my correspondence volume thanks to my dedicated pen pals - my mom and grandmom! After hearing of his plight, my mom even offered to write him! 😊
Mom usually wrote brief one-page letters before she went to work. They were succinct and loving. This brevity resulted in the arrival of two to three letters a week. The combined quantity and quality created the perfect formula for this homesick college coed.
Below is one of my mom's letters. A red arrow by the 'PS' is particularly noteworthy as it is a reminder of her upcoming phone call on Thursday after 11 PM.
In the seventies and eighties, long-distance weekday phone calls with my family were ALWAYS relegated to 11:00 PM and later because the phone company rates were lowest then. No exceptions!
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Letter from my mom when I was a college coed. |
Seeing her sign off - Love from all, Love always, Mom - with her trademark wispy swoosh underneath feels as comforting today as it did in the seventies. Her love always came with flair.
My older brother attended the same college before me. He wrote often, always placing two, $1.00 bills in each letter to me for no particular reason. I still feel the warmth of that older sibling attention from far away.
In The Correspondent, the character of Sybil, a retired law clerk now in her seventies and living a quiet life in Maryland, corresponds with a Texas suitor who questions her dedication to her writing practice. Sybil's response honors the power and possibility of letter writing when she explains:
.... even if they (letters) remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn't there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one's life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?
Letters preserve pieces of lives lived.
My mother-in-law, Dorothy, who lived in Florida, was a platinum-level correspondent. She would first write a draft of her letters and then commit them to gorgeous note paper in a final version. Her penmanship rivaled any Palmer method devotee.
The letters were precious in their content with immaculate cursive writing. Here is a sample:
During the summer between my eighth-grade and freshman year of high school, I corresponded with my beloved eighth-grade teacher, Sister Kathleen Thomas. As expected, her penmanship ranked in the stratosphere of beautiful handwriting. More importantly, she always cared deeply about her students, encouraging us to make the most of our expanding lives, as evidenced in the note below:
Letters can bring good news.
My first job in high school was at the J.C. Penney department store, located in Upper Darby's retail-heavy 69th Street. While the offer letter below is a one-way correspondence, it marks my entry into the part-time employment world.
Sentimentality is a core value of mine, so I was not surprised that my almost 16-year-old self was very proud of this particular "first."
Penney's employed me throughout high school and on breaks from college. They were reliable to me, and I to them.
My husband's maternal grandmother, Odie, also wrote to me starting while he and I dated. She was a retired school teacher and understood the value of written communication. She loved to share stories, especially from her years of living overseas in the 1960s. I am glad to have kept one of her letters.
Letters are sometimes the writer's final words.
My mother had two older brothers who served as US Army soldiers in Europe during WWII. Pete, the middle child, died in Germany and is buried in a US cemetery in the Netherlands.
Letters from Pete detail his soldier's story from basic training in 1943 to fighting facism on the front lines in Germany in 1944. He writes with optimism and reassurance. Pete reliably asks the family in every single letter without fail not to worry and to look after his beloved girlfriend, Gilda.
My grandmother saved over 50 letters from this soldier son.
Below are two particularly precious examples: Pete's last letter home and Elizabeth and Vincent's Christmas card to him.
They crossed in the mail in October/November 1944. The parents and son had no idea they would be the final written words between them.
First is Pete's last letter, written 10/31/1944. He consoles his mother in what appears to be criticism she received from a friend for not crying or worrying in front of others about her son fighting overseas.
Pete writes with tender understanding and, as always, a reminder to "keep up your courage and never worry."
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Pete's last letter home written 10/31/1944
(1 week after his 21st birthday & 1 week before he died in combat) |
Next is the Christmas card sent from Elizabeth and Vincent, mailed in October, 1944. It expresses hope that this will be their son's last holiday overseas. It includes Vincent's signature. He never learned to read or write, but he could, with Elizabeth's encouragement and guidance, sign his name.
(Every card my siblings and I received from Elizabeth and Vincent that celebrated a holiday, birthday, graduation, etc. included Vincent's signature emphasizing the moment's importance.)
I can't imagine the searing emotion my mom and grandparents felt seeing this Christmas card returned to them during the seven months Pete was MIA.
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| Note inside the Christmas card from Elizabeth & Vincent to my Uncle Pete postmarked 10/18/1944 |
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Christmas card - Elizabeth & Vincent's signatures postmarked 10/18/1944
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Softly moving my index finger across the words stills me. These fragments are emotional portals, and I am a willing traveler. I honor this uncle whom I would never meet. I honor his parents' unsinkable love, which I luckily had for 21 years.
Such is the pulse of written correspondence.
We not only hold something the writer once held, but we see something of their personality in their unique script, whether it is chicken scratch or elegant. They are embedded within each pen stroke.
I remember touring Boston University with my eldest daughter and stopping in the school's library. There, protected in a glass case, were letters written by Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1950s when he was a BU student earning his PhD.
Seeing his longhand felt so personal. It was visual oxygen breathing life back into this martyred leader. The handwriting brought him closer.
History is saturated with letters penned by notable and mundane figures. They are treasures because they capture a moment in time, in the voice of the time, as experienced by the author. No filters. No AI. Just thoughts.
From hieroglyphs to early alphabets, to modern languages, the urge to communicate affirms the essential human desire to be seen/heard.
Letters freeze time.
A friend's daughter chose a love letter as a wedding ceremony reading. It was from her grandfather, who was serving as a US soldier during the Korean conflict, to her grandmother. Hearing those loving contents not only moved those of us who were guests; they landed powerfully for their recipient, the bride's grandmother, who was also in attendance without her deceased spouse.
However, in a Cyrano de Bergerac twist, it was discovered that the grandfather deputized a fellow soldier all those years ago to use his eloquent writing skills to pen the love letter. He would then copy it onto his own notepaper and mail it to his stateside sweetheart.
Authorship aside, the loving intention won the day, and they married shortly after he returned home from duty.
Inspired by The Correspondent, a friend has initiated a pen pal effort with me, even though we live relatively near each other. I even have a few sheets of my mother-in-law's pretty writing paper to use.
Sitting in a quiet space, holding a particular pen, and writing one's thoughts in that moment feels different from a phone conversation or a text. It fuels contemplation.
Taking time to write forces my mind to slow down and think about the next word, which cannot be easily deleted by a quick tap of a keyboard key.
It is emancipating and painstaking.
It is art.
Author Virginia Evans summons our inner correspondent.
Let's heed the call.
*QUESTION: What handwritten letters have you saved from your past? Why have you kept them?
*VIRGINIA EVANS INTERVIEW: Katie Couric interviews the author re: The Correspondent.
*SUGGESTED READING: Want to read some letters written by notable historical figures? Click the link below. The website, The Marginalian, has been produced solely by Maria Popova since 2006, and offers insights via literature, science, philosophy, and human behavior themes.
"Letters from The Greats"
*SOME ADDITIONAL WWII ERA CORRESPONDENCE
