I had a healthy to-do list when I was heading into my weekend a couple of weeks ago, but then I made the mistake of hunting down an old photo. I found the sought-after picture fairly quickly, but, by that time, the glow of nostalgia had pulled me into the other photos in the box and, before you knew it, I was going through all of them. I have done this many times over the years, but on this particular occasion, I stopped to peruse some items I usually ignore: letters that I had sent and received back in the days when I still communicated with friends and loved ones through the mail.
Most of the letters were written in 1986/87 when I lived with a family in Maracaibo, Venezuela as part of the AFS program, but there were a few others I received from friends through 1994, shortly before I got that first e-mail account, thereafter changing the way I communicated with old friends. The letters I wrote to my family from Venezuela, which were returned to me when my trip was done, were all carefully numbered so that my family would know if any got lost in the mail. In one, I wrote “if you don’t receive this letter, please tell me” without even realizing how illogical this request was. Almost every letter written to me had a description of the weather along with many other mundane details: how business was at my family’s restaurant, who was moving on to new jobs, updates on favorite tv shows, and travel plans for my sister.
Because of an agreement with the local newspaper in which I had promised to write regular letters from Venezuela for publication, I received several letters from the publisher. One of those letters ended with him saying: “Keep up the good work. Who knows, maybe you’ll work up to be an overseas Bureau Chief for Associated Press or something!” Those words never came true, though I did apply for a job at the AP many years later, but those encouraging letters made it easy for me to approach the publisher on my return to ask for a part-time job that got me through my senior year of high school and several subsequent summers.
In the pile, I discovered a love letter that has now been set aside so that I can take the time someday to plow through the Spanish that no longer comes easily to me. I also saw my grandmother’s scrawl for the first time in decades while re-reading her September letter in which she told me she had just started knitting the mittens that were her traditional annual Christmas gift to all her grandchildren.
Reading old letters is a wonderful gateway to our pasts. These letters not only remind of us events long forgotten, but they also tell us about our hopes, fears, struggles, and loves during a specific moment of our lives. When we’re gone, these letters can give our children and grandchildren a glimpse into our lives from a time when they didn’t have a chance to know us. For literary and historical figures, letters have formed the basis of new insights for their biographers, giving us a more complete backstory on their lives.
I’m not one who typically laments the loss of old traditions or practices as a result of technology, but losing the habit of letter writing is an exception. There really is no modern equivalent to this practice. These days, when I recount the events of the last day or week with my friends, I’m no longer sharing personal thoughts and feelings as I would when conversing one-on-one with a close friend. Instead, I’m crafting an image of myself in a short post that I believe will put me in a positive light for anyone following my social media account. It’s all surface stuff with very little self reflection. Any messages of a more personal nature are locked behind private and (hopefully) secure platforms that are unlikely to be handed down through generations. If Snapchat is your primary form of communication, these messages may not even last a day, unless the user explicitly asks to save it, as the service quickly deletes them once all recipients have viewed them. This practice is a good thing – do we really want our most personal messages to remain on the server of some private corporation for years to come? On the other hand, will my children ever have a moment 30 years from now where they can spend an afternoon looking back on long-ago conversations they had with friends?
Even if we save the most meaningful and important communications, there is no guarantee that the commercial service hosting them will be around ten or 20 years from now to allow us to reconnect with our younger selves. Over the past month, I’ve watched as many of my colleagues have flocked away from Twitter, in many cases deleting their accounts and, along with them, all of the posts they’ve made over the years. While not exactly the same as losing a personal letter, the loss of these posts is a loss of our collective memory. We can save this collective memory by archiving Tweets to the Wayback Machine, but it’s an extra step that most people probably don’t even think to take.
About two months ago, I wrote a letter for the first time in decades. It took some time because I first had to track down stationary, which could not be found in any nearby store, not even the “stationary” aisle of my local CVS. I wrote my letters slowly so that they would be legible (I have terrible handwriting), and my hand was cramping as I reached the end. Now I have a lot of blank stationary paper staring me down, challenging me to write the next letter. Accepting the challenge is far more work than just posting a status update to social media, but the benefits could be long lasting.