Serendipitous Deliveries

Some time has passed since I've written a letter or in the The Letter Jar blog. First work took me away,  then I was so sick I could barely lift myself out of bed, let alone lift a pen to paper.

The two week hiatus wasn't that long, but still long enough that the prospect of returning to my correspondence was starting to feel foreign.

Was.

A couple well-timed and thoughtful responses to letters I sent, and my love of the handwritten note has been reignited. Reading each reply was a double blessing, as I learned how my letter affected the recipient and also savored for myself the act of holding someone's thoughts and sentiments in my hand, feeling connected across miles and years.

Today I received a letter from M, an editor of mine at my first newspaper reporting job. In my letter I had thanked her for being a tough boss:

I'm not going to lie to you, M -- when you first came to the paper, I resented you. A lot. You pushed me out of my (oh-so-comfortable) comfort zone and demanded more from me ... I may not have liked it at first, but damn if it didn't make me a better reporter ... That I'm no longer in newspaper doesn't diminish the lessons. No matter what career one is in -- news reporting or toilet scrubbing -- one can, if she is being honest, say whether she has given all, the best, 100 percent. Thanks for helping to instill that idea early and often.

M wrote back that she was "floored" to get a "real letter:"

I've delayed writing back because I've been thinking: How many years has it been since I've received a "real letter?" I'm pretty sure it's at least 10 ... What will happen to history with the loss of writing on paper? We can see how Lincoln edited his speeches, how Hemingway wrote his novels -- but we can't see the deletes and editing in an e-mail, assuming the e-mails even survive.

A few days ago I received a letter from J, a county attorney who, serving as he did as a source for many of my stories at that first reporting job, was someone else I needed to thank:

It was clear you always expected me to do my homework before talking to you ... I would think I'd done everything I could to shore up answers and fill in background, but quite frequently you could point out where I should have been looking for something or could have found my answer. I became better at my job as a result of being challenged by sources like you.

J wrote that he was "pleasantly surprised" to receive my letter.

I am touched to have been in your letter jar. Thanks for your thanks -- and an accurate reading of my expectations.

M's and J's letters came at exactly the right time -- just when I and The Letter Jar project needed some reinforcement. I so delighted in finding personal letters in the mail, so enjoyed the anticipation I felt in wondering what the senders had enclosed inside. Seeing their handwriting and reading their words, I got such a boost -- one I am once again committed to giving others.

ACCIDENTALLY ANTISOCIAL: Thanks to all my new Twitter followers and Facebook fans and please accept my apologies for my lack of acknowledgment to date. I appreciate your interest in The Letter Jar, and I hope you'll see that my recent inactivity is uncharacteristic; I love to write letters -- that's why I started The Letter Jar project -- and I love talking about it here. And I look forward to hearing what you think too.

Luck of the Draw

One of the things I love about The Letter Jar project is its randomness. I resolved at the beginning not to write my letters in a particular order, knowing that I would choose "easy" recipients -- former work colleagues, teachers, my favorite authors -- first and postpone the more emotionally complicated letters to family, close friends, ex-lovers.

So each day I pull a name from the jar. Over the past week I've written to my mother, a fellow stepmom I met through an Internet chat board, my 14-year-old nephew and a competitor at my first reporting job.

Never knowing what -- or, more accurately, whom -- I'm going to get when I open the jar means I also don't know what kind of mindset I'll require when I sit down to write. Will I plumb the depths of my emotions as I realize I'm now the age my mother was when she made major life changes? Or will I write a less challenging, but still gratifying, letter to simply acknowledge how the skill and ambition of my former competitor forced me to up my game and made me better at my job?

Your Aunt Lynn is working on a project to write 365 letters in 365 days,  I wrote to my nephew. I know it sounds crazy -- why wouldn't I just use e-mail or Facebook or a text to get in touch with people? I've always written letters, though, ever since I was pretty young. And I really enjoy it. There is something about the process of putting pen to paper that helps me really tell people how I feel about them.

While my Letter Jar method could be aptly described as "the luck of the draw," it also seems there is luck in every draw -- for all my relationships, and in all the ways they have taught and enriched and strengthened me, I am lucky indeed.


THE LOST ART: Thanks to Jackie at Letters & Journals for linking to a story in The Guardian about "comedian and serial tweeter Sue Perkins, who is fronting a campaign to get people back into the habit of writing to one another." Write on!

Roll Call, Part II

Several months ago I posted about where my letters have been going. As I approach the 200-letter mark, I was curious once again as to the distribution of letters from The Letter Jar:

Illinois	54
New Mexico	30
Iowa	28
Colorado	18
New York	12
Indiana	8
Florida	5
California, Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia	4
Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma	3
Arizona, Texas	2
Arkansas, Georgia, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin	1
Alberta, CANADA	1

Of course, the majority of letters are still destined for the places I've spent the majority of my time -- Illinois and New Mexico as an adult, Iowa as a student, Colorado and New York as a child. But seeing all the other places too reminds me how blessed I have been to know people who hail from all around the nation (and beyond, in the case of my friend T in Canada), and who, like me, have moved about the country as well.

