My Mailbox

My Mailbox By Jacqueline Cruver

I am checking my mailbox in anticipation of receiving important mail this week. Here in our friendly and unpretentious rural towns, that could still mean going to the post office and seeking your post office box number on the wall of hundreds of small, ornately painted glass doors, and perhaps exchanging pleasantries with the postmaster to whom you know on a first name basis. Today, I am listening for the squeak of my curbside mailbox door signaling the postman has delivered my cache of mail along his hurried pedestrian route. I am anxiously waiting for my signed copy of Jim’s fourth book. Jim and I keep in touch by occasional emails, calls and snail mail letters. I like the letters the best because I can sit in my comfortable reading chair and hold the words in my lap and put them down and pick them up again. Like a good book. We have remained pen pals since 1980 BC (before computers). We have mailed announcements of births, weddings, retirement, memorial services, and manuscripts on compact discs, and copies of our published ramblings.

Most of us “boomers’’ are not total dinosaurs, and have become aware of the terms wi-fi, broadband and Megabits. There is no arguing that emails and Facebook offer convenience. But I think the lifelessness of inanimate technological intelligence merely enhances the echo of our solitary existence. In the here and now of quarantines, and visits to loved ones being prohibited in hospitals and care facilities, the written card or letter offers a way through the barrier of isolation, lingering and accessible to be picked up and read again to help pass those hours alone. Young and old alike have the need for connection. The Pew Research Center statistics reveal that more than one third of adults 25 to 54 are unpartnered and many more in the category of 54 and older. That means aside from work and errands, there are a lot of folks going home to their cat and impersonal, one-sided conversations online. I am not saying letter-writing is the fixall, but it could be a nice way to supplement the other ways to connect. I am so pleased when my sons call or video call me, so I can visually witness their lives as they continue to mature and change. But there is such a void when the call is over. I hear the click like the pop of a bubble and I am left holding the phone as if it is the empty bubble wand. Silence. No copy to backup or replay. But a letter. . . a letter ends softly with a closing salutation that wishes the reader good health, aloha, adieu, until next time...I like that. As my recollections have begun their game of hide and seek with me, letters that I have kept provide a good reference of what is going on in the lives of friends and-

-family and a dependable way to keep track of everyone’s constantly changing physical address. But let the computer do that for you, I hear you say. I am familiar with data entry, and will enter it when I get the time it requires to type it into that contact list. Truth be told, I suffer from trust issues. I once lost three years of journaling when files were deleted on my first computer. Photos, dates and details of my young sons turning into manchilds, entries of helpful lessons from a life coach, emails, stories, facts and figures that I wanted to remember for future reference, this precious file of records to supplement my already full memory bank was just lost, lost in space. It was a crime and I was the prime suspect of operating a computer without a learner’s permit. Rule #1 Do not let your children play on your personal computer. I will NEVER-

-let that happen again. I have advanced my computer skills and now rely upon a solid back-up system that cannot be deleted; A box under my bed. I can share it with other people without needing a password to open it. No Wi-Fi, no long wait to open the program, no apps, and absolutely no clicking needed. It does not require enormous data centers, wired for powersucking fans to cool the hundreds of monstrous machines that hold the endless data saved in the “cloud” that will soon contribute to heating the planet. Ok, ok, help me down from my soapbox. My large, dull brown shoebox holds selections of unique and meaningful mail covering a span of three generations. Just like the file becoming dusty in my mind, they are not in order. They are all mixed around waiting to be selected at random. Then the portal opens, and I am with the person who took the time to take thoughts from their heart and place them on paper to deliver the information or sentiments. Letters are love on paper, plain and simple. They say, ”You are in my thoughts and I am taking time, precious time from my hurried life to make sure you know that you are this important to me”. The dozens of postcards, birthday cards, holiday cards, and letters in my box are very diverse, just like the authors. There is a telegram delivered to my mother before she met my father, found in her things when I closed up her home and her stories. Another brief message on a postcard shows a caricature of an estranged friend of mine and just the words “I Love You”. One dear friend staples extra pages into cards and scatters colorful illustrations and borders throughout her words. Her letters are lively and animated just like she is. There is a note to me from my youngest son that delivers an apology in bold crayon capital letters. He was twelve years old. His humble accountability being captured on the page for eternity. Another is a letter I had written to my grandmother in carefully penned cursive to tell her how special she was to me. I was ten. I can almost feel my ponytail pulled back just a wee bit too tight, making my eyes feel slanted and I hear the whrrrr of grandma’s cards being shuffled for the next round of solitaire. As I unfold a letter my mother had kept, written by me just before I moved away, I can see her peering down her nose through glitter framed glasses and the smell of her rosewater lotion fills the room where I sit now, with my box of letters. My box of love. I became a letter writer in my childhood by circumstance of the era because phone calls were quite expensive if they were not local. Being raised by a very restless mother, by the time I graduated from High School we had moved to thirty different houses and I had attended about a dozen schools. Always making friends just in time to move away. If I called them in an attempt to keep friendships, the long distance call had to be timed and kept to three minutes. Impossible. The art of establishing and keeping penpals allowed me to remain connected to many friends, with the periphery advantage of practicing my penmanship skills. In the early sixties I wrote letters on the backs of soup can labels. Very “Andy Warhol”esque. A few years after that novelty wore off, I discovered fountain pens with small tube cartridges of ink that gave my writing a new flair. That ended when I found them leaking in my desk drawer. Even in college, I continued writing letters. Hmmm, I know some of you cannot imagine college without computers but it was done and we actually learned quite adequately. Typewriters performed the task of word processing, but rewrites were obviously time consuming before copy and paste or delete. For me, the shared library typewriters were only for assignments. My craft of letter writing and journaling had long since become part of me. I had even adopted the practice of melting a dab of colored sealing-

