Mr. Postman

I miss writing and receiving letters. I'm a huge fan of technology and email -- don't get me wrong -- but there is something about snail mail and the excitement of opening an envelope, and the recognizable uniqueness of a loved one's handwriting. I love nice papers and the tell-tale envelope shape of personal correspondence. (Dave has also made me something of a pen snob.)

I think that's what it is -- the handwriting. I love the crisp cleanliness of print, the legibility and uniformity of fonts. But they are also so sterile, so generic. They reveal nothing of the writer but his or her preference for serif or sans serif and the creative capacity of his or her word processor.

Handwriting is personal and imperfect. Though many a nun and other grade school teachers tried for years to produce perfect Palmer right handers, one's personality, style, and mood cannot help but be expressed in handwriting.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if handwriting classes have been replaced with keyboarding classes in grade schools. Do kids still have to suffer through practicing multiple versions of that numeric-looking cursive capital Q on paper with dotted blue midlines?

Emailing is great, and free, and fast. IM is immediately gratifying and allows for multitasking that would be perceived as rude in a conversation. Each of these media have now been accepted as their own genre allowing for many a PhD candidate to wax philosophical and linguistic about the ease of global communication, syntax change, new systems of punctuation and abbreviation, and even those damned emoticons.

Technology allows for rapid and inexpensive communication with anybody on the planet who has access to the internet. Wait -- do I have to change that? Does the shuttle or space station communicate via email? You see what I'm saying?

When I get suckered into reading newspaper articles that are human interest stories on families impacted directly and daily by this war (it's always the photos that suck me in), I am struck by the number of people serving on land and sea who have the capability to email loved ones on a fairly regular basis. How different is this even compared to when the previous Bush put us in the previous war in Iraq? How reassuring must it be to communicate with a loved one overseas and know that the message might be a few minutes rather than a few weeks old? How comforting must it be to get even a few lines of text? -- "I'm ok. I love you. Send wet wipes and Humvee armor."

So, email is a great and wonderful tool that allows for easy written communication and has quickly become affordable and accessible to large sections of the population. It has, indeed, developed into its own medium.

And yet -- I cannot bundle yellowing emails with a tattered ribbon that I used to wear in my hair. Printing out emails from friends and family in order to preserve them in a shoebox under my bed is just, well, stupid.

Emails don't have the communicative power of transferring the multi-sensory nature of the (truly) written word. Only a handwritten letter or note can impart this -- the warm feeling of connection -- I am touching a letter that he touched, I am holding a piece of paper that he held and that started its journey far from me, was passed from machine to machine and person to person until it is now becoming wrinkled by my sweaty touch. This material connection is truly a connection over time -- from the moment it was written, to the moment it was read by the recipient, for the rest of time that it is cherished and reread and shared.

One of the beautiful and lasting side-effects of the many years of a long-distance relationship between David and me is a pile of letters and cards that are, yes, tied up with a tattered ribbon that I used to wear in my hair. Briefly, for those of you who may not yet have been subjected to this saga or were not present to live through it first hand, David and I met during our junior year in college while studying in Freiburg, Germany. After that blissful first semester, David was homeless for a few months, and I was for one. While he continued to roam, I took the Orient Express to Vienna, Austria for a spring semester of studies. Our letters began while David traveled Europe and slept on trains (although I had before that received a few notes with surprise gifts at my door and had thoughts scribbled in the margins of my notebook during class such as "your hair looks nice today"). David's letters are the epitome of romantic. He is such a good writer -- and such a charmer. And we were young and in love and in Europe...you get the picture.

Since I had an address at the time, I was the lucky one -- I got to receive letters! He would tell me about where he had been and what he had seen. Most letters ended with a proposal: "I'll be at the main train station in Prague this Saturday every hour on the hour from noon to six -- come if you can!" This was our only means of communication at the time -- Dave's letters to me and my occasional escape to meet him in a foreign city. (We saw Prague, Berlin, and Salzburg like this, to highlight a few.)

We never really had the chance to call each other -- we could sometimes coordinate phone calls to public phone booths with money saved up for phone cards. We didn't live close to each other, we didn't have cell phones (hardly anyone did), we didn't have access to email -- no, we were forced to do it the old-fashioned way. (Which, interestingly, is how I wrote this blog!)

I cherish the bundle of letters and cards from that time in my life. We continued to write each other upon our returns to our respective pieces of the Midwest: me in St. Louis, Dave in Chicago, me in Des Moines, Dave in Champaign-Urbana. Even as we graduated to phone calls and emails, we still sent each other the occasional note, or a funny card. Even since we've lived together I have enjoyed emailing quick notes to Dave at work or leaving the rare sneak attack voicemail -- but nothing beats a handwritten note left on the toilet (where he is sure to find it) or surprise cards sent to work.

I still carry in my Filofax a sweet note that David wrote me years ago and left for me to find on my pillow. It's kind of yellow now, and little roughed up, but it is a real piece of him that I can have with me when he is not near. And not even the most touching email could affect me like that short, handwritten note.