Letters

When I was thirteen, my mom presented me with a packet of about ten letters, printed, three-hole-punched, and fastened into a blue Mead folder, that she had written to me, one every year on my birthday since I was a wee tyke - about four years old. In them, she describes my typical day and my relationships with the other members of our immediate family: herself, my dad, and my sister. She concludes with a bit about my personality in general and other milestones that have come up are sprinkled throughout. They are usually 3-5 pages in length. They are among my most valuable possessions.

When I graduated high school, I got another set of 5 letters, from the intervening years. When I graduated college? Yup, another four. After college, with no next obvious goal in sight, she started mailing them to me. Because I had so loved reading the others, I read them right away for a few years.

Then I started to realize that what I had loved about them was their unexpected nature, just going through my life and using the letters, my mom's observations of me, to help me reflect on how I've changed and grown. I realized that I couldn't do that if I was constantly getting a letter about such recent history. One particularly poignant example was reading, less than a year after the breakup, about how my mom thought one boyfriend would have made a good son-in-law.

So I stopped. I told her, of course; I thought her writing had changed when her perception of her audience changed - for the first set of letters, she could not imagine where I'd be five or ten years later when I read them, but the later letters had more of a sense of immediacy to them. I also didn't want to talk to her shortly after my birthday and have her expect me to comment on the most recent letter. I have five letters, largely unopened and entirely unread, burning a hole in the third blue folder. I wonder like crazy sometimes what's in them, but I'm looking forward to some milestone event in the future in which I will tear them open and gobble them up - maybe when I get my master's degree, or buy a home, or get married, or have a baby and start my own letters. Time will tell what that milestone will be.

In the meantime, I have taken to writing my own letters to a couple of youngsters I'm close to. The letters follow roughly my mom's format, describing their relationships with their family members, as far as I can see from my perch on the periphery of their family, and recently, from afar as well. When they lived closer by and I saw them more often, even spent day in and day out with them, I felt more qualified to comment on their daily activities, but now my comments are more general and any specifics are derived from their parents' reports or my infrequent visits. I tell them stories and offer them (hopefully useful) advice, and they are generally 1-3 pages long (mostly because I don't spend nearly as much time with them as a parent does). I, too, have visions of these letters being b'nai mitzvah gifts, but am realistic that such celebrations are up for debate in their family and so don't mind if they wait until another milestone - maybe graduating middle school, or even high school. If nothing else, the letters are good ways for me to hold onto these memories of them, and to practice writing in general and letter-writing-to-special-little-one-in-my-life specifically. But maybe, just maybe, these guys will find these letters as meaningful and precious as I find mine.

I'm thinking about all of these letters a lot since I'm finally making time while on semester break from school to work on the ones I'm writing, but also because I'm reading a memoir by someone I went to high school with. I remember her (and her siblings) as good-looking, smart, athletic, nice, and generally good at whatever she put her mind to, and it doesn't at all surprise me that she wrote and published a book already, but the content was unexpected. When she was 24, her husband died suddenly in an accident, leaving her alone and five months pregnant. Her memoir is wrenching and beautiful (all the more so because I can picture her and various people she mentions, and the locations). It opens with the day of the accident, beginning as abruptly as her life changed, and goes through until her son's first birthday. I'm about a third of the way in and she's about to go into labor. I can't help but think of this as a sort of letter to her son, as well - chronicling everything she was going through, and about him as a tiny baby, which he will be able to cherish once he's old enough to read it.