When "Flow" Turns to "Overflow"

I was writing a letter yesterday to O, a newspaper reporter whom I befriended when I worked in public relations, when I had an uncomfortable realization--sometimes I just overdo it.

D'oh! as Homer Simpson would say. Overdo'h!

This letterwriting experience, of course, has been filled with wonderful revelations and lessons. But this one? Ouch.

What I was really trying to say to O was that I was glad we got to know each other, having overcome the natural skepticism that media can sometimes have for PR types (and vice versa). I was also trying to thank him for some good, meaningful conversation that went beyond the weather and whatever story I was trying to pitch him (or information he was trying to get from me).

I wandered off into the weeds, though, and found myself becoming too verbose. (Therein lies a hazard of writing longhand--my "verbociousness" kicked in on the second page, and who wants to start over at that point? Besides, there seems to be something disingenuous about discarding and starting over a handwritten letter--isn't the purpose of such an exercise to just let the words flow, longwinded and disjointed as they may be?)

Maybe I was sincerely trying to get my point across, but if I'm being honest with myself, I suspect what I was really trying to do was "puff up the pen"--make my message worthy of paper, achieve some mystical letterwriting standard, make it a reader to remember.

Oh forgive me William of Ockham, oh ye of Ockham's razor. In letters as in life, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

I've written 96 letters and I'm proud to say this is really the first time I've caught myself "pen puffing." And I hasten to add that after realizing what I was doing, I did step back, take a breath and just let the words flow. In the end, O might raise an eyebrow when he reaches the middle of that second page, but by the last page hopefully he'll no longer be wondering what exactly I was on when I wrote him.

It's not always easy to let the words flow--particularly when my son is crawling circles around me on the livingroom floor as I try to write--but, fortunately, it does seem easy to notice when words are "overflowing."

WHEN NORA EPHRON IS YOUR PEN PAL: Thanks Letters & Journals magazine for tweeting this wonderful Wall Street Journal blog post on the PencilPALS program. Teaching youth the value of handwritten letters? Fantastic!

Signed, Sealed ... Delivered?

Tonight I found myself, for the first time, actually not knowing where to send a letter. I signed it, I sealed it, but I didn't know how to deliver it.

I'd written the letter in question to a police lieutenant who had been a source of mine back when I was a newspaper reporter. This lieutenant, as I told him in my letter, had been a tough but fair source who made me work harder. I was a better reporter because of him, and I wanted him to know that.

After finishing the letter, I "Googled" him just to confirm he was still with the same police department, so I could send the letter there.

Turns out he was a lieutenant with that same force ... up until just this last March, when he retired. If only I'd drawn his name sooner from THE LETTER JAR.

Well police lieutenants, for good reason, don't make their home addresses public. "Where was I going to send the letter?" I wondered.

Ultimately I settled for sending it to the police department's public information officer, who had written the press release about the lieutenant's retirement. I explained to her the project and asked that she please pass on the enclosed letter if she is still in contact with the lieutenant.

Expecting some skepticism on her part, I named a couple other lieutenants (sergeants at the time I knew them) who could vouch for my identity and encouraged her to read the enclosed letter should she have any doubts about its content.

This isn't the first time I've written a letter to one person and sent it to someone else. Before composing another letter--interestingly, also to a news source (this one a politician) whose expectations of me I felt made me a better reporter--I Googled the person to see if I could still find him. Turns out he'd died in 2006. I still wrote the letter, but to his wife--I told her I was sorry to read of his passing and how her husband had been a positive influence in my career. The gracious letter I received in return, thanking me for my words and telling me how touched her husband would have been to know he made a difference in someone's career, was the very first reply I received in the course of this project.

This, however, is the first time I've been left wondering if the letter will ultimately reach its intended destination. Kind of a new twist on the tree falling in the woods with no one around: if you write a letter but the recipient never sees it, does it make a difference?

Wisdom ... Without Warning

Today I wrote a short letter to R, a coworker from our information services department with whom I typically exchange "hellos" as we pass in the hallway. (I have to say that in some ways I'm glad our longer conversations--incidental as they are to my computer going on the fritz--have been infrequent.)

It was a surprise then, that some of my most cherished wisdom from my first few weeks of motherhood came from none other than R. He is a Facebook friend of mine, and like so many others weighed in with congratulations soon after my son was born. So many times I reread and repeated to myself R's message:

Congrats ... take it easy ... enjoy the moments of quiet and remember you are doing everything right ...

"Remember you are doing everything right." As I told R in my letter to him, those words--read in a hormonal and sleep-deprived funk--affected me profoundly. What new mother doesn't second-guess herself through those early days? "Remember you are doing everything right." Oh how those words calmed me when I could feel the icy grip of anxiety closing in time and again.

Just goes to show, I guess, that wisdom--like the proverbial closest emergency exit on the plane--isn't always in the first place you'd look. (Something to remember, perhaps, when you're desperately seeking an answer and you're just convinced you're looking in all the right places?) When you do find it, it's worth acknowledging.

NEXT READ: My mom has me excited about Lee Kravitz's new book, Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things. The summary goes something like this: Kravitz, fired from his job as editor of Parade magazine, chronicles how he launched a journey--around the world and around the corner--to make amends with the people and pieces of his life from which he had become disconnected. Sounds intriguing, and inspiring.

Report Card

My stepson's first-grade report card arrived in the mail today, and it reminded me that I've been meaning to to give a "report card" of sorts for myself on this project. Writing 92 letters, it turns out, has made me realize that the people in my life have taught me a lot of valuable lessons.

I've started a list, which I look forward to expanding as I continue to pick up pen and paper.

It's About Time

My 7-month-old son, T, pulled the name of my dad--also T, my son's namesake--out of THE LETTER JAR last Saturday.

Same son kept me too busy on Saturday to write. So I started the letter on Sunday.

And worked on it a little on Monday.

And finished it today.

It made for a somewhat disjointed experience, stopping and starting like that, even if I did have in mind from the beginning an idea of what I was going to say. And as I sat there this morning in my recliner, wrapping up the letter, I did have an appreciation for e-mail's allure. Let's face it: I probably could have written my father--and mother and brother and mother-in-law and several best friends and my hairdresser--any number of e-mails in that same time frame. My words-per-minute score isn't that great, but I'm sure I can type faster than I can write.

But.

Therein lies the rub. I type faster than I write from a purely mechanical standpoint, yes, but a mental perspective too. When I'm typing an e-mail, I'm fairly aware I'm simply skimming the surface of my mind, offering a quick update about the kids, a little tidbit about work, some pleasant inquiries as to what's been happening on the other person's end.

But to put pen to paper and write ... it feels important and I happily, easily even, put forth the kind of thought I feel the process deserves. Themes emerge and my vocabulary expands as I take what feels like a cherished opportunity to tell my letter recipient how I feel about him or her.

I heard an NPR interview the other day with Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Carr maintains, based on his own experience and the hours of research he has done, that all our time online--quickly moving from skimming a story on a news site to browsing the RSS feed of our favorite blog to checking our e-mail and rinsing and repeating over and over--is cutting into our attention span and making it difficult for us to concentrate on kind of things we used to spend our free time doing. Things like reading books.

And writing.

Carr says we can stem the effects of Internet overuse by devoting equal time to activities of deeper concentration, which gives me reason again to believe I'm on the right track with this letterwriting journey. (I will admit to some doubt as my recent letter turned into a multi-day project.) This blog is evidence enough that I'm not about to abandon my Web-surfing ways, but to have another reason to spend some hours unplugged, with just my pen and paper, is fine by me.