Pony Express

Letter-writing, one of life's forgotten pleasures, truly.  Something about handwritten efforts carry a deeper dignity.  Each individual character written for someone, in its own personal script.  Handwriting necessarily requires more thought, patience and focus.  In receiving a letter, you realize that 20, 30, 160 minutes have been spent for your few minutes of leafing through its pages.  The effort of author, alone, is touching.  But then, in addition to the obvious efforts, you can see the process of thought--words scribbled out, rewritten, sentences adjusted.  Isn't this the most unique part of a letter?  The hesitation, the re-evaluation?  And the payoff is lasting.  One can always pull out the letter for a browse.  Sometimes the best rewards come after a frustrating day when, while searching for something else, I happen upon a letter from an old pal or family member.  I have several people that I write to often.  Most often I write to my grandpa McKenna.  He tells me about the joys and struggles of raising 11 kids, working on the railroad, serving as a marine in the Korean War, and growing up in Hornell, NY.  He tells me about how I remind him of his father, my great grandfather McKenna, who was a small-town judge in Buffalo.  I find out about the state of his vegetable garden, his future fishing trips and about his bad back.  He writes to me about how sad it can be growing old, but also, how it's rewarding.  These letters are among my most valuable of possessions. 

My other favorite letter-writer has to be my ol' pen-pal, Ryan.  Back in my younger years, I met Ryan, who went to a rival high school.  Though we went to different schools, we shared the company of similar friends.  On some occasion, the circumstances of which I can't remember now, we shared our dismay over the emerging popularity of electronic mail.  "Whatever happened to the old pony express?", I'd probably said.  We exchanged old fashioned mailing addresses, and so it began.  We faithfully exchanged several letters a month--sometimes more, sometimes less, but without fail letters were exchanged over the period of several years.  Most letters were long, prompting even longer responses.  Looking back, they were of quite impressive lengths & efforts.  But what was so striking and interesting about our relationship was that our friendship existed in its true form almost exclusively through postal channels.  In person, it was hard to translate.  Our letters were very personal--inquisitive, revealing, they encapsulated hopes, dreams, fears, observations, likes, dislikes...But yet, in those times where we would meet in the flesh, we dried up.  How strange!  We knew each other so intimately, but could barely converse.  This has changed over time, but so has our writing.  We've stopped writing.  It's been several years since we've scrawled out messages to each other, in the old fashioned way at least.  Email has (sort of) won the current battle...But I'd like to think that our long letter-writing history won the goddamn war.  That history got me through most of high school without too terrible a teenage breakdown.  It was a therapy of sorts, that's for certain.  We absolutely wrote for ourselves as much as we wrote for each other.