DEAR children,
Please put down your phones and log off Instagram and Twitter, because I want to tell you about something I used to enjoy. It was called “writing a letter.” Sadly, you don’t know anything about this. When you want to communicate with someone, you just type a few words and hit the “send” button.
This lack of knowledge became obvious the other day, when you—my 18-year-old son—came to me mystified about exactly how to address an envelope.
You can figure out what’s wrong with my computer in nanoseconds. You can break your phone down and put it back together. But you don’t know how to lick a stamp.
Oh, foolish me. You don’t even have to lick stamps anymore. They mostly come prelicked.
I understand the appeal of instantaneous communication with everyone on the planet. I, too, enjoy e-mailing my friend in Switzerland or sending an instant message to that guy we met in Egypt.
But that electronic dialogue has its downside, too. When you take pen in hand and actually write a letter to someone, you are touching the same paper that the recipient will touch. It has your fingerprints on it (something to remember in case you ever end up on “Forensic Files.”)
The words have flowed through an instrument held in your hand, enshrined in ink on paper that you have selected.
Little bits of your DNA embed themselves in the paper, and even more on the envelope when you lick and seal it.
In other words, it’s personal. It’s intimate. It’s real.
When you want to send it to the recipient, you have to write an address on the front, which usually includes the person’s street address, with the city, state and zip code. These should be centered on the envelope.
In the top, left-hand corner, you put your own address, city, state and zip code. That’s called a “return address.” In case the person has moved or there’s a delivery problem. The post office will send the letter back to you so you know it wasn’t received.
You know what the post office is, right? Remember that person that Buddy the Wonder Dog always barks at as if he were a serial killer? That’s the mail carrier. He works for the post office. It’s run by the government. They send letters and packages all around the country. They delivered packages even before Federal Express was invented.
After you write the addresses on the envelope, you need a first-class stamp, which you will put on the upper right-hand corner. The stamp has to be in the proper amount, or the post office will send the letter back to you. No, I can’t remember exactly how much, because I have that big roll of “forever stamps” in the drawer that I’ll never use up. It might be 47 cents.
Yes, I know you think it’s stupid to pay 47 cents to send someone a greeting when you could just e-mail them in eight seconds.
But, consider this: I recently opened a box of letters and cards I’d sent my father and grandmother. As you know, they have both passed away.
Reading these cards and letters, starting with my childish handwriting and the little pictures I drew, and then progressing to the adult me, with chatty news about my life, was a moving experience. It was like coming across little time capsules from the past.
Then, there’s the tiny collection of love letters I’ve received in my life. They’re in a box I keep in the closet. I don’t look at them often, but when I do, I see the handwriting of someone I once loved. His fingers once touched that paper. It rockets me back in time.
This is not the same thing as reading something that someone typed on a screen. Nowadays, they’re talking about no longer teaching children how to read cursive handwriting.
I suppose that’s because no one writes letters anymore.
Perhaps, someday, my letters to you will look as obsolete as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Nowadays, the only letters that arrive in my mailbox are bills, invitations to join, say, some society that wants to cremate me and then dump my ashes in the sea.
Letters are now associated with grandmas who write to you in cramped, cursive writing on letter paper. Their mail smells like scented powder and Chanel No. 5.
Chanel No. 5 has always been hands down my favorite scent.
But when a friend gave me a bottle and I asked my teenage daughter what she thought of it, she said it smelled like “old ladies.”
Hmm, fair enough.
Maybe I’ll write you a letter about it, in cursive, and use my best pen. You can tweet me back.
Marla Jo FisheR / The Orange County Register