Dear Dear Abby

Barbara: Dear Abby,

I am very sorry to hear you’ve passed away. Especially knowing that your long illustrious life ended with Alzheimer’s. I hope you didn’t suffer too much, and that your loving family didn’t suffer too much letting you go.

When I heard the news, I knew right away that I had to write. I didn’t immediately take stock of the last time I read your column (which was long before your daughter took it over), but I did have a visceral memory from my fraught adolescence of me pouring over those letters to and from you. I would skip past the dire world news and go straight to your advice column. In many ways, that ritual was much like my experience reading blogs now—unrelated people coming together from far and wide to share their humbling, difficult, complicated, tragic, nasty, romantic, sad, confused, loving experiences living in this complex world. For the first time in my life, I saw people bare their souls. For a naïve, inexperienced, soon-to-be woman like me, it seemed impossible that people would be so open and honest, revealing hearts and lives I either related to with every fibre of my being, or ones I was fascinated to discover, or ones I hoped I’d never ever have to encounter.

How did you do it? You were so brave and honest. You were funny. You said things that didn’t offend me, that opened my eyes. You didn’t pander or patronize. You shot from the hip. You were gracious and decent. Wasn’t it hard, exhausting, to be so wise and patient? I don’t think so—because we never heard that it had been either one or the other. You were graceful and kind about your role as therapist to the world (aka North America). You showed us by example that we could learn from our mistakes and change our views in a changing world. You showed us we didn’t need to hide our mistakes and fears behind closed doors, but that we could come out and share them with others so they could learn from them too.

If not for you and the trend you began and the example you set, why, none of us might know how to do this online/internet/social media thing with any social grace. You led the vanguard, baby. You showed the way it ought to be done. With kindness and compassion and good common sense.

Thank you very sincerely from the bottom of my heart for teaching me so much about the human experience. R.I.P.

Love, Barbara

(Dear Readers, if you don’t know to whom I’m referring, Dear Abby was/is a daily advice column that ran from the late 50s to present day. Pauline Phillips wrote it until the early 2000s until her daughter took it over.)

Deb: Dear Abby,

You spoke to a generation, nay, several generations about brave and bold gentility. You were of your time and beyond your time. Rest in Peace. 

My Friends’ Handwriting

Deb: Recently a friend posted on Facebook an appeal for people to send Christmas cards online instead of through the mail. I get it, I do. But there are more factors that go into the sending and receiving of cards than just the environmental ones.

The sending and receiving of Christmas cards—or greeting cards period, for that matter—is a tradition going way back in time.

The first commercial Christmas cards were commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, in London in 1843. 

They became so popular that it was unthinkable in certain society not to send cards. After a period and certainly when I was a child, sending Christmas cards was something you simply did, no questions asked. I used to love the card garlands my parents would make and I loved to flip up their festive covers to expose the signature underneath.

Over the years I have adored both sending and getting Christmas cards from loved ones near and far. When the season is over, I cut the cards up and use them the next year as tags for the gifts. We also use the same gift bags in our family year after year. This year I am buying yards of soft tulle-like fabric that can be used as the stuffing of the bags instead of tissue and reused every year. These things are my tiny efforts to mix the traditions with the realities of this world. Small, but something. And yet the pressure to end this tradition mounts every year.

Fewer and fewer of our friends send Christmas cards and I understand the reasons—footprint, time, expense. Still I miss these cards. It’s not even the cards I miss so much, but the signatures.  What I really love about getting cards is seeing our friends’ handwriting. It is so comforting to open up a card and just by the valediction know exactly who sent it.

And when I was doing our cards last night, I was thinking about the relationship between John Hancock and our son’s generation. It dawned on me that this generation has no connection to handwriting. They could not begin to recognize a friend’s cursive scroll and feel warmed by it. They won’t look at a note and recognize it as Bill or Megan’s handwriting. Because they don’t. Write, that is. With pen or pencil. They simply don’t write. And they don’t care. Why would they? They don’t want for what they never had.

Me? I will miss seeing our loved ones dotted i’s and crossed t’s on our Christmas cards. I will miss seeing the flourish that Kathy gives to her “L’s” and the looped curve to the “C” that identifies Christopher’s note. I love my friends’ handwriting. It is so personal. It’s who they are; it’s part of them.

