November 2021

I am old enough to remember writing letters.

It was also long ago enough that I remember being annoyed by having to write letters. When I was a child, the only time I wrote was to relatives who, in the days when air travel was outrageously expensive, I had only dim memories of. I remember the obligatory Christmas and birthday letters – sitting at the kitchen table writing and shaking out the cramp in my hand. I wrote obligatory letters to my parents from cadet camp in the summer. There was a time set aside for it, and NCOs enforced it. Write or pushups, my friend. Your choice. We all chose to write.

When I was a young man there was a period where I wrote letters. I met a young woman and we wrote letters to each other. These were not love letters, for we were not in love. But she was a prolific correspondent, with many partners. Her letters were delights, and I wish I had managed to keep them. I always hand-wrote my letters to her, although I had access to a typewriter and my handwriting was poor. That was part of the process, the slow and deliberate formation of words and sentences, taking care to arc the Cs and put the top on Rs to distinguish them from Is, which is a problem I still have when I write cursive.

Writing a letter is very different from writing an email. There is little or no quoting. You might write ‘in your letter of 14 January, you say…’ and then copy a line. But most often, you’d say something like in your letter of January 14, you talk of… and then summarize your understanding of what had been said. But even that, as I remember it, was fairly rare.

For me, the process of writing a letter started with the recieving of one. Some people – my first girlfriend was an example of this – tore open the envelope and skimmed the letter as soon as they got it. I never did this for personal letters. I would wait until I had time and space – dinner was simmering on the stove, or I had settled down on the couch in the evening – and then I opened and read the letter. I read it slowly, savoring the words.

I always read a letter at least twice before replying. I will often read it a third time, and a fourth, if it is a good letter. When it was time to write my reply, I would make a cup of something warm and sit at whatever writing surface I had chosen. I always needed a deep surface because I had to support my whole arm.

I took my time, and I wrote what I wanted to say. I wrote as if I was giving a speech to the recipient, with an ear to the tone and the cadence of the words.

A letter is like an essay. A good letter assumes that the reader doesn’t know something, or things, and presents these things in a way that is interesting and informative. They may be trivial things: the weather, Aunt Judy’s hip replacement, the window in the front room… but a good letter illuminates.

And that’s what I miss about writing letters. The slow, deliberate, contemplative process of it.