This morning my 7-year-old observed that “In the olden days people couldn’t text, so writing cards was like texting.”
His comment was timely, because some days it seems all I do is read letters from the olden days, as my thesis project has me poking around back in an era when that’s how you made contact with another person. We forget this now, when it’s so easy to reach out via text or email (and does anyone really call anymore?).
At the risk of sounding very old, I’ll mention that a college friend recently reminded me I was her first friend with internet, back when connectivity was never a sure thing: no cell phones, very slow and shaky dial-up, etc. Anyone who experienced the internet of the 90’s will recall that screechy, staticky sound the computer made as the dial-up modem tried to contact the server, then the moment of suspense when you weren’t sure whether it was going to successfully connect or leave you hanging. After I graduated college and went overseas, I kept in touch with friends and family back home with long, rambling letters. The alternative was to pop into an internet café—remember those?—and hope it wasn’t full of all-day lingerers or out of commission entirely.
But I’ve been going back further than the 1990’s for my thesis project, which focuses mainly on the 1950’s and 1960’s when people wrote really long letters to each other.
Last week I was in the Cecily Brownstone files at NYU’s Special Collections archives. Brownstone (yes that was her real name, and yes she lived in a brownstone) was the Associated Press food editor for nearly 40 years, as well as writing and editing a few cookbooks. She saved everything. She was very close with Irma Rombauer of Joy of Cooking fame, and Rombauer’s daughter, Marion. There are hundreds of letters back and forth between these women, and they are warm and unabashedly effusive. They also report on mundane dailiness; everything from what was blooming in the garden to family drama to the minutiae of health complaints. Lots and lots of health talk.
Although the conversation was not always scintillating it was intimate, and there is an intimacy we have lost in our cursory texts to one another. I’m as guilty as anyone of preferring a ping to picking up the phone…and a letter, what’s that? But our texts, while immediate and sometimes humorous, are oddly emotionless, and it’s so easy to misunderstand the mood or tone in these whittled-down communications—or worry that one’s own text has lost something in the translation. Even messages that are meant to be affectionate can be misunderstood as cold or curt because they are so brief. And let’s not even get into auto-correct mishaps.
Back in analog days, just how did busy, successful people manage the time to write a ten-page letter to a far away pal? My guess is they had a lot more time because they weren’t scrolling social media.
Since my family can’t seem to throw anything out (a blessing sometimes), we also have a few letters going back to antediluvian times, including some young and flirtatious courtship between my great-grandparents when they were sweethearts, not yet married. Those are from the 1800’s and my aunt Katie seemed surprised when we happened upon them, sepia colored and turning to dust among her memorabilia, as we sat digging through the past one lovely day last month.
Then there are the travel letters home from my grandmother to the family (she and my grandfather logged a lot of miles for work as well as for pleasure). In a four-page typewritten missive to her young adult children in 1965, she reported on their travels through Mexico and described, in thrilling detail, a new thing she tried called a Marguerita: “There is salt around the edge of the glass and you sip through this, very fine indeed.”
I wonder if one day we’ll save e-mail threads the way we used to save letters. I already find myself going back through old message chains from when the kids were tiny, and silly back and forths with my Dad when he was still alive. I wonder how we’ll preserve these exchanges for future generations. E-mail doesn’t quite have the tactile satisfaction of unfolding an old, crispy letter. Emails don’t smell the same as old letters do.
