So I wrote my dad a letter last weekend. Not an email, or a fax or a telephone call or a telegram (as if I’d even know how to go about sending such a thing). No, a real honest to goodness handwritten letter. With a 37c stamp and everything. It’s the first one I’ve sent him in years – maybe since I was 22 or so. I’ve sent him countless emails and the like, but no trees have been harmed in our correspondence in a very long time. It got me thinking as I wrote it. I included some of the following thoughts in the letter, but of course they’ll turn out a little different here – after all, I can’t check my Sent Mail and copy it over here!
The thing is, writing by hand is so different from typing. When I compose an email, I’m typically doing something else at the same time. More importantly, though, it just…feels different. Email is immediate, but at the same time it’s perfect – or it can be, at least. You can pick the exact word you want, or even look it up if you need to check the spelling (I do that more often than I’d like to admit). You can do the same thing with a handwritten letter, but it interrupts the flow of the writing. An email is immediate, and that is well, but it is also sterile.
When you have a pen in your hand, conversely, it’s a very different thing altogether. It takes longer. Longer to write, longer to read, longer to send. It lacks immediacy, to be sure. But what it lacks in efficiency, a handwritten letter makes up for in other things. Tone, for one. You read an email and you see what you were meant to see, nothing more. But ink (or lead) on paper conveys truth, not just fact. A misspelling, or a line that trails downward toward the corner of the page or a word that’s crossed out in favor of a better one, or a safer one, these things are almost like the nonverbal cues we get from a face to face conversation. They tell us not just what the writer chose, but what she considered. They demonstrate state of mind, almost. Ultimately, a written letter is less immediate, but it is more intimate. It is more true.
And in the end, maybe that’s why I haven’t written a letter to my dad in so long (well, that and the laziness. I am, after all, very lazy). I love my dad, and I tell him that, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. At the same time, I can’t say that I actually know him all that well. I can point to a lot of reasons why that may be so, but it really comes down to something simple. I don’t know him because I haven’t taken enough of an interest in doing so. That makes me sound like a real jackass, doesn’t it? If so, then I think I’ve done my job here – I sure enough feel like one.
Bravo Good on you for taking a plunge into the deep end. Always a bit of the kick-in-the-pants factor in stripping away some of the residual falsehoods that we hold near and dear. My mother and I are very dissimilar creatures, yet I hold our weekly exchange of written letters (yes, we are responsible for many tree-deaths) close to my heart & savor every one I get.