Tags
A Life in Letters, Advice, Air Mail, E-mail, Friendship, Letter Writing, Letters home, Letters of Note, long distance relationships, Love, marriage advice, matters of the heart, Memoir, Michael Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Par Avion, President Ronald Reagan, Shaun Usher, Skype, social media, telegram, Telephone, Themes of childhood, treasure chest, Unbound books, Valentine's Day, Words of Wisdom, Writing
Many relationships in my life, I conduct almost entirely by telephone, including those with the people dearest to me. With so many miles of ocean or freeway stretching between our houses, it has been easier to carry on conversations from the comfort of our own homes. I suppose in that regard, it has been business as usual during the pandemic. Always, there is something to talk about even when there is nothing to talk about. Once upon a time, before WhatsApp and Facetime, there were long-distance phone calls with my mother scheduled at odd hours during weekends when we could be less circumspect with the time difference and the cost per minute. Before Facebook, there were also sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we fell softly into conversation and picked up where we left off years before.
By telephone, we delivered and received the most important news of our lives, from that which cannot be shared quickly enough: “I got the job!” “She said yes!” “We’re having a baby!” “It’s a girl!” to the kind that startles the silence too early in the morning or too late at night to be anything good. From a tiny village in Wales, news from an old friend that her husband had been killed outright in a car accident: “My darling is gone! My darling is gone! Gone!” From me in a parking lot outside a Scottsdale hospital, to my best friend, who, fingers crossed waiting for “benign,” answers before the end of the first ring, only to hear, “I have cancer.” Two years later, it is my turn to wait on the other end of the line on another continent while she, parked outside my Phoenix home, tells me on a bad connection that, yes, both my car and his are were parked in the driveway, that, yes, our little dog, Edgar, is inside sitting on the couch, silently staring back at her. My ear pressed hard to the phone, I can hear her open the front door and tentatively call my husband’s name once, twice, and then after a third time, the words traveling over the wires “He’s passed away! He’s passed away! Oh, he’s so cold. I’m so sorry.” And then the hanging up so she could make another call to 9.1.1 and then I’m back on the line again to listen to the sounds of my sunny little house on the other side of the world fill up with strangers, kind and efficient, from the police and fire departments, the crisis management team, and finally the people from the one mortuary that agreed to take my husband’s body even though there was some as yet unresolved fuss over who would sign the death certificate.
If nobody would sign it, perhaps he wasn’t dead.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” I breathed into the phone.
“Yes. He’s dead. He’s dead. Yes. I’m so sorry. He’s gone.”
Gone.
Thus, two best friends are connected in an ephemeral silence with nothing to hold on to.
Nothing.
In a different time, I would have received a telegram, or a hand-written letter. Words on paper deal the blow differently – better, I think, than the phone’s surreal real-time. Sitting down to write a letter brings more time to shape our tidings with the very best words we have. Even though we know they are inadequate.
I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by e-mails and texts that, regardless of font and typeface, emoji and GIF, are just not the same. I miss what Simon Garfield says has been lost by relinquishing “the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers,” I miss walking out to a red brick mailbox, to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, Par Avion. I used to imagine its journey, all the hands it passed through on its way to me from a red pillar box in a village in Northern Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to me in the desert southwest of the United States. I miss the creases and ink-smudges; the tea-stained ring of my mother’s cup; and, the barely there fragrance of her soap.
I saved so many of them. Along with faded picture postcards, they are in a cardboard box, waiting to be reread, immortal reminders of people I treasure and who treasure me. I cannot say the same of my textual exchanges.
I have been living in Mexico since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no mailman here – if there is, I have yet to see him – but I still check the letterbox in our front door every day. To send or receive a letter, I drive about a mile to a shop between here and the lovely little village which is returning to a kind of normal after on-again-off-again lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing protocols, new vaccines, new variants, and never-ending social media debates about all of these. It’s not officially over, and the virus itself will always be around, but it appears to be “socially over,” people exhausted and drained as they resume a kind of normalcy, no longer fearing perhaps – or no longer caring about – the virus which has upended life as we knew it, keeping us apart yet also bringing us together.
In 2020, the United States Postal Service reported that letter writing increased, perhaps gaining more interest because unlike digital and disposable exchanges, letters require a little more labor, a little more intention. After all, you have to find your best pen, write the letter, place it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and send it. You have to slow down – even as the world around you spins at breakneck speed.
In part, these are the sentiments behind the Letters of Note website, a homage to the craft of letter-writing. Editor, Shaun Usher, has painstakingly collected and transcribed letters, memos, and telegrams that deserve a wider audience. Among my favorite books is this beautiful book of letters. Because I am of a time when telegrams came from America and other places, to be read by the Best Man at wedding receptions, I opted for the collectible first edition, accompanied by an old-fashioned telegram.
Anyway, considering telegrams and old letters, and the heart laid bare on stationery this Valentine’s Day, I am reading again the letter of marriage advice from then future President Ronald Reagan to his son, Michael.
Regardless of what I may think of Reagan as a President, there is both heart and craft in this love letter, originally published in Reagan – A Life in Letters.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Michael Reagan
Manhattan Beach, California
June 1971
Dear Mike:
Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.
You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the ‘unhappy marrieds’ and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.
Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was ’til three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it.
The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.
Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.
Love,
Dad
P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.
