On writing letters...

[bee_pipes]

I used to do a lot of letter writing. I spent about a decade in the service and had a routine down where I would do laundry on Sundays and while I was waiting at the Laundromat I would get my letter writing done. Phone calls are nice and can’t be beat for instant gratification, but you can’t play a phone call over and over again, the way you can re-read a letter. It’s also good for collecting your thoughts and getting organized, rather than the spontaneous exchanges in a conversation. With the proliferation of cell phones, text messaging devices and low-cost long-distance, letter writing is a lost art.

One real benefit of the internet is email. After being abused, harassed and pestered by email in a work environment, I am now enjoying email for personal uses. Rather than re-writing letters to send the same thing to different people, we can send the same email to multiple people. My family has pretty much fallen away from letter writing or email, in favor of periodic phone calls.

We (my wife and I) have been able to make email part of our monthly ritual. We start an email at the beginning of the month and keep it open all month long. As the days go by we add to the email with events of the day, incidentals, opinions, etc. By the end of the month there is a fairly respectable amount of writing in a running dialog. We live out in the boonies and have a dial-up connection. The amount of time it takes to send one sizeable photograph is absurd. Since we joined the BHM forums, we have been posting pictures and adding links to our email so the recipients can see the photographs posted on BHM. That has really added a lot to the emails. In the morning of the last Sunday of the month, or the first Sunday of the next month – depending on how the week falls on the calendar, we send the email out to our mailing list – family and distant friends. This keeps the lines of communication open with these people, lets them know what we’re up to and how life is treating us. The monthly email will often spur phone calls or brief emails in return with comments or news.

We’ve been doing this for about two years now. This isn’t exactly priceless information or world class literature, but we have a granddaughter and we’ll feel pretty good about leaving her writings that tell her about the times we lived in.

Regards,
Pat

[jen_in_southtexas]

Thank you for reminding us that letter writing really is a lost art. I use to be good about keeping a journal. I dont know what happened but suddenly I found myself not writing any entries. That is going to change today.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
-Jen

[humbug]

You never get a letter in the mail anymore do you? Letters truly are a record of the lives of the people who we care about and whom care about us. I have a box of old letters stored away in the closet from when I left home. Sometimes I go through and start reading them..Oh the memories..and the things that I had forgotten....Letter writing is a lost art...

[Deberosa]

Blogging is another way to accomplish writing a history. You can make a blog public or private and it's a great way to get out your thoughts on things. I have a public blog about my homestead but I'm considering a private blog also for my own thoughts. Won't happen till winter though!

I also had kept stacks of letters from periods in my life and would revisit them. The other thing they are good for is to really close unpleasant portions of your life by destroying batches of letters - I've done that too! Seems to help in moving on somehow. I didn't start any forest fires with them though like happened in Colorado a few years back. :o

Actually writing by hand for me has become tedious now that email and chat and forums and blogs have come into being.

[tufhelp]

We have all but left the world of snail mail letters… Except for our friends Tom & Peg who are homesteading down near our place in Redrock. They don’t have/refuse to get a computer and we keep in touch with them two or three times a month via the USPS. I must admit it is neat to still get mail and to answer it. I have all but given up writing them by “hand”, use the word processor in stead – but I do use the Comic Sans MS font to give it a somewhat hand written flavor. ;)

[Drawbar]

I see email asa love/hate relationship. For Friends and Family that have email, its great to be able to stay in touch instantly,and to share pictures and stuff quickly.

I also tend to stay connected with people through emails that I normally wouldn't. There is my old secretary, quite a few people I met online, and others that if I did not have email, they would have long been lost in the ebb and flow of life.

Then there are those that I do not have emails for, like my sister in Alaska. I have become so dependent upon emails that I just don't talk or write to her much. In that sense, my sister is a casualty of technology, just because she is not in the loop so to speak.

[alma]

I still have 50 letters that i sent to my sister in the 60s.
I recorded my exploits of that era and it, of course, told the story of my times. It is like a history *book.

It includes the civil rights era and my participation in it, and the anti war protests of that, and later eras, my experience in chicago in 1968 at the democratic convention and all that *happened there.

I met abbie hoffman, jerry *rubin, the berrrigan brothers, rev. abernathy *who took over the poor people's campaign after dr. king was assassinated.

I met some of the weathermen, formerly s.d.s. people, particularly cathy wilkerson whose house was bombed, theoretically, while they were making bombs. She lived next to dustin hoffman.

I lived just outside d.c. at the time and spent a lot of time there helping to make history , and have, not only my letters to my sister, that she saved and i got them after she died.

--but all kinds of experiences at that time and writings about it and later things of my time.

I highly suggest that everyone do so. It is so amazing to remember, through these letters, the times gone past when *you were able to participate in worldly events, including an episode at lyndon johnson's lighting of the xmas tree, and being crushed against ted kennedy's neck at my daughter's high school graduation
class where he spoke.

A neighbor once said that i should have given him a hickey, but that might have changed the whole course of history. ha!

I was sitting in the front seat and was crushed against his neck when i stook up to greet him as he jumped down from the stage to meet people, and they rushed him.

I have a book full of this stuff and everyone can do the same. It doesn't take long before you have *a book of your own recording your times regarding things you'd long forgotten.

I got arrested during one event and spent two weeks in jail with the berrigan brothers and ralph abernathy came to see us there in the women's division. He was in the men's division.

We were singing hymns at the capital and didn't move off fast enough, so got arrested, including many church of the breathern who joined us at some point.

Oh, the days, the happiest and saddest of my life. I got cancer about that time and went through an ordeal then.

It is worth standing *up for what *you believe in and paying the price. It seems to me that you are not afraid of dying if you are not afraid of living.

I just can't rmember off hand what else to say, except write, write, write letters, even if you have to pretend you are writing to someone and then keep it for yourself, insted of mailing it. *I have done that many times, too.

I have stories from my teens, also Oh, the joy, and the saddness, too, as i've mentioned.

My neighbor was a white house photographer, among many others, and i helped his wife develop some of the pics.

She died long ago, and the last i heard, the pics were rotting in his basement. I keep telling his daughter who is a cyber friend, to go get those pics. they are like gold, before his brother's wives move in to help the old man and take off with a treasure in pics of that era. love, alma

Oh, yes, pics are priceless, too, as well as pieces of fabric from clothes you once wore used in quilts.

[annabella1]

mom writes a letter to God every night, She's been doing it for over 65 years. She keeps them all in three ring binders. I think it is the best thing and have tried to get myself in the habit of doing it also. But I guess I just don't have the discipline.