Big Crazy Idea (the letters)

It is a completely normal thing to hear me to rail against most any kind of nostalgia, whether it is in my presence or just sort of out there in the world. The Good Old Days is a phrase that I loathe and would not mind seeing eradicated from the world entirely (only to see it resurface as the name for an underground waltz punk big band).

Modern medicine is good. Ibuprofen is good. Sanitation, yes. Communications technologies are impressive and wonderful. Technologies that allow us to read and understand the words and languages of the past, and therefore challenge us to reconsider our presence not as the end all be all of everything, rather as part of continuum of incredibly stupid creatures who occasionally manage to create or develop or express magnificence.

I take from much of the nostalgia that I hear that people wish for a simpler time, when there were not so many decisions to make, and children were better behaved and played outside and families congregated around dinner tables and people took care of each other. I will not explore every avenue opened by those statements, but I will tackle one: The one of extended time spent together. The one about quiet and unrushed conversations. The one that I heard quite a lot right before I moved away from Lincoln.

"Letters? I love getting letters!" "You mean, like handwritten or typed and mailed through the Post Office, letters?"

There was a conversation around a living room about getting letters that started when I explained my Big Crazy Idea (letters) to people who did not know me that well, and who have at least two decades on me. They did not seem to believe me, and I didn't pursue it because they then went on to talk about how it felt to get mail. Mail that wasn't bill, that was meant specifically for the person opening it.

The point was made that email feels ephemeral, even if you have written and sent a letter, getting it via email makes it feel somehow less permanent or meaningful, whereas even the most trite statements carry an air of importance when written on a piece of paper and stuck in the mailbox with a bribe for the postman (stamps).

I knew two years ago that I was going to leave Lincoln, and that the group of friends that I was part of would be geographically separated, probably for the rest of our lives, barring visiting people or vacations together, or those adult types of relationship maintenance. The importance of those friendships in my life for the last several years cannot be overstated, and I realized that if I did not make some action to preserve them, it was likely, however sad, that they would fade.

I love writing letters. I love getting letters and responding to them. I love the act of sitting down with a typewriter or pen or computer keyboard and thinking about one specific person for an extended period of time. And the opportunity to share that experience is part of the joy and also the gut-wrenching tension of writing and sending letters to people. It is personal and it is intended to be that way. Individual and instant.

My letters have been labeled self-indulgent. It was a fair label, coming as it did from my second husband who received letters from me almost every day one summer as I was out in the field studying thistles and learning about dehydration and exhaustion and the wonders of corn on soft tacos. I learned some years later that he had not even opened almost half of them. It makes a certain degree of sense if you know him. I do not pretend that it is okay. I choose different recipients now.

I used to have a limit to how many letters I would send to someone without getting any response at all. And then I started this project:

I write and mail letters every day. I have a schedule and a wooden recipe box full (almost) of addresses pasted to card stock. I keep track of them, and record the dates on which I sent the last letter. They go out to new acquaintances, friends both recent and long-term, and people who may as well be family for how long I've known them.

Responses are beautiful and they make me smile, but they are not required and do not change my need to stay in touch. I am a difficult person to love or to know in even the easiest circumstances. Being away from almost everyone that I love and enjoy is hardly easy. Writing is as much a habit as it is self-expression and must be maintained as such even when it seems there is little to write about.

To be honest, I have not written every single day. Up till now, I have occasionally skipped a day and then made up for it one the next, that kind of thing. And I haven't written a letter at all for a week. (It had been a difficult sort of week.)

Guilt is an emotion I reject out of hand. We do not get along and while I am mercenary in almost everything, assuaged guilt is vile and empty in my world and I would rather have chocolate or a massage or The Ink Trilogy, thank you. Therefore, everyone on the schedule for last week will be moved to this week, beginning tomorrow, and I will endeavor, at least until December 15th, to write every single day. It is not like I don't have the time right now.

I say this and then realize that I have picked a week full of long, detailed letters filled with passages copied out by hand and fiction of caves and wordal wanderings about insect wings.