He's going to hear from me...

My daughter and son-in-law had a son a few months ago, and I’ve already started writing him letters. I started writing when he was just a month or so old, and I sent him a thank-you note a few weeks ago for a lovely gift “he” sent me. I used printed block letters rather than script, but I’m really not sure why. I think the impetus for all the writing (besides the fact that I love to do it) was a box of letters I recently found from my mother to our daughter. They span many years, starting with short notes to her when she was just a wee one, to cards and letters to her while in college—and everything in between. There were congratulatory notes for good grades and other accomplishments, birthday letters, and even a note referencing a few dollars enclosed for a lost baby tooth, money long gone but the sentiment still very much intact. What really touched me was the familiarity of my mother’s hand and how it changed over the years according to our daughter’s age, from printing to measured script to Mom’s usual hurried scrawl signifying that our daughter was indeed old enough to decipher it. My Mother has always had too much living to do to worry about perfectly formed letters. The whole of them form a loving written chronicle of their relationship for a couple of decades, and they are priceless.

            I tried to immortalize other notes a few years ago. When my husband and I were planning our daughter’s wedding, we exchanged literally hundreds of emails with her since we live so far from one another. Some were hilarious. Some were quite serious. Each was so poignant in its own way.  I thought I’d print them and bind them as a first anniversary gift, but I never did. Email addresses changed, inboxes got overburdened, and they ultimately and easily found their way to that cyberspace graveyard via the delete button. So whatever your feelings about technology, pens and writing, there’s a timelessness and gravity in the written word that conjures the past and offers up the future like nothing else. And it defies deletion.