Going Old School
Personal Memoir
When did we stop writing letters as a society? Throughout my childhood and into my twenties, I wrote letters all the time. Am I dating myself when I say, back then, there was no email or texting? Of course I am. Long distance phone calls were expensive so they were saved for special occasions. I still recall highlighting phone bills to pay my fair share with college roommates. A practice that neither of my children are familiar with because they have their own cell phones.
Even before I morphed into a full-fledged genealogist, the urge to keep and archive my own history was strong. The oldest letters that I possess are the faded birthday and holiday cards, sent by my grandparents and previously stuffed with $1 or $5 bills. I began writing letters in earnest when my father moved to New York City in 1978. My parents separated during the spring of 1975 and divorced the following year. Papa lived nearby and we stayed with him one or two nights a week. No need to write letters then, except for when we went to Indiana over our summer vacations. If I needed to talk, I picked up the phone.
But everything changed in May 1978. The first letter is heartbreaking (because, of course, my father saved our letters, too). A despondent nine-year-old tried to sound upbeat, but she missed seeing the blue Volkswagen Rabbit that once waited for her after-school. As our habitual letter writing began, I clung to them, even though they were written jointly to my brother and me. For years, I saved them, tucked away in a red cardboard box covered with cartoon Garfields. The letters were a life-line for that lonely girl who missed her papa and who struggled under the firm hand of a tired, emotionally strained, unimaginative, overly religious mother. In contrast, my father kept his correspondence upbeat, chronicling his adventures in the big city, apprising us of his next visit, and recapping the previous ones.
The letters survived various moves and the big hop across the country (from one coast to the other) over thirty years ago. At one point, I moved the letters into three-ring binders, arranging them chronologically for easy reference and dividing them between my pre-college days when the letters were written to Jack and me versus those written solely to me. But that was the extent of my preservation efforts, until a few months ago.
It all began this summer with the urge to organize my digital photographs—a project I will have to circle back to at some point. Does anyone else think about what will happen to all those photographs we save up in the cloud when a person is gone? Who ultimately will have access to them? I think for most people, the pictures will disappear. Years of family images will be lost because we don’t print our pictures anymore and store them in physical albums.
At some point, my genealogical ADHD took over. My attention shifted to the piles of old family pictures scattered around my office. Of course, they raised more questions as I attempted to identify people and date them. I scanned over 1,000 slides and photographs before my focus moved onto the correspondence between my father and his parents, in hopes of finding answers to some of my questions. My father’s letters led me to my own. A month later, here I am, digging through plastic tubs late at night, reliving my undergraduate and graduate college years and the summers that I spent at Camp Kabeyun, all through the point of view of some old friends—many of whom I still interact with.
These old letters have stirred my proverbial pot, so to speak. These days I don’t check my mailbox regularly. USPS sends me a daily email to let me know what’s coming. It’s usually junk so I don’t bother putting on shoes to walk the fifty feet down to the box. I pay my bills online, since I went paperless long ago. Plus the last few times I’ve tried to mail a check, they have gone AWOL. I did receive an actual letter this week from one of my oldest friends; she sends me a few every year and I cherish them. In the past week, I’ve filled a binder with her correspondence—the earliest ones date from 1984. They span our teenage angst to our worries over our own teenagers. To me, the letters are a priceless treasure and a doorway into the land of long-forgotten memories.
As I sit in my office, writing on my laptop, I am surrounded by letters, filled with the voices of old friends and of relatives long gone. The urge to write letters has returned. I have challenged myself to pick up my pen and go “old school,” as we like to say around my house. So, dear friends, if you are following along, don’t be surprised if you find a letter in your mailbox in the coming weeks. I challenge you to write one in return, but if you don’t, that’s okay too. The pleasure is all mine, and I hope to brighten your day with a colorful missive that breaks up the daily monotony of unsolicited credit card offers, political mailers, and weekly shoppers.
I don't write letters or send cards much anymore either. Mike's mom, who is 102 and very frail, sends out cards to her grandson Jeff, and sometimes to me. Jeff and I chuckle about it because her writing is very difficult to decipher. We are both amazed that she is still corresponding.