When There Were Letters

     One thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do in this blog is rant, so I won’t.  However, I think we fogies may be happy in our hearts that there are things we were born early enough not to have missed.  I read today that the student mailboxes will be closed forever at my Alma Mata, Bates College.  It seems that due to email , Facebook , and texting, letters are a thing of the past. 

     When I was at Bates, there were three students to a box.  Mine was assigned to Rushforth, Swarthchild , and Talbot.  David  Rushforth  and I ended up in Plymouth.   Actually Caroline Tabor preceded me alphabetically in the class of ’62, but Bates was very straight laced, and I guess they thought coed sharing of mailboxes was indecent. 

     When the mail was in, a crowd gathered around the mail boxes with people dialing the three digit combinations and the sound of the little doors being slammed in frustration if they didn’t get any.  Letters were for the most part hand written.  There was no spell check.  Our teachers told us if we didn’t know how to spell a word we should look it up.  Dictionaries didn’t give your their best guess of what you were trying to write, so you did the best you could. 

     There was something about a letter that has been lost.  There was the paper, the handwriting, the ink (or pencil), and even the spelling.  The effort it took to write a letter was part of the pleasure you got from receiving it.  Some one cared enough to write it, seal it, put a stamp on it, and mail it.  You touched what they touched.  You could picture the person at his or her desk or kitchen table writing to you. 

     It may be that the slowness of the job let us think more carefully about what we said, although I won’t swear to it.  When I was a teenager, my mother advised me, “Never say anything foolish to a girl, and if you do, don’t put it in writing.

      Letters could be kept and often were.  I love to read John Adams’ letters to Abigail and her letters to him.  I enjoyed Harry Truman’s letters to Bess.  People reveal themselves in letters.  One of the great losses to my family history was the time the letters of William Talbot, who was a sea captain and a Mississippi River pilot, were put out into the garage where the dampness turned the old paper to powder. The one that escaped described New Orleans during reconstruction.  Captain William was sympathetic with the suffering of the people, but he said, “Bostonians, with their love of liberty, would never stand for it.”  I quoted that to a modern day New Orleans steamboat captain, and he was not amused

     There were the letters of Michelangelo and the love letters of Abelard and Eloise, but the best book of letters I ever read was by E. B. White.  I think if he wrote a shopping list, I’d want to read it. He was a prolific correspondent.  Usually when I’m reading a long book, I’m happy to come to the end, but I was sorry to close that one.  One of these days I may start again.   

     I don’t know what future historians will do.  Will people someday read The Emails of Hillary Clinton? Perhaps it will be The tweets of Kim Kardashian.  I’m glad to have lived in the age of letter writing.  It’s nice to get an email, but it was better to get a letter.