Going postal

No, not that kind. But it’s worthy of note that today my teenaged daughter, gifted as her generation is with the magical texting fingers (as our generation was with the magical remote-control fingers), received a letter from an out-of-town friend. A letter. Handwritten, on paper, in an envelope, with a stamp. (Lickin’ it old-school, you might say.) I’m thinking about offering it to the Smithsonian as the last teenage letter in captivity.

I was even thinking about letters not too long ago, listening to Joe Cocker belt out his version of “The Letter,” made more famous by the Box Tops, and thinking of other songs that we still hear but which must make absolutely no sense to my children except as historical curiosities: “Western Union,” “Please Mr. Postman,” even “Memphis Tennessee,” requiring as it did the intervention of an operator in order to place a long distance call. (Must seem as odd to them as “Daisy, Daisy” did to us — not just the bicycle made for two, but the need for a stylish carriage.)

Me, I’ve been busily tossing away a stash of my own teenage letters that somehow survived a hundred previous purges and have been hiding away in the attic. They’re not taking up any space, except in my psyche, but it’s just time for them to go. Of course, that requires one final read before they can be shredded, which means one more visit to whoever it is that I was back when I was 15, 16, 17 and more and the universe was expanding, when I was making new friends in far-off places and we were all so clever and literate. The old practice of referring to previous missives renders about half the letters unintelligible, and references to people and places I no longer remember finishes the job. I have letters from people whose names I barely remember, and from people I don’t remember in any way, shape or form. I have letters that intimate that I was in places I don’t remember having been, doing things I don’t recall having done. So this is how the memory goes, slowly, and things that once were so important they were committed to paper now cannot be recalled, even with written evidence to jog the memory. So it goes.