RIP, Letters

The Huffington Post recently released a list of 20 things that became obsolete in the 2000s.  Many of the list’s items seemed to have left our daily lives long ago (VHS, telephone books).  Other obsolete things are off my radar (say, 1-900 number phone sex).  And still others seem not quite obsolete yet (bookstores—we have them for the moment, as far as I can see.)

On the list are letters of the hand-written, stamped, and mailed variety.  This item, of all twenty, is the most regrettable to me.  Maybe it’s my romantic side, my penchant for words made tangible, my appreciation for stationary (letterpress and foiling and embossing, oh my!) Or maybe it’s me moving into the old biddy phase of my life where I bemoan the end of the good old days.

In any case, I've always liked letters, equally for the writing and the receiving.  As a kid, I would spend a great deal of time writing a letter, practicing my best cursive (when else are you gonna use it?), peppering in whimsical little illustrations, exchanging with friends, family, and my two pen pals in Japan and Australia. 

Also, like many, my earliest romances hinged on letters.  You remember the drill: it started with the classic loose-leaf note, folded intricately with a little pull tab, passed in class or delivered by a giggling friend.  It said something along the lines of: “Do you like me?  Circle one: No.  Yes.  Maybe.”  If you circled one of the latter boxes, you might progress into serious love letters with a multitude of P.S.-es and feelings too big to say aloud.

These letters, if you didn’t burn them at the inevitable end of the romance (usually about 2-4 weeks), you probably kept somewhere with your old yearbooks and junk.  And that’s the great things about letters—the keeping.

A few years ago, my Great Aunt Lu died.  She was a cool lady who took an interest in me for whatever reason, and we had a relationship based nearly entirely on written correspondence.

When she passed away at the age of 90, her son asked my mom and me to go through her things.  In the course of sorting, I found every letter I ever wrote to her neatly folded in a circa-1960s golf shoe box.

She said she enjoyed receiving my letters, but I hadn’t realized she cared enough to keep them.  She had my letters spanning my young childhood 'til the weeks before her death.  She had letters from her son (who was in his mid-sixties when she passed) from summer camp to college, letters from his teachers, letters from her siblings, her husband, friends long since passed.  The time capsule in her cupboard was powerful.

I am an e-mailer, a texter, a Facebooker, a blogger.  I love these modes of communication endlessly and cannot imagine a world in which they didn’t exist.  But I’m not sure that I’d ever feel the same way sorting back through the depths of my inbox as I would physically unfolding and going through old notes and letters.  I can’t imagine looking through my grandparents’ correspondence on a screen or reading Rilke’s “E-mails to a Young Poet."  It seems wrong to not get an actual paper "thank you" or wedding invitation, and no postcards is no fun.

Something happens in the writing, giving, and receiving of a letter that makes it its own artifact worthy of keeping.  And while I can do without travel agents, landlines, and maps (and I do love me some maps), a world without letters is a little less charming.