You’ve got mail!

Before the Internet, email, and texting, there used to be a channel of communication called the U.S. Postal Service. Yea, yea, the only things that come in the mail nowadays are junk mail, advertising flyers, and bills, but back in the day, it played a critical role in modern society.

For you young ‘uns in the crowd, you would write down the name and address of the person you wanted the mail or letter to be sent, put a stamp on it, and, on your way to school or work or wherever you were traveling, you would drop the letter into a blue USPS mail box. A few days later, the letter would land in the appropriate mailbox.

Yes, a text or a SnapChat message is much quicker, but somehow we survived.

Image by Pixabay.

Mail call! Mail call!

I have to laugh thinking about how much communications have changed. My wife and I owe our relationship thanks in large part to the mail service. Without the Postal Service, we probably would have never met.

My wife knew my middle brother from the summer camp they both worked at in college. He had dated her roommate for a time and they had worked closely with a number of the same campers. Around the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, my wife was trying to check in on several of her friends who were in the military. My brother was an officer in the Marines and he was one of the first people she tried to contact. It was a worrisome time. You couldn’t get away from talk about the ramp up of the U.S.-led coalition and the impending war. She wrote a letter with her phone number to my family and my mom passed it along to me.

When I called her back to pass along his address, the two of us developed a friendship. Our call didn’t last all that long, but we learned that we had a lot of things in common.

We started off slow, we’d talk every couple of weeks, usually after something big in the news broke, like the start of the bombing campaign or one of the scud missile attacks on coalition forces, but since long distance calls were so expensive at the time, we started writing each other every few days. The cards and letters allowed us to talk about everything and nothing all at the same time. After a number of months, we decided to meet in person.

A few weekends later, when I knocked on her door, we felt like we had known each other for years. We hit it off.

Love is in the air

After we met, the letters and cards and calls came quicker. We fell hard for each other. We dated and did the long distance relationship thing for a long time before I finally proposed to her. We talked often in those early days on the phone, but I attribute those letters with cementing our relationship. We made jokes and laughed, but we also wrote down on paper our dreams and what we wanted to become. We opened up a vein and shared our deepest thoughts.

From those early days, I found my best friend. Yes, it was frustrating not being able to see or talk with her as much as I might have wanted, but when a letter came in the mail, I felt like I was walking on clouds. After working all day, the first thing I did when I came home was to run to the mailbox. Looking back now, I believe those antiquated days of letter writing taught us how two people need to communicate in a marriage for it to survive life’s happy moments and hardships.

Image by Pixabay.

Wednesday Letters

I write today about a different kind of letter, my weekly note to my wife, in my blog, Wednesday Letters, on The Heart of The Matter. Some will call it romantic. Others may think it schmaltzy mush. I tend to think of it as self-preservation or, better yet, my way of saying thank you to my wife.

Let me know what you think about both my blogs today: You’ve got mail and Wednesday Letters. Who has fond memories of snail mail in the days before texting and social media? What do you remember about sending cards and letters?

Related Story:

The Wednesday Letters

on The Heart of the Matter