My name is Gina, and I enjoy long walks to the mailbox.
One of my favorite things in the world is snail mail, or letters that people send via the postal service (yes, people still use that). As a writer, I have a keen appreciation for the authenticity of smeared handwriting and the fresh scent of a ballpoint pen on paper. There’s something so vulnerable about it; in a tech-enriched world, our handwriting has become Helvetica and Times New Roman: shaped and sophisticated, although that realistically represents few of us. I adore the uniqueness that is handwriting and affiliating each person with their own; some write big and confident, and others, small and methodical. It’s a personal font, and I’ve always thought that’s pretty neat.
This month, four years ago, I started writing snail mail with one of my best friends, Brandon. We saw that the USPS was declining, and we wanted to help preserve what we both appreciated. As he headed off to private school for high school, we kept in touch through letters in the mail. He only lives a few miles from me, but this was our main mode of communication for the past four years. I guess not a lot of teenagers can say that, huh?
On Sunday, Brandon shot me a text asking if he could stop by with a surprise. Clueless but excited to see him, I immediately said yes. Well, the surprise that he had for me was a timeline that he had created of my own high school years, through all of the letters that I have ever written him and postcards I had ever sent, bound in chronological order in a binder. It was incredible and easily one of the most thoughtful gifts I have ever received. I couldn’t help but tear up and simultaneously laugh at my dorky self as I read that first letter I had written four years ago. It hit me all of the things that have changed in that span of time, including my own handwriting, which used to be curlier and cleaner.
Inside of the binder, Brandon wrote me a letter where he counted that I had sent him 50 letters and 26 postcards in the past four years. I have to quote him directly here because I love it: “The total number of letters mailed in the US over that time was 629,000,000,000. So with our efforts combined we made up 2.4E-10% of the total mail volume over that period! Congrats kiddo we’re saving the postal service one letter at a time! When we started writing back in 2012, the price of a first class stamp was $.045. Today that number is $0.49! My goodness things have changed.”
They sure have, but not just within the postal service, and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here musing on this if I had told him all of my triumphs and all of my falls over a text message, or even an e-mail. It’s the beauty that is snail mail. It’s incredible to be able to say that I only see him a few times a year and yet we have been able to stay so close through something deemed so minuscule to most, even when I was a bad pen pal and took a few months hiatus, caught up in my own hectic life. It didn’t matter. His mailbox was always there and mine was always here.
Brandon’s personal font is a tight, slanted cursive, with the same Pilot pen, each time. His letters were always easy to pick out, as he is also keeping cursive alive while it is ceasing to be taught in schools. I guess you could say we are a little stubborn about old ways, but I like it.
So this eighth grader I started writing four years ago is now going to be attending Ohio State on a pre-law track. I definitely wouldn’t say this is the end of our pen pal agreement. High school was a bumpy ride, but we have so much more ahead of us that we are going to experience and want to share, and as Brandon put it, “Not until something was worthy of putting pen to paper and into the mail box did it ever amount to an achievement.”
Thanks for sharing that with me, Pen Pal.
Gina Deaton 