So at some point, probably next year, we will give up the sending of cards and do them online. We will send by mail to the aunts and uncles and friends who are not online and that will cut down the cards by ninety percent. But it’s not the same. At least for me. You can send me the most beautiful e-card in the world and I may even play it over and over. But it won’t have your personality scrolled across the bottom. It will simply say, “Love, Doug, Janet, Tyler and Grace”. I’ll be glad you sent it. But I will miss the you in it.

What are you going to do? The handwriting is on the Facebook Wall.

Barbara: I never thought about looking at people’s handwriting and seeing it as an intimate extension of who they are. Of course it is! And I must have noticed it, but I’ve never thought of it. And now that you mention it, it is a special communion. It is distinctly personal, revealing, sacred.

All this said, I often think of my own writing as the side of me I’d rather hide, like ugly toes or excessive sweat. My handwriting is atrocious. It is hurried and sloppy and barely legible—even to me. And what’s more, it is often physically painful for me. When I was young, I used to develop these hard little balls under the skin near my wrist from the “exertion” of writing. The top knuckle of my middle finger veers right thanks to the pressure I put on it as a rabid teenaged writer. Computers have saved me from confusion (others’ and my own), have saved me time, have cleaned me up for the world, like a mom slicking back her kid’s unruly hair while wiping the grime from their cheek. I was getting seduced into thinking this was a better me I was showing to the world. And yet, to your point, Deb, it’s not the real, unadulterated me. 

My other weakness is in the whole sending of mail. I am terrible here too. I have long ago accepted I would rarely, if ever, send anything by mail. Legions of letters, packages, and warrantees have languished on my hall table to slowly gather dust and eventually be tossed.

I admire you and your ilk. I have treasured every card you have ever sent me and admired every stroke of your thoughtful pen. I love getting real mail. I love getting real cards. I will miss the ritual when it passes.

The Handwriting's On The Wall

Dearest Blog Readers, 

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be sending thank-you notes online I would have been insulted to the very core of my being. I have, as my mother taught me well, been a stalwart thank-you card sender for these many years. Selecting just the right card, the perfect pen, and the carefully chosen words befitting the occasion was something I took pride in. For the final personal touch, I would get out my stamp collection and, pressing it onto the pad, would leave my inky message, be it “Happy Birthday”, “Congratulations”, or “Sorry for the loss of your hamster”. This would say to the recipient: you have been constantly on my mind from the moment I drove to the card store until the moment I stood at the mailbox craning my neck to make sure the card dropped out of sight.

So it is with some regret that I find myself clicking keys instead of dipping my quill into the ink well. Okay, I don’t use a quill, but I felt that it illustrated the vast disparity of styles. Is it enough of an excuse to say, “I’m just too busy”? No, damn it, not an excuse! I still send Christmas cards, does that count? Not a bit!!! Now, I have not abandoned the handwritten note altogether as I still write them when I can find time, but when I hear people talk of how wonderful it is to receive a handwritten card, I hang my head and press “send”. 

With warmest regards and continued wishes for your good health, 

Deb

PS If any of you are struggling with the demise of this time-honoured tradition, a great way to meet it halfway is with these Jacquie Lawson e-cards, which are––in my humble opinion––the best e-cards on the web!

***Picture Happy Face Stamp here*** 

Barbara: Oh dear. This is dangerous territory for me—and by that I mean, dangerous for my guilt-factor. I have a grandmother and a great-aunt who are very precious to me, but who live on the other side of the country. Over the years, we’ve always relied on letter-writing and card-sending to keep us connected. Or rather, they’ve always relied on it—while I have struggled every time with the several steps involved: getting the card or nice paper, writing pithy details of my life, conveying how much I miss them (I truly do) without sounding like I’ve cut and pasted the same sentiment over and over into each new letter, putting the letter in the envelope, getting a stamp (we are ALWAYS out of stamps when I need to send a letter to them), and finally—and here, for some reason is the single most difficult part—MAILING IT!! I can’t tell you how many completed letters have wizened and decayed on my hall table, waiting to be sent on their way. 

My aunt finally got a computer and an email account, which was very exciting. Not as glamorous and elegant as a letter, like you say, Deb, but at least I can communicate with them on a regular basis. Now my missives get reliably sent … but I’m told my aunt never looks at her email. *sigh*