Seeing this list reinforces the subtle excitement I feel when I address a letter, envisioning it winding up in a mailbox -- an actual, real, physical mailbox, not a cyber one -- somewhere 20 or 200 or 2,000 miles away.

CAN'T WAIT: National Public Radio has put out a call for letters -- love letters, fan mail, notes from relatives -- as part of an upcoming story on the U.S. Postal Service. This project has produced a few I'd like to upload (find out how you can too -- click here for NPR's Facebook fan page, where you'll find the post about letters). This letter-writing junkie looks forward to hearing the story.

Clues

Who knew that letters to 194 people could teach me so much about just one:

Me.


I just finished a letter to P, a woman I met in college. About 13 years ago, I set P up with J, another friend of mine. P and J married one week after I wed my first husband.

While our union lasted five years, and theirs just five months, I still see in P a kindred spirit -- she and I both acted in good faith when we chose to wed, believing we were in love and had found someone with whom to fulfill our dreams.

Turns out we were wrong. Certainly about the dream fulfillment part; perhaps as far as love was concerned, we simply overestimated its power to make everything else right.

As I wrote to P, and thought about our weddings a decade ago, I felt as if I was retracing my steps. I found myself looking for -- and finding -- clues, little bits of answers to questions I wasn't even consciously aware I had: Why hadn't I given more thought to getting married the first time? What made me leap, with nary the most cursory look around?

Oh, that a six-page letter to a friend could fully answer those questions. But writing still put me in touch, however briefly, with the girl I was back then -- through a new lens I examined my youth and naivete, my eagerness to please, my need for security and the approval of others.

Learning more about myself certainly wasn't a primary goal of The Letter Jar project, but is perhaps an outcome I should have anticipated. After all, I haven't lived my life in a vacuum; the events of my life are populated with a widely varied, and in some cases highly influential, cast of characters. And, in that way,  writing to them becomes an opportunity to recognize not only who they were and are, but also, interestingly, a way to explore who I was and am.

NEXT READ: I can't wait to get my hands on Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey, a fascinating history of handwriting and its effect on our creativity, understanding of language and daily lives. Listen to Burns Florey discuss her book on the public radio show "Here and Now."

Memory DNA

Image courtesy of Svilen Milev, www.efffective.com

I remember the hat you mentioned. Your brother said it made me look old. I still have that hat, but, I don't need it to look old. 

Yesterday I received a letter back from my Uncle F. In my letter to him I had recalled a roller coaster I once rode with him and how he lost his hat when the ride went upside down.

Never mind that the ride was some 30 years ago -- it immediately comes to mind when I think of Uncle F.

Stories like these -- an amusement park mishap, my Great Aunt L using colorful language to make my brother behave at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the time I foolishly took on my Uncle C, a real estate agent, in a game of Monopoly -- make up our family DNA. Just as important -- maybe even more so -- as our real genetic strands, memory DNA helps define us, gives us an irrevocable sense of place no matter where we roam.

Of course, just as with the real stuff, not all memory DNA is perfect -- alongside the silly and the funny there is the serious and sad, the illnesses and deaths and divorces. Which, perhaps, makes the happy moments all the more important: not unlike the stronger parts of our genetic code, recollections of better times can reinforce and heal us amid painful struggle.

I also remember taking you and your brother for a short flight in the Taylorcraft. Your brother has told me that that ride gave him an interest in flying. I am enclosing a copy of my logbook entry for that flight.

I was so touched to see the logbook entry from 1979. That airplane flight, a roller coaster ride, years of Christmases and Easters and everything in between -- no one else has my exact combination of memories. More so than my flat feet or straight hair or blue eyes, my memories, thankfully, make me who I am.

Yesterday morning, before receiving the letter from Uncle F, I wrote to my Aunt C. She is someone with whom I associate not hats, but shoes -- stilettos, in fact.

... Your ability to walk gracefully in those shoes, in any situation -- I will never forget the time you came to see me in Georgetown at my hotel, and we walked to that restaurant across the icy bridge. You did it, skillfully! Might seem like a weird thing to mention or admire, but I'm telling you, as someone who isn't always as sure on her feet, I'm in awe.

Obviously her footwear isn't all I associate with Aunt C, with whom I spent many a holiday as a child and who, a decade later, gave me advice about quitting smoking (our chat didn't yield automatic results, but it certainly got me started on the path of giving up cigarettes for good). More memories, more DNA.

My Uncle F closed his letter to me by mentioning how I have a great husband (I do) and how my stepson and son are lucky to have been born into such a loving family (we're lucky to have them). One of my greatest hopes is that my husband and I can help the boys build their own "memory DNA" -- a lifetime of experiences uniquely their own.