April and Randy dot com

Letter
Originally uploaded by aprilandrandy.

Letter-writing is becoming a lost art. When I receive a handwritten letter via the U.S. Postal Service, it practically bowls me over. It’s a rare individual who takes the time to commit thought and feeling with pen to paper anymore. The decline of real letter-writing is becoming a casualty of our postmodern lives. It’s a sad situation that should be fought tooth and nail.

My love for letters specifically must come from my mother. My mom has always been an excellent correspondent. Besides the annual Christmas letter, she writes friends and relatives regularly and has done so my whole life. If she has a few minutes while waiting for an appointment, she’ll write someone a quick note. When I was young, she used to stay up late at night, sitting at our IBM Selectric typewriter and write these amazing narrations of our daily lives and send them all over the world. Recently she’s learned how to use e-mail but thankfully for me, she still sends me letters through regular post.

Cherished Memories Randy and I have been working on sifting through the truckloads of boxes that we have in storage and I stumbled upon the first letter that Randy ever wrote to me. I was able to transport myself back in time to our lives fifteen years ago. Moreover, I could see the effort he put into carefully writing every word as it was quite legible which, as Randy will readily admit, is not his normal modus operandi. As for the letter’s content, it provided me a snapshot of the inner workings of my husband, a glimpse into the young man who won my heart.

When I turned twenty-one, I was away at college three thousand miles away from my parents. My father usually leaves the correspondence to my mother, but I knew that for a long time, especially while he was in the service, he was a prolific letter writer. That year, as a birthday gift to me, I asked my dad to write me a letter which he did. It was a lovely, handwritten letter full of news in my father’s voice. Needless to say, it is one of my most prized possessions.

It’s Easy to Drop Someone a Line My hope is that letter-writing will come back into vogue. Perhaps the popular movement of simplifying one’s life will resurrect the pleasure of taking pen to paper and jotting down a quick hello. The scrapbooking phenomenon may also aid this cause in that journaling is somewhat similar to writing letters and people might just get used to handling lots of pretty paper. Or perhaps wonderful stationery stores like Papyrus will lure writers out of their electronic daze. However it comes to be, I just hope it occurs. Right now, a few minutes of time plus $.37 could eventually become a priceless memory for someone or at least make someone’s day; either way sounds like a good bargain to me.