Writing Letters Before Email Existed

Edward P. Jones's New Yorker vignette entitled Shacks reminded me of some of my own qualities way back when. Jones recounts his freshman year obsession with one Sandra Walker.

I had never kissed her, for she was true to someone else. I don't think I'd even so much as touched the back of her hand, but I cared for her, and the only way I knew how to express what I felt at that point in my life was to write letters, and write letters I did. Three and four and five a week I wrote.

Gosh this rang familiar to me.

In between let's say 1990 and 2000, starting when I discovered my ability to write, I sent hundreds of letters a year. These were stream of counciousness, but also very much intending to be clever and funny. I think they were occasionally funny, but mostly they were vivid and earnest.

I need to take a little bit more time to think back on the different clases of friends that received these letters from me. Many were cases of unrequited love for girls much older than me.

Many of my most long-lasting friendships were cemented in these letters. I remember my friend Dan telling me that we would have most certainly lost track of each other were it not for the letters we exchanged when we went back to college after our internship together.

Friends occasionally send me mementos from these correspondances. I do not know what I was thinking most of the time. It is quite embarrassing for me to show the following to you, but I must admit that it does capture my perspective as a unhappy college freshman in Eugene Oregon, where I didn't want to be. And it certainly captures my all-around oddness.

As weird as this reads, I can sit you down and explain to you what I was going for. I sent these to anyone who would listen.

More to come on this subject. In the meantime, I wonder why this part of me ceased to exist with the advent of email, blogging, and now "social" media. Are these alternatives, or has this part of me just ceased to express itself.