“The concept of a handwritten note, a wax seal, and the whole nine yards is kind of lost on the public at large these days,” he said as he looked through paper selections trying to find the perfect stationery to represent his personality and taste. I couldn’t agree more. It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote letters on a regular basis.
When I was in elementary school it was to my very first pen pal named Shasta- I still remember the school picture she sent me with her very first letter, introducing herself when we were paired up as part of a class project. She had brown pigtails and was missing a few teeth, as we all were at that point. We wrote back and forth for months and there was nothing I looked forward to more than getting those letters on the scratchy school-lined paper, usually with a drawing of sorts to spruce it up a bit. We’d send stickers, drawings, friendship bracelets, pictures of our pets, and letters talking about what we hoped we’d get for Christmas, what our brothers and sisters did that annoyed us, foods we liked, our favorite colors…you name it, we wrote about it.
That habit evolved into the letters I’d write in middle school and high school…somewhere around the time I turned thirteen, I remember going on my first trip to Disney World with my friend Beth. We became friends with these two “dreamy” boys from Florida and Texas, and we started writing letter after letter to them after we got home. No one had cell phones yet, and to make a long-distance call was still pretty expensive, especially if you talked for hours, so phone calls had to wait for special occasions like birthdays. But the letters would go back and forth every two weeks like clockwork- there was absolutely nothing better than checking the mailbox and seeing a hand-addressed letter sitting there, contents unknown, waiting to be read.
When I was in college, I wrote to my grandpa. He loved to write, and continued to write to me until his handwriting got shakier- and then he would get out the old typewriter instead. I kept him up-to-date on what I was learning in school, who my friends were, and shared the aspects of college life that grandparents would approve of. But regardless of what was said, the mere act of writing made a difference to me, and I hope it did to him. There’s something about getting a letter from someone that is a genuine compliment– it says someone made time for us, which is perhaps the most valuable thing anyone can do for someone else.