Long Live Letterwriting (Letterwriting Is Dead)

Dear friends:

It has occurred to me that the art of letter-writing seems to be, if not dead, then in a persistent vegetative state, unlikely to be revived during our lifetimes. This reflection, I admit, causes me some sorrow, though I am at least in part complicit in the casualty, having resorted to brief and largely unsatisfactory email messages to maintain contact with friends and loved ones in recent years.

During my youth, I exchanged countless letters with friends whom I met at various summer camps. In college, I had a lively correspondence with my dearest friend from high school. In a way, I was a lonely adolescent, and these friendships, nurtured and maintained through correspondence, provided a companionship that I did not have with many other young people within physical proximity. Through letters, I connected in a way that I could not through personal contact.

As any letter-writer knows, writing letters is a time-consuming task. Not only must one take the time to put pen to paper, which takes more time than typing (I am taking the easy way out at this moment, I regretfully confess), but one must also have SOMETHING TO SAY. Letters must be composed or risk being boring. They must be chatty and convey news, not a simple “how are you?” otherwise why waste the postage. But I eagerly put pen to paper as a child and teenager, mailed my letters, and awaited a response from my friends. I attempted, in a way that I do not with email, to infuse each letter with a sense of fun. I felt the duty to entertain my friends or at least to convey something REAL about my life at the time, to share rather than to “check in.”

Over time, my number of correspondents dropped from many to a few. One day, I simply did not receive a response, or, more rarely, I confess, I did not write back, feeling the pull of other more pressing demands on my time. I often wonder whether, if I had met those same friends in the age of email, the number of friendships retained through email correspondence would have been greater or fewer, richer or poorer for the medium. For, while the numbers of friends with whom I wrote on a regular basis dwindled, the quality of the friendships strengthened.

One is still a dear friend to this day, though our lives have taken us in different directions. We keep in touch through email, but I admit that something does seem to be missing, something that was present in all those letters. The loss of another friend – not to anything tragic mind you, but simply to a lack of time to maintain our correspondence once we entered college – still saddens me all these years later. We touched based a couple of times in our adulthood – I found her online and connected through email – but the correspondence has been brief, and, again, lacked some quality of our early confidentiality on paper.

And those letters remain, wrapped in ribbon, stored in a box in the closet of my office. As I have gotten older, I have let go of much of the detritus of my childhood and teenage years, but these, these lovely reminders of a bygone time, I cannot bear to release. What is it about letters that satisfies some deep need that electronic correspondence cannot seem to appease?

The Cost of Living Lighter

Sippy cups. Cute plastic sippy cups have been dominating my thoughts recently. Those of you not in the "we've made a baby and now we have to save her and the whole planet" world of parenthood may not have heard about this issue, but it is all over, and I mean ALL OVER, blogs and boards and listserves for parents, particularly those of the green persuasion. The brouhaha? Bisphenol A, an endocrine disrupter, appears to be leaching from plastics, specifically from many plastics used to make sippy cups and other baby and toddler eating and drinking paraphernalia.

Prior to having my darling daughter ("DD" for those of you not in on the parenting blog lingo), if I had even heard about this issue, I probably would have given the uproar little thought, maybe switched my plastic water bottle to a sturdy aluminum one. But now, surrounded by an overabundance of plastic sippy cups sporting cute pictures of Elmo gamboling with his Sesame Street pals, I have to think about this issue. Am I a bad mama if I don't toss all those adorable Elmo mugs in favor of something more reproductive-health-friendly? Do I need to switch ALL our plastics?? What about what my husband and I drink and eat out of??? And if I do need to switch, to what? And at what cost?

It's amazing how, when I had a child, I began to think about things I'd never really considered before; things that before seemed matters of convenience now take on greater importance. Here's how it started for me: when DD began eating solid foods, I took a really hard look at food labels. Oh sure, hubby and I ate pretty healthy, pesca-vegetarian food prior to DD coming along; we ate organic when we could afford it, but I wasn't really a label reader. Mayo is mayo right?

But, like many other first-time moms, I worried about DD. What if what she ate made her hit puberty early? Develop cancer? Have a lifetime of food and health issues all created by Mama's terrible food choices? Ok, so that sounds a little more neurotic than I actually was, but I did begin to look for more organic options, options without the ubiquitous corn syrup, options with ingredients I could pronounce (or at least understand the reason for inclusion -- I mean, I do have a biology degree so I'm not a total chemical moron OR chemical-phobe). And not only for her, because, really, if it wasn't good enough to put in my child's body, then why would it be good enough to put in mine or my husband's?

This interest in organic foods and DD's health lead to contemplation of other, related issues. I mean, if we're going to do what we can to give her a healthier and LONGER life, don't we need to do more to give her a lovely, clean environment in which to live that long, healthy life? Suddenly Jack Johnson's song about the 3 R's (reduce, reuse, recycle) doesn't seem like just a cute ditty but a mantra for how we should be living. So we looked for ways to live lighter -- lighter in the sense of impact on the planet, lighter in the sense of how many possessions we own and bring into our house, lighter in the sense of how much our garbage bin weighs (as compared to our recycling bin).

Here's the kicker, though, living lighter has a cost. You trade getting mass quantities of email from Freecycle for having fewer things to take care of. You trade the smell of new books that are instantly available for only $12.95 a copy for the smell of library books that may have a waiting list of four months. You trade $0.99/pound conventional apples for $0.99/apple organic apples. And you waffle over some of the trade-offs: is it worth it to drive 40 miles to a recycling center that takes the items your friendly neighborhood recycling trucks do not? You trade a blissful clear conscience about throwing things away for guilt over the things that you can't recycle or change in your lifestyle.

For now, in the sippy cup dilemma, we're stuck with Elmo. I, doing my part, have looked -- there are no glass sippy cups. There is a metal one with mediocre reviews and a big price tag. DD needs cups with lids so she can cart her milk around without dribbling (did I say dribbling? no, DUMPING) milk all over Mama's not-so-spotless floors, and she loves that goofy red furry monster. Give her a few months and she'll be ready to drop the carry-around cup and switch for good to a real "little girl" glass.

So for now, for a little while longer, the trade off is a happy, spill-free daughter for a somewhat less light life.