Letters
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 3:08PM | by Otter A few days ago, mom asked me to open up a cupboard that was too high for her to reach and to bring down whatever I found there.
One box was full of travel memorabilia: menus from the old Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth cruise ships; postcards sent by her parents and herself from Italy, Britain, and France; a hand-written note from the London Grovesnor Hotel concierge, espressing his satisfaction that my grandfather could pick up tickets for The Mousetrap at the box office in the West End; a press clipping from a local paper in Lowestoft, England where she and three friends were interviewed as friends from across the water who had come to work at the local YMCA on their vacation.
The other box was filled with letters.
Hundreds of letters.
There are letters from me when I was in college; letters from my sister and brother; letters from old college friends; letters from casual acquaintances met on overseas journeys in a time when such meetings sometimes meant the price of an aerogram three times a year. There are letters from old school-friends, and from friends acquired in churches or buses. There are even letters from guests in the English hotel where mom worked as a college student.
There are letters to my mother expressing condolences on the deaths of her mother and father, one from the president of her old college and so personal ("I have heard from Jane...") that it could not be from the hand of a secretary or some form held just for the occasion.
There are wonderfully playful letters from an uncle by marriage, her mother's sister's husband, who deplores the vulgarity of rock and roll in 1956 but who defends Jerry Lee Lewis from Dick Clark's charge that he is "hatchet-faced" and "plays the piano like he's beating a dead horse."
The family letters are filled with a gentle, passionate affection.
There are illegible letters and letters so neatly written that they seem to be composed by angels.
There are postcards with pictures of beaches and boats or the Eiffel Tower.
A large stack I am not permitted to see is bound in string and in rubber bands, the letters my father has written to my mother, scores of them.
The paper is yellowing, sometimes brown.
Mom thinks that she will throw a stack away. I take them from her, and she asks why. I tell her I'm surprised she has to ask. If your mother, I ask, had left letters, would you want them?
She nods silently, and passes over a small stack she has just re-read.
In a time before email, we wrote letters.
They captured our thoughts so impurely, not as data streams or binary strings, but in handwriting that our hands had committed to fragile pages. We left our sweat or tears or even blood on the pages. Our hearts seemed to embrace writing not just as self-expression, but as a remembrance that the hand that moved the pen was failing in time's stream.
In forty years, the best of our prose and the worst will be forgotten.
But there is a scent almost of vanilla and age that hangs around the box I am accumulating in my room, the handwriting of the dead and the soon-to-be-dead, and I for one am not willing that one particle of their silly, profound love should be left like a body to rot in the earth.
As I close this post, I hear mom on the phone with her childhood friend, alerting her that the bodies once hidden are now disclosed: there are secrets that girls share that possibly ought to remain hidden, but here are the letters, testimony to a checkered past. They are laughing now: the past is a long time ago, but there we have their hands against their hearts.
"Let me reassure you of this," says my mother with gentle North Georgia irony. "You had an awfully good time." But nobody should probably know. Nobody will. There is only one copy. I know where it is.
But unlike with email, there is a remedy: soon the weather will get cold, and I suspect that I will be asked to build a fire.
Cancer, Email, Letters in Culture, Personal Reflection, Relationships 
Reader Comments (5)
I come from a family of letter writers and my father wrote to my mother every day the year he was in Vietnam. They're too personal to share now, but someday my mother says she would like me to have them. I actually wrote a letter to my mother today. I'll probably get one back from her telling me what she saw out her kitchen window. Off the subject of letters, but related...I love having a record of people's handwriting. Before my grandmother died, I chose several of my favorite recipes of hers and had her write them down for me. For a gift for my oldest daughter, I chose recipes of mine, my mother's, aunts', etc. and had each person write them on a recipe card for her.
My father wrote his dad every week. The letters were 10 pages plus long, and Grandpa wrote him back every week. When I moved away I wrote my dad every week. There is something special about touching something that someone you care about touched and made just for you.
I miss so much that people so rarely write letters anymore. I have boxes of beautiful stationary - but who to write to in this age of emails that don't even require openings, closings...or real words. But we seem to live in a world of, "Hurry, hurry, hurry - who has time to write a letter?" I think time should be made. Will our grandchildren have letters from previous generations to hold and appreciate, or will it be a computer file of our old emails to muse over {shiver!!!} When my Grandmother died, we found *her* box of old letters, and also documents that had their original Russian names, etc. When my Great Grandmother died, we found in her boxes of letters that she was in fact from Russia, not Poland like she insisted all her life. When my Father died, I found a letter he had written, more to himself but with thoughts of me. It is tattered and worn now, even only being 20 years old (has it really been that long since I was 19? Can he really have been gone so long?) kept safely in my special box. Yes, I miss letters, and letter writing, terribly.
And the last line of your post made me cry.
Reading this makes me very sad for what you are going through. I am so very sorry.
It also reminds me how furious I still am that my brothers just threw away all my mother's letters. The letters my father wrote to her when he was in Viet Nam? Gone. The letters she wrote back, which would have been the stories of my childhood, and theirs? Gone. All gone. I don't even think they knew what they were doing.
I have the letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother when he was dying in the TB Sanitarium in Kentucky. I love those letters. I wish I could afford to really preserve them, but I'm afraid that they won't mean much of anything to anyone after I'm gone.
So cherish your letters. They might be cold comfort right now, but I am so envious that you have them at all.
Our technology is advancing and it's sad how people are forgetting the old way of communicating to their friends and loved ones.