An essay in this morning’s New York Times by Dwight Garner, caught my attention. The author mourned the lost art of letter writing imagining a world with no more “Collections of letters by…..” well known writers. Is any writer today keeping emails and if so, don’t we tend to write differently in an email than in a letter he wonders?
Mr. Garner writes about feeling isolated during the pandemic. “I’m not a telephone person. I dislike Zoom even more.” I‘m the same. He describes the highlight of each day waiting for the mail person to arrive and questions how our President could even suggest getting rid of the U.S. Postal service. I, too, have developed the habit of being on the lookout every afternoon for the mail person. When I see the white van, pull up, I call to Art, “Mail is here…”. One of us goes out to bring in what is ads but maybe the new issue of the New Yorker or Economist. That’s a “good” mail day. No long juicy letters to sit and enjoy… letters to read and reread as we did years ago especially when we lived abroad without Internet and the prohibitive cost of phone calls.
I think about friends and family who still value the art of letter writing and can count them on one hand. Very few. My brother, for one, who has no Internet and doesn’t write emails. He answers my typed letters with his own written in longhand on notebook lined paper. Perhaps it is one thing, other than having the same parents, that we have in common. We have a need to put an event, an idea, a thought down on paper almost as if it won’t be validated unless we write about it. Letters do that…they make experiences and thoughts more real. I write him more often these days sensing his sense of isolation living alone.
Mother with my brother Rich and Me in Asheville in 2013
My Cornell College roommate, Terrie, whom I have corresponded with for over 50 years saved all my letters. She has returned many to me in recent years in the exact envelopes in which she received them from so many different addresses. I attribute her respect for personal letters to her love of history and her career in museums preserving things. Not to mention her strong writing skills which have transferred easily to long newsy emails she sends regularly. She is my one friend who has spent 10 years of her retirement meticulously going through family letters and diaries, transcribing, rewriting, binding and self- publishing and finding institutions where these should be archived. She is dedicated, maybe even driven to do this. While she is rewarded having become the family historian, she is insistent that old letters in some form should be preserved.
Her email response to Mr. Gardner’s essay came back promptly with the response I knew she’d have, “Oh my, what we are missing by using only emails. You and I know that our children and grandchildren will have nothing by which to become acquainted with us or our parents.”
Terrie and I at our 50th Class Reunion in September 2017
I sent Mr. Garner’s essay to my intellectual friend Mary in Washington D.C. which prompted a quick reply. She confessed having recently thrown out letters she had saved from an old boyfriend. “Ultimately, I thought they were too intimate and we are not famous”, she wrote in her email. Then she admitted that it was a difficult decision and took her days to make. An unusual admission from a friend whom I’ve not known to be indecisive about anything.
Mary Rojas and me in Washington D.C.
I never thought of Art as a letter writer but during the winter of 2019, while searching for an indoor project we found Art’s Peace Corps letters. He wrote home regularly for two years from Western Samoa to New Haven, Connecticut between 1967 and 1969. His Mother kept the letters and we had them for years. I offered to type them if Art would dictate them to me. In this way I was introduced to Art as a 21 year old. We had not known each other then and would not meet till we were 26. The typed letters were bound and copies made and the originals now are in the Peace Corps Archives at American University in Washington D.C.
I was a prolific letter writer as was Mother. The result of decades of long letters written “home” now rest in a packed two drawer filing cabinet in my office sorted by date and country. Both our letters home tell our stories. Two adventuresome young women of different generations, starting out in faraway places.
Mother‘s letters are unique. They tell her story when she was 24 and left home in 1944 to travel by herself on a five day journey by airplane to Santiago, Chile to marry Dad. She had been engaged for 2 ½ years, had not seen Dad because it was wartime and he had taken a job in South America. When he was able to send for her she packed and left never looking back. She was married in Chile in Spanish, a language she could not understand, but her letters home describe the adventure of it all. There was much more to follow as documented in letters now filed in folders labeled Chile, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil. When her Mother died in 1962 there was no longer anyone to write to or save her letters.
My letters are in labeled folders with the first letters I wrote home when I left to go to high school in the US. Mother kept years of my letters in shoeboxes in closets and somehow they got moved from place to place ….until she began giving them back to me. There are intriguing folders labeled England, Travels through Europe, Paraguay, Chile, Blacksburg, Costa Rica, Huntsville, Princeton until Manila when we began emailing. That brought an end to letter writing.
Garner’s essay which began my reminiscing and sparked a sense of guilt in me, is really about lamenting the decline of “proper correspondence”. I, too, miss the world in which I exchanged letters with others and had time to think about and process one before another one came. I wrestle with the dilemma of letters from the past that are mine now to do…or not…something with. Do I owe it to future generations to transcribe them in an understandable way? (My archivist friend Terrie would answer with a resounding “Yes.”) Neither Mother nor I attained fame in our lives and everyone has some life story to tell. Will my children and grandchildren care or pay attention to these family adventure stories many years to come?
In the meantime, I will look upon my own writings as a journal I have kept. Art and I pulled out all the letters written from Asunción, Paraguay on February 16th this year which was our 45th wedding anniversary. We read aloud our own story of how we met and decided to marry. There were lots of “did you remember that?” “No, I had no recollection.,,” or “Can you believe the weekend adventures we went on? The trips we took together…” It is all there…every detail I wrote home .
Perhaps the continued isolation during the pandemic will inspire me to do more with this treasure. For now I shall savor these letters which remind me of what a far from ordinary life I have lived.
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