Last month the New York Times published a little essay in the Opinionator column by Jim Sollisch called "The Art of Repitition" about writing thank you notes. That prompted me to think about my own beginnings as a writer.
Like Sollisch, my earliest writing outside of school was in the form of thank-you letters. Growing up in my household, it would have been unimaginable to have received a gift or a special invitation and not to have reciprocated with a written thank-you. Simply writing "Thank you for the gift" was not sufficient. The letter had to be specific, and I learned early on to include some description of how and when the gift would be of use/delight/instruction to me.
My first "professional" writing was a charge I was given each summer. My grandparents had 80 acres in Toano, a tiny farming community outside of Williamsburg, Virginia. My family lived in Ardmore,Oklahoma, where my father was a geologist, and each summer, when school let out, my mother, sister and I would board a Boeing 707 (we may have even taken flights on the older De Havilland Comet) to my grandparents. In August, my father would make the drive east for his two-week vacation and then drive the family back to Oklahoma.
In a town the size of Toano, the arrival each year of Mr. and Mrs. Chas. W. Richards' daughter, Mary Jane, and her two daughters was news, news that had to be announced in Toano's weekly newspaper. Almost as soon as I could string sentences together on a piece of paper, I was given the assignment each June of writing the article for the paper -- in second-person objective, formal prose. Like Sollisch, I learned early on "the practice of saying the same thing over and over again in different ways."
For as long as I can remember, I was expected to write to my grandmother weekly, though those letters were mostly about daily comings and goings. My correspondence with my grandfather, who was a great moralist and story teller, was altogether different, and we carried on a wonderful conversation in letters until he died in 1971.
Anyone who had a father in the oil business in the late '50s and '60s knew to expect him to be transferred (that was the term). We were fairly lucky and weren't transferred as often as some of my friends' families. We did a stint in '60 and '61 in Richardson, Texas, outside of Dallas. When we moved back to Ardmore, I began an exchange of letters with the one friend I had made in Richardson, and when my father was transferred to Tulsa in 1969, one of my girlfriends back home and I wrote lengthy letters back and forth. While I was in graduate school, a best friend from Oklahoma College of Liberal Arts was living in rural Oklahoma in a trailer that burned to the ground. A couple of years later she told me that the only thing she wished she could have saved from the fire were my letters. That statement moved me deeply.
Though I would eventually be satisfied with three or four pages from a yellow pad, my side of these early correspondences was conducted on Eaton's deckle edge stationery. Out of curiosity, I just now opened the Eaton Cards and Stationery webpage to see if it is still available. The tabs across the top of the Home page read Weddings, Births, Funerals, How to Order, and Contact. There is no tab for Correspondence or Stationery. The handwritten note has been relegated exclusively to rites of passage. Along with newspapers, magazines, and books, the digital age is making stationery and the handwritten letter into artifacts.
I have never stopped writing letters of condolence on fine writing paper by hand. The first time I thanked someone for a gift in an email, I apologized profusely. Now I don't, and that is cause for mourning.
