I am a regular listener to Vinyl Cafe which is a CBC radio program which I get every Sunday at noon. It consists of music and stories. They travel and do shows on the road. Usually they have a theme for the program and today's theme was letters. So all the music and stories were about letters. The story was about the host writing letters and then getting interested in stamp collecting. It's surprising all the music you can find about letters.
This got me thinking about my personal letter writing. First of all, personal letter writing, where a letter is written by hand and sent through the mail is almost extinct. I started to think about the last time I wrote a personal letter and I couldn't remember the last time I wrote a letter.
I do remember when I did write letters on a regular basis . I also received letters regularly. As a child I wrote letters to my friends and Grandma. My letter writing hey day was when I first left home. I usually wrote home once a week. I used a fountain pen and unlined writing paper...the kind you put lines under so you could write in a straight line. I think the postage was four cents. We don't even have a penny anymore! I would put dear Mom and Dad on the greeting but in my head I was writing to Mom. I thought of Mom because she was the one who always wrote back to me.
So I wrote letters home for nine years after I left home. Why did I stop? I got married and somebody else took over the letter writing.
Letter writing today has become quite rare. Long distance phoning has become much more comparable in price to sending a letter in the postal system. Phoning is much more immediate. Email is also super fast and efficient. Now texting has become almost continuous.
Now I would say that I am an elder in the blogging world. I think I'm older at 73 than all my followers as well as the people I follow. So most of my readers will probably be pretty hazy about personal letter writing! Writing was an excellent form of communication at the time but modern technology has given us easier and faster more direct contact.
Just out of curiosity, does anybody out there write personal letters?
