Last week, I received a lovely eight-page, handwritten letter from my oldest sister Betty who lives in another city. She always sends letters and greeting cards where every inch of blank space is filled with her news.
Betty is not a fan of computers and doesn’t use email. I don’t believe she has ever sent one, though her husband prints out ones that are sent to her and brings them to her.
She doesn’t have a smartphone and not even a regular cellphone. She uses her landline.
But she loves her flatscreen TV and sits in the evenings, remote control firmly in hand.
After I receive one of my sister’s letters, I call her and we talk for two hours. But this time, I decided to respond in kind. So I sat down and handwrote her an 11-page letter.
It was tough slogging. My handwriting, which used to be so good I won awards at fall fairs for it, has gone downhill. And it was a real effort to form all the letters and make them legible. My left hand kept wearing out on me and I would have to set down the pen and massage it back into shape.
The problem was I was trying to write like I type on my keyboards – very quickly. I couldn’t slow down and my hand was very tense.
But, the job finally done, I stuffed my treatise into an envelope, addressed and stamped it and took it to the mailbox down the street.
I felt pretty good about myself and tried to figure out when the last time was that I handwrote someone a letter. It might have been 50 years ago when I would write home for money to keep me going in university. They were very carefully written letters, something a defence attorney might present to a jury to try to keep his client from going to jail. The better I presented my argument, the more money I might score.
Then there was the summer I wrote a love letter every day to my girlfriend at the time who took the opportunity to get away from me by going to summer camp. Those letters, looking back, were probably sappy enough to cause rock music icon Roy Orbison, who specialized in writing sad songs, to admonish me and tell me to, “Cheer up, for ‘Crying’ out loud!”
In any case, yesterday my sister called me with some news and I asked her if she’d gotten my letter yet. She hadn’t and was all excited to have been sent one.
“I will read it over and over and treasure it,” she said.
And I know she will.
Next up: Sending her photos of our family. She sends us photos all the time in the mail and we never send any back. That will soon change.
In this fast-paced society we live in, Betty’s feet are still on the ground.
And I am grateful they are.
My feet, on the other hand (can your feet be on your other hand?) are somewhere between clouds seven and nine. Fresh off this victory, one of these days I am going to walk right past our shower stall and lay me down into a piping hot, soapy puddle waiting for me in our bathtub. It might take me two days to get out of the damn thing, but it will be worth it. Back in the day, I used to smoke cigarettes and read a book in the tub. It’s a right bugger trying to do either one of those things, or both, in the shower. However, I have given a lot more shower concerts than I ever have done in the bathtub.
And it seems like forever since I fell asleep in the shower.
©2020 Jim Hagarty
