The Merits of Snail Mail

        Before I was a “creative writer,” I was a letter-writer. I have always loved corresponding. Not e-mailing. Not texting, though, certainly, I do indulge in those forms of communication, too. But what I love far more – both giving and receiving – is snail mail. There’s nothing digital that comes anywhere close to its warmth and specialness.

        It began for me as a way to stay in touch with my loved ones. I was the “Menopause Baby,” arriving twelve, fourteen and seventeen years after my siblings. So, by the time I was one, two and seven, respectively, they’d all left the nest and begun independent lives far from our tiny, bucolic Upstate New York homestead.

        Back in those Jurassic times, long-distance phone calls actually came with charges – by the MINUTE, no less – so were reserved solely and exclusively for emergencies. If you wanted to keep in touch, hand-written notes and letters were your only choice.

        I wrote constantly to my brother in San Francisco, where he was trying to become a professional drummer, and went into great detail about my beginning piano lessons. (I was five.) He wrote me back about life as a beatnik. He even sent me a red beret that, he said, was identical to his, and with it, he also sent a small set of bongos so that, when he came home to visit, we could play duets.

        We corresponded until the day of my ninth birthday, when a long-distance phone caller advised my parents that a maid at their hotel had just found my brother dead in his room from an overdose of sleeping pills.

        When his box of belongings arrived at our house, it contained his glasses, one shirt, one pair of slacks, his drumsticks, a red beret and my four years’ worth of letters, all in neat bundles and labeled with the year they’d been received. In his sparse existence, my brother considered my written words among his treasures.

        I wrote to my sisters, too. They had both moved to what everyone in our little town referred to as “The City.” My older sister married young and had three girls in rapid succession. My oldest niece is only seven years younger than me. I wrote to them, too, and my sister read them my letters. She used them, she said, as an enticement for getting them to take their naps. If they took good ones, she’d read them their snail mails from Auntie.

        My other sister was a single career girl, and she wrote me all about the fun of being on her own, dating, having work friends and finding great places to eat and shop. I had so many years of vicarious thrills, compliments of her hand-written chronicles!

        At college, I began sending snail mails home to my dad, who was my mentor and hero, to apprise him of the musical – though certainly not the social – skills I was acquiring. Those juicy morsels, I saved for my sisters and nieces. My nieces tell me all the time that they still read through them when they need a smile.

        The ones I wrote to Daddy and my sisters I received back when they passed. That they saved them all those decades melted me. Surely texts and e-mails do not have such longevity. Their impact is fleeting; snail mail is not.

        With this style of communication, I have retained several college friends, in states as far away as Arkansas, Vermont and Iowa. We supplement with digital correspondence, but the bulk of our communications remain within sealed envelopes that arrive in our mailboxes.

        I even use the United States Postal Service to keep in touch with my daughter’s college roommates. Watching their lives blossom throughout the past twenty years has filled me with enormous joy, and the girls have confided to me that because we communicate the way we do, it’s inspired them to do likewise with other loved ones of theirs.

        “There’s just something so satisfying about sitting down and letting go this way,” one roommate told me. “I tell you so much more than I tell anyone else.” There’s an intimacy to snail mail.

        Lately, I’ve used it as a way of bringing a moment of joy to loved ones of mine who’ve fallen on sad or trying times.

        A friend who was a colleague of mine at the JCC, the Jewish Community Center, took a horrendous fall and ended up needing rotator cuff surgery. Her usually cheery self was as dark and hopeless as I’d ever seen it in thirty-five years of friendship.

        Every day, for the five months of her recuperation, I copied down a quote from one of my piano students and sent it off to her house. Things like: “I wonder how long glue’s been alive.” (Age six) And: “My dog seems to think your hat is his dog dish. Actually, he thinks everything is his dog dish.” (Age eight) And, from the student who received her ‘Recital Ready’ candy choice – a six-foot roll of Bubble Tape: “Wow! This is going to be like eating my dad in Bubble Tape!”

        Sure, I could’ve e-mailed or texted these gems to her, but by snail-mailing them, she got to watch for the arrival of her mailman every day and then force herself to leave the comfort of her chair to go to the mailbox and thereby “earn” the laugh that only children can evoke with their unfiltered vision of the world. And she could keep her burgeoning trove close at hand and re-read it as often as she needed. Snail mail keeps you company.

        Another friend of mine just lost her forty-two-year-old daughter six weeks ago to stomach, lung and liver cancer. She lives just thirty minutes away from me, but she is, understandably, down for the count and isn’t getting dressed or receiving visitors – even of the high-school-friends variety, like myself – yet.

        Every hour or two, I send her a digital kissy-face emoji, but I also send her a daily hand-written letter filled with the same banal, schmoozey things we’d talk about if we were face-to-face. We both tacitly understand that I’m babbling, and that it’s because I refuse to let her surrender to the undertow of her egregious sorrow. My snail mails are the equivalent of a lifeline that we’re both tugging on to keep her head above water.

        She says that they are making all the difference right now because everyone else who loved her daughter and showed up to help and be supportive her last weeks have resumed their regular lives now. So the snail mails keep the tensile filaments that are holding her heart together from completely disintegrating. Snail mail creates a lasting bridge.

        When people ask, “Who has the time to do all that?”, my response is simple: “Someone who cares about you.” Nothing but nothing says, “I love you, and you matter to me” more than a snail mail. Who among those you truly love isn’t worth that level of your effort?