We need more pen pals in this world. Getting to know someone who is in a far off land or if you’re a county kid, getting to know a city slicker could open yourself to a new world. The art of writing a letter to someone you don’t know, talking about things that could be foreign just increases the knowledge one can grasp in a short period of time. It’s an art that most have probably forgotten about during this technology era.
I remember going to Nashvile as a freshman and telling people I was from Nebraska. They (city kids from Nashville) didn’t even know where Nebraska was on the map. Hard for this geography buff to comprehend someone in high school was not aware of the location of such a great state. I explained it was in the center of the US and the response was ‘oh, close to Chicago’…. No, not really, but nice try.
Then they proceeded to ask if I lived in a house that had running water or if I had to take showers using a pivot. I must confess they didn’t call it a pivot, but that’s what they meant. They truly thought we took showers with the irrigation water. I was by all accounts a city slicker myself (my Grandma would confirm such) as I grew up in a town of 1,111 people, but I’m going to confess Nebraska had running water and we had indoor toilets. We did not have an outhouse for that.
You see my Grandmother was a rancher in a town of 15 people, 7 being my Grandparents, my mother and her siblings. When we’d spend summers with her wearing our shorts and sandals, she’d often look to us in disgust and say we needed to wear jeans and closed toe shoes while on the ranch. Wearing sandals and shorts while riding a horse was a big problem. We’d never get to ride a saddle without the proper boots, so it was always bare back riding, no exceptions! Additionally, rattle snakes occupied much of the same land as humans so it was truly necessary to wear the jeans and boots.
I often thought how closed minded the city kids were. They had everything in the city at their finger tips, while it was harder for rural kids to come by, but in many ways we were much better off. We learned because we had imagination to do big things, to learn about the world outside our small communities and part of that learning was through pen pals and writing. We didn’t have cell phones or emails. Heck, calling wasn’t easy because everything was long distance and cost money. In fact, before I could place a long distance call from the house phone i would have to give the operator my phone number so she could properly connect/charge for the call, yes, I said I had to speak with the operator!
My Grandmother would write letters to her three girls and families. Three separate letters until she got ahold of some carbon paper. Then she’d write the letter pressing through the carbon papers (no Xerox for her). When we’d get the letter from Grandma you never knew if you’d get the top one that showed the ink from the pen or one of the ones where the carbon was transferred to the paper. She wrote them regularly without fail. She always closed with the X’s and O’s and usually a dime for each of us kinds. She expected us to save the money.
My Grandmother had excellent penmanship as did I at one time. She’d comment how my handwriting was very good, not great because I mixed cursive with non-cursive, she was a purist when it came to the X, Y, Zs. She was all about cursive. I wish my hand writing remained as it was back then but these days it is rushed and rarely do I pick up a pen to write a letter.
I should because it is a lost art and something most people enjoy. I’m not talking about the annual Christmas card. So many of them are replaced with a page long computer printed letter, I’m talking about a card and then a hand written letter to someone else. A few years ago I did just that, and was praised by the recepient. She told me she was so thankful that I took the time to write the letter and told me she was amazed that I did. She said ‘nobody does that anymore’.
I say bring back the art of writing cards and letters to people. It’s most welcomed by people because it is a rarity. Practice your cursive writing as many school children are no longer learning it. In fact, did you know that the postal service is reducing the cost of a stamp this year?
Forget the keyboard, put down that phone, take out a piece of stationary and write a letter to someone you know or maybe someone you don’t. Take the time to learn about someone or something new. You may be pleasantly surprised about how good you feel and how good they feel once you do it.
In case you need to jog your memory about how to write in cursive, just look at the chart below.
