© Another Day in the Country
These days, if you receive an actual letter in the mail, handwritten, on stationery, it’s most likely someone from the older generation.
The generations that follow me may write on a card, a sentence or two, and they may send you a postcard when they are on vacation; but most often they’ve joined the wave of people who communicate by e-mail. You’ve probably known all along that when I was a kid, a teenager, a college student, a young adult — no one had ever heard of e-mail. Suddenly I’m feeling like antiquity.
Last week, what should come in the mail but a real honest to goodness letter. It wasn’t typed. It was handwritten from start to finish and consisted of two pages. “Who on earth?” I said to myself, because I couldn’t read the handwriting.
When I opened the letter, I discovered it was from a long-ago student friend of mine. Bill was one of those kids who liked to talk and he’d stand at the window of my office in the University Student Center and bend my ear about whatever his favorite topic was at the moment. Sometimes it was politics — campus, American, global. Sometimes it was food — ethnic, artisan, horrifying (as in the college campus cafeteria).
After Bill graduated, he kept in touch. I say he kept in touch, because I’m not sure that I ever really knew his address. Bill was trying to find himself and his calling in life. During his college years he was a regular visitor to our house. Now, he’d call and say, “I haven’t seen you in awhile, I’m bringing a friend, OK?” In this way we kept in touch.
And then years went by that I never heard from Bill — except by word-of-mouth as mutual friends would say, “You know what Bill is doing? He’s in a monastery cooking for the monks.” Really?
After I moved to Kansas, I heard from Bill after at least 10 years of silence. “It’s me, patwick (that’s what the students called me) and I’ve heard you’ve fallen off the face of the earth into Kansas.”
“I thought you were in a monastery,” I quipped. “Now I’m in a culinary school in southern California, learning how to bake bread — and not just any bread, artisan bread baked in a wood-fired oven.”
He went on, but I was still pondering bread baked in a wood-fired oven — my grandmother and her mother before her had baked bread this way. Now you went to culinary school to learn to do this? Amazing.
Now that you’ve heard this part of the story, you won’t be totally surprised to hear the reason for my receiving in the mail a handwritten letter. “I’ve decided,” wrote Bill, “that I need to improve my penmanship — I’ve printed all my life. I’m inviting a select group of friends to actually write letters to me.” I think he’d been reading the letters of John Adams to Thomas Jefferson when he got this brainstorm.
I wrote back, “I’m not sure that our letters will be as worthy of reprinting as were the pen strokes of our founding fathers; but I’ll do my best.” As I thought about it, Bill’s idea is a good one. Imagine the surprise of people across America who would receive — not bills or advertisements — an actual letter from you. A letter they could hold in their hand and savor!
It’s been a week since I wrote back and during that week I’ve been pondering what one would write in a real letter that is not typed and on stationery? Suddenly there doesn’t seem to be a plethora of fascinating things happening in Ramona. Would one write about the garden, like my grandma used to do? Or would one write about the weather or who just moved into town?
It’s another day in the country and I’m wondering — since John Adams was a country man, would he have written to Thomas about his chickens?