Pen Pals
Tue., September 10, 01:42 PM
Before there was e-mail, there were letters. I’m sure you remember them. If nothing else, your mother made you write thank you notes to someone who sent you a present. For many people they were a chore, but I always liked writing letters. As I got older, I became the family correspondent, sending the news to my grandfather, my aunts, and so forth. Sometimes I wanted to write but knew no one who would be interested in that particular subject – whatever it was – and that kind of letter evolved into a sort of a diary.
There was, however, another option for people – especially kids – who wanted to write letters. Maybe you could find a pen pal. In elementary school I was matched up with a girl in England, and we wrote to each other for a couple of years. I would enjoy it even more now, except I can’t even remember her name. At the World’s Fair in 1964, you could apply to be computer-matched with someone, and for a while I wrote to a woman in Austria. We didn’t have a lot in common, outside of my ability to write in German, and even that was severely strained. Meanwhile, my mother kept complaining that I was writing to a Nazi, that she must have been a Nazi during the war, that she was almost certainly anti-Semitic, and that I shouldn’t be writing to her. Though I thought my mother was wrong, I was carefully circumspect in my writings. (If you think your correspondent may be anti-Jewish, you don’t write about celebrating Jewish holidays!) And that pen pal faded away too.
I never thought about pen pals again until just recently. The most convenient thing about E-mail, as opposed to letters or phone calls, is that no one is required to write a long letter or to respond immediately. But if you’ve gotten out of touch, you don’t even e-mail old friends that often. I don’t particularly care for chat rooms, and I don’t wander through the net looking for people. As I travel through Diaryland, however, I find myself reading my favorites regularly and traveling on to new ones. If I find I want to comment, I do – but I don’t have to. It’s kind of like pen pals without the hassle of overseas postage. Nice.
Many of my “virtual friends” are in pain this week, and as I read, my heart goes out to them. May God grant you the strength to do whatever you have to do. I wish you all the joys of family and friends – I’m so grateful for mine.
