I love stationery. I love getting letters. I love writing letters. When I was a child, I was the last kid who still had pen pals, I’m pretty sure. I wrote my friend Emily West from summer camp until we both ended up at the same college… no, I lie. We last exchanged letters just after her wedding. Yep. We wrote from the time we were TEN until well into our thirties. With the advent of babies and email (well, there was email well before that, but we ignored it), we lost track, but I know she’s still somewhere, being Em.
In college, my friend Darla had files of blank cards she bought – just things which caught her fancy. My friend Erin, in grad school, coined the phrase “paper slut,” because honestly, the girl was a menace to walk with at craft faires or bookstores. She stopped every four feet, and bought and bought and bought. A dollar fifty here, three dollars there — and something every time she went to Trader Joe’s, or Cost Plus, where the really cool cards are. I was just as bad, of course. At the Stirling library in Scotland, the library sold cards for a fundraiser… oy. I was always haunting them, for the books and for the cards. Between my fines and my purchases, they made off with quite a bit of my money.
Last summer, Bean gave me two handsome file boxes for the specific purpose of, like her, organizing myself so that I have the right card for every occasion. I feel very prepared for my life just now. Or, at least one small part of it.
We are the people who are not going to let the post office die without one helluva fight.
Keeping in touch is vital — saying thank you means you’re taking note of all the good that happens to you.
This little news snippet makes me sniffle, because the girl from Starbucks said it best: gratitude makes you feel like a person, and not a …tool. A thing that people feel entitled to heckle and sigh at, because you don’t get their half-caf double mocha latte with unsweetened almond milk just so. Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s CARPE JUGULUM says it best:
There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats.
“And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that –”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes –”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things …”
Just like the random acts of kindness with which we started the year, the Thirty One Deeds, this emotion is the goal — giving people the feeling that they matter. That’s why we do it. That’s why we’re here.
That’s why we’re thankful. Right? Because there is so much good, and that we can pass it on.
I wrote so many letters during high school college~especially to friends whom I had to leave behind when I moved. Recently, I was given all the letters I wrote to my grandparents during those same years~what a trip! S’pose I should get ambitious and put their letters and mine to them in a scrapbook of some kind.