Chronicle Classic

Morgan has been asking me why she never gets any mail. I say what mothers always say: To get a letter, you have to write a letter.

I don’t blame her for asking. I work at home and am always cheered to see that white rectangle with scrawled handwriting on it come sliding through the slot and land in a sea of junk mail.

I don’t know who it’s from yet, but I know someone put off washing the dishes or reading his new copy of Model Trains to write and address a personal letter, a rare enough thing nowadays. It could be from my friend Georgia, talking about why she loves looking out windows, or another friend telling me about flying across the country to see his 87-years-old father, how they sat up late, the two of them, drinking a fair amount of Scotch, how he suddenly blurted out to his father, “I think I came here just to tell you I love you” and then burst into tears. “It was the last time I saw him alive, and I was sure glad I made the trip,” my friend wrote.

What I told Morgan was true enough, though: To get a letter, sooner or later you have to write one, and most people would rather go scrub the kitchen linoleum with a toothbrush than sit down to write five lines to Aunt Jilly.

Part of this is laziness, but mostly, it’s fear. Whenever you pick up a pen, you give yourself away. The essay writer Patricia Hampl said that her Czech grandmother would dictate three sentences and then come to a halt, completely demoralized, Hampl said, “by the evidence that you can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.”

Sometimes, though, there’s no getting out of it. Maybe your friend in the antipodes sent you a yellow Panama hat. Your husband’s away and you miss him, or your friend Rosalie’s in Rome, drinking too much red wine in trattorias and needs to hear that he was never good enough for her anyway.

You have to write, so you start with something easy — where you’re sitting, what time it is, what you can see or hear out the window. Then you let it cook along, saying whatever comes to mind about the last time you saw the friend you’re writing to, or the fight you had with your sister, or the plate of burned eggs your daughter has just brought you.

Pretty soon all sorts of stuff is spilling out, stuff that can’t get said any other way, not in a phone call, not in a fax. Only a letter has that combination of letting you marshal your thoughts at a comforting distance – you are alone as you write, and days later, when it is read, the reader will be alone, too — and yet know the overwhelming intimacy of pouring out your thoughts to another human being.

When I was turning a lonely 21 by myself in Paris, I got a letter from my mother telling me how she felt the day my twin and I were born, and about her hopes for us. I still remember standing in that tiny French kitchen, with the January rain pelting the roof, reading what my mother would never have said aloud.

What that Czech grandmother was afraid of — betraying your secret self — is of course just what you’re after, in a good letter. “Thank you for the hat. I really liked the hat,” you start to say, then, if someone doesn’t grab the pen and nothing boils over on the stove, go on to spill the beans about everything from how blue the sky is out your window to how you really felt the day your fiancé got on that Cessna.

I can tell my dad to go to hell in a letter, and he can, at his leisure, write back, telling me what he regrets, what he looks forward to, what he remembers. When his letter arrives I can ball it up, or read and reread it, and fold it away. It’s a moment I can keep.

When I was turning a lonely 21 by myself in Paris, I got a letter from my mother telling me how she felt the day my twin and I were born, and about her hopes for us.