Living: the ultimate team sport

Snail Mail (personal) vs Electronic Mail (impersonal)

Posted on January 18, 2012 Updated on February 28, 2012

I’m thrilled that instant information rules our day for the most part and I’m SUPER thrilled that we can communicate via Blogging, but I’m also a proponent of posted/written communication.

First of all: Blogging.

I think us Bloggers relish the opportunity to “be published” on the Internet because  not many of us will ever have a byline in a syndicated newspaper, and book-publishing just seems too hard a goal to attain.  With that said, however, I write with this in mind: job counselors often advise employees to dress for the job they want, not for the job they currently hold, so I’m Blogging with a publishing intent that takes me out of my home-office and into the homes of others.  If I can’t get others to read my articles, I may as well be writing in a personal journal.  So blogging is a great venue in which to reach the masses.

But I LOVE the written word.  I own a Kindle, actually, I’m on my second Kindle, and that’s the only way I read books, be they fiction or non-fiction.  I’m such a voracious reader, I’m convinced Kindle was invented just for me.  🙂  So when I say I love the written word, what I’m really saying is that I love letter writing.  I own stationery, n. paper and other materials needed for writing, and I have a large accordion file that holds greeting cards, n. a decorative card sent to convey good wishes. (Definitions from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th Edition, 2004.)  I love sending cards and I love receiving cards, but mostly I love sending them.

Nicole Brodeur, Seattle Times staff columnist wrote a piece that appeared in our local newspaper on January 13, 2012: For The Love of A Letter. She writes how wonderful it is to receive a piece of mail with our name on it, written in hand, which becomes “a bit of humanity among the bills and slick circulars.”   She correctly states that the written letter is becoming a dying art, so much so that the United States Postal Service faces a very bleak, if not brief, future.  Certainly e-mail is quick and doesn’t require one of those pesky, ever-changing-in-value postal stamps.   Evites are quick and oh so engaging – NOT- as we read respondents’ comments about why they can’t attend.  But Evites are pretty darn impersonal.  Ted Kennedy Watson, owner of two Seattle shops with all things paper, states in Ms. Brodeur’s article that he “gets ‘hundreds’ of emails a day, some invitations to events that, en masse, lose some of their luster.  You start to feel more included than invited.”

En masse communications – you’re simply one of the many e-mail addresses in someone’s global e-mail address book.  I know we’ll always rely on this form of instant communication – I certainly do – but Ms. Brodeur hits it on the nail when she says that she hopes that “we don’t tweet or tap away the value of putting thoughts to paper, of taking the time.”  (Even a “Dear John” written letter is more personal and respectful than a “Dear John” e-mail or text message.)  She talks about letters that she’s saved over the years which instantly brought to mind one of my most valuable letters; one which I keep in my fireproof safe: the last letter my mother ever wrote to me.  My parents still lived in Hawaii when I moved to the Seattle area in June of 1994 and my mother and I spoke on the phone at least two times a week.  But it was her letters that I relished the most.  One of those letters arrived in my mailbox on September 22nd, 1994.  I read it, placed it to the side, and went about the rest of my day.  Two days later my mother died in her sleep quite suddenly and inexplicably.  When I received the news in a phone call from my father that day I frantically looked around for my mom’s letter hoping that I had not tossed it in the recycle bin.  Glory hallelujiah – I had not.  So two days before my mother died, I have her thoughts on paper, in her handwriting, and signed “Love, Mom” at the bottom of the second page.

Somehow I don’t think a saved e-mail could ever render the memories and the sentiments that my mother’s handwritten letter does every time I retrieve it from the safe to read it.

Facebook (I have an account) and Twitter, and other social sites can continue to do what they do, but let’s not dispense with the antiquated and/or archaic practice of putting pen to paper.  Please?