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

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-wax upon the envelope closure of my dispatch. My selection of ornate stamps included a dove with an olive branch, SWAK, my zodiac sign of the ram, and my favorite; a peace sign. As with many vintage traditions, this personal touch was slated for days gone by when the hardened wax seals became cracked to bits by the automated rollers at the swamped post offices. Soon, I learned my style of letter writing must also evolve. For many years my letters were several pages in length and contained newsworthy events, my opinions on just about everything, and always what I considered heady ruminations on life. The naive assumption that my inner thoughts were only seen by the eyes of the addressee was brought to a halt in a phone conversation that delivered the words “My husband thinks you are a bit of a nutcase.” Egads! My old college roommate had broken our trust and had shared my thoughts with her husband? From that sobering moment, my letters to her did not reveal quite so many layers of my onion. They remained personal but became shorter and more inclusive. I focused on more inquiries of everyone’s well-being and positive affirmations to their entire household, aware now that all of the residents may become audience to my communiques. Woe was the day Christmas letters began arriving in cards with impersonal copies from a copy machine. I felt the crack in the universe. I was just number twelve of twenty four on a list that received the very same communication. This was not correspondence. This was mass production! I did not even resort to this method when I was raising my family and sending out over fifty cards on the now combined list for myself and my husband. I had different sentiments to offer to each individual person and would not, could not, sacrifice the personalization. After many years of inconsistent Christmas card exchanges, it became more like a bad game show where the contestant has to guess who will send them a card to avoid the telltale exclusion followed by last-minute reciprocation. The hectic Christmas season solicits far too many expectations of us. For my own survival, I tossed out some traditions that I find quite unrelated to celebrating the birth of the Christ child. Instead of joining in on the Christmas card lottery, I send out Thanksgiving cards. I love this opportunity to draw from images of trips with friends or wild places where I felt that power greater than myself, reflecting love of the people and things I am grateful for. This was not my idea, mind you. I have taken the cue after receiving a Thanksgiving card from a long lost acquaintance. A photograph of fall leaves in a stream near her house, framed a poem she had written and a lovely handwritten letter was inside. It took me a while to get my thoughts around it but I eventually adopted the new custom wholeheartedly. I found that I am more upbeat and positive at this time of year as the winter has not yet overwhelmed me. My inspiration and words come from the warm and vibrant fall colors around me. It also allows the person to respond with a holiday card or a letter much later in the year when time allows. I seem to get a good number of Happy New Year cards and like counting my friends as blessings to begin another year. Even a card from the dollar store with a few lines about the weather or enclosed a recipe card or packet of spring seeds on May Day will carry the intimacy of personal mail. Cards and letters will always hold words from my heart through my pen to the paper placed into someone’s mailbox by the postman on the street where they live. That is the real world. Be real. Buy a stamp. Write a letter! And remember that paper is recyclable. Letters can also be folded into origami cranes, made into paper chains, shredded for hamster cage bedding, layered on the bottom of the birdcage, crumpled to fill a sock for a puppy toy, stuffed into cracks of drafty windows, and if the delivered message was mean and not to your liking it is very therapeutic to rip it into pieces and burn it in the wood stove.

I will leave you with my greeting card composition for this year;

May the spirit of Thanksgiving bless us with gratitude, the holiday season recall goodwill to all, and the beginning of a new year restore the hope in our hearts.

Love and blessings, Jacqueline