Society
has moved into the twenty-first century with a vengeance. Everything is
technology. What is a blog, anyway? Or a blackberry? Or a podcast? Or a text
message? Facebook haunts me and Plaxo won’t leave me alone.
I
realize that e-mail has made me lazy. A quick message, usually with only a few
errors, is speedily sent to its recipient. Not too much later a reply, usually
with only a few errors, arrives to my ‘Inbox.’ Questions are asked and
answered. I hit the delete button and the print is dead.
My
letters of correspondence are typed. My annual Christmas letter is typed and
then sent by e-mail. A quick signature on the bottom of a greeting card wishes
Happy Birthday, Get Well Soon, or My Sympathies. A telephone call to a friend
or loved one is easily made and instantaneous—no waiting for snail mail, and no
record of the subject matter for posterity. I may write one or two checks a
week and then my hand cramps from holding the pen.
Manuscripts
written by famous authors, with the cross outs and arrows are worth a small
fortune because they are intact, tangible, and can be framed and displayed for
the world to see. Writers today easily delete or cut and paste their changes
and no one is the wiser. Their work looks like every other author’s work—Times
New Roman, font 12. No writing analysis expert can examine loops or swirls and
determine who wrote anything.
And
look at the treasures that are found in attics or basements fifty or a hundred
years later; not only written documents but old photographs that tell a history
or a mystery. I love watching the Antiques
Road Show just to hear the stories of discovery. “I bought this picture for
$5.00 at an estate sale,” and a letter written by Abraham Lincoln to a mother
of a wounded Civil War soldier is discovered tucked behind the frame.
Where
have all the letters gone? No one hand writes anymore. When I do receive a
letter from a family member, I save it just to preserve the handwriting so I
can tell my grandchildren, “Your Nana wrote this when she was eighty-nine” or
“This is your Pop’s handwriting. He died before you were born.”
A
few years ago my mother handed me a pile of letters I had written to her in
1970 and 1971 describing my pregnancy with my first baby. Long distance
telephone calls from Mississippi to California were rare. I could only afford a
stamp in those days. I have passed these letters on to my daughter because they
document her life and my aches and pains during her first nine months. Thirty-seven years later we see the wisdom of
my mother’s actions. Thirty-seven years from now, will there be anything to
pass on to my grand and great-grandchildren?
Today
I am writing stories of my life growing up; my life with my husband and
children when they were growing up. It has been fun to recall different events.
I’m leaving these for my descendants to enjoy so they will have an idea of who
their Mimi was and what her life was like. Unfortunately, these stories are
typed, not handwritten. Oh, well. I can only do so much with carpal tunnel syndrome . . . and my handwriting gets worse as I get older!
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