A Lovely Record

My brother started something of a round-robin family Thanksgiving letter this past week. It was great to read about his life and family in New York. Then a brother's in Washington, a sister in Oregon, a brother in Oregon, a brother in California. E-mail is a fabulous convenience.

The NPR news site carried the story Sunday of a woman who found a bundle of love letters washed ashore after Hurricane Sandy. The letters dated from the 1940's and chronicled a wartime love affair that led to marriage and children as falling in love can do. The story goes on to report how the finder was able to locate a relative of the long deceased correspondents who was, needless to say, thrilled to have this fragment of romantic family history.

On a similar note, one of my office staff found a box of the love letters in her late mother's attic. They were letters her father had written her mother from Europe during World War II while they were boyfriend-girlfriend and separated by half a continent and the Atlantic Ocean. She took certain of the letters and had them cleverly framed for other members of the family. An incredible treasure, to be sure.

I've mentioned it before: I'm a terrible collector of "stuff." In my recent re-organization of my office I've uncovered a few relics. And, too, I continue to house a collection of letters-- romantic and otherwise-- that extend back more than 40 years. Friends, girlfriends, wives, family-- even a lawyer or two.

As fun as it is to read about long lost love letters being found the real point is this: what happens 60 years from now? Will your children, or their children, wonder what life was like "back in the day." Will they wonder about your courtship? Popular culture?  It may well be that no one will really give a rip about how it was way back then. But, if history repeats itself, someone's gonna want to know and someone's gonna be pretty disappointed that there is no written first hand social history. No love letters. No letters home from camp or college (like that ever happened anyway!). No letters to collegues and friends. Unless your e-mails get subpoenaed in some sort of nasty legal proceeding, there is little likelihood any written autobiographical information will exist down the road.

I'm not about to deactivate my email accounts. And I'm not about to stop writing the family via e-mail. But I will try to save the personal e-letters I get, print them to paper, and place them with my stash of letters. And every now and then, just once in a great while, I'll get out a piece of paper, fire up my old typewriter, and put a letter in the mail-- for as long as that service exists.