Letter Writing

When was the last time you wrote a letter?

Please note typing and sending an email is not the same as writing with a ballpoint pen, filled with blue ink, on a plain sheet of paper.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives. ~Anatole Broyard

The other night I was eating dinner or was it supper (Supper is the last meal of the day, right?? But what about those snacks I eat at midnight?) and watching reruns of The Amazing Race on television. The contestants were reading the clues and hurrying to the next task when I decided I would complete a few e-mails I had waiting for me. It occurred to me that I never write letters to anyone anymore. I am lucky if I get the chance to answer a few emails during my busy week. Come to think if it, over the years I have never really been a letter writer. I guess I should thank the person who came up with e-mails.

I remembered back to my youth where the family gathered around after a sit down dinner every night and we would talk briefly about our day (family time together) and if there was mail we would sit and listen as it was read aloud. The scene might be where the daughter writes a letter to her family and the Dad or Mama is reading it out aloud. This always amused me back then. All of my family members were listening intently and so was my mama.

I found this hilarious, not sure why, but it did and I pointed this to my mama
"Hahaaa . . . they are still writing letters, can't they just use the phone or the internet". I shake my head . . . I was still in my "Ping you've got mail" mode.

My mama had this "far off" look and says "Hmm . . . I remember when I was newly married, I used to write home regularly and you know all my friends and neighbors would gather around my brother as he read it aloud. I would always make it a point to include everyone's name in it."

Mama was born and brought up in the South and had moved to downtown Atlanta after marrying my dad. She was always writing to people almost everyday. Some were to family and others to friends. She also wrote letters for all of our school activities as she was president for the PTA. I always wondered what she wrote in those letters.

This was in the 1950’s. Maybe something in the lines of . . .

"Atlanta is beautiful and the climate is very hot in summer and quite cold in the winter months. We have to wear woolen sweaters to stay warm.” She said she saw a double decker bus one day and her husband takes me regularly to the cinema (Yep it was called cinema in those days. I think she would then write about the latest comedy film that she saw).

We went to the drive-in theater on Saturday nights several times a month when they changed the movie that was playing. It was our ‘family time’ each week and we would sit outside in the warm (hot) evenings eating popcorn, drinking a Coca Cola, and watching the people who were also at the drive-in. It was called the Piedmont Drive-in and now is the Lindberg MARTA rapid rail station. Times they do change for us all.

I remember her telling me about Star Wars years later after she had seen it long ago. “That film was so boring because it had these weird guys fighting with color light tubes." I remember we all loved that movie but could see why she thought it so ‘campy’.

My mama was always writing letters in those days, maybe I should ask her what she was really writing back then.

Ice