The golden rules

thing When unearthing old letters finding feels like buried treasure

Today, I gave an old friend a gift.

It was a “no occasion” gift. She said it was one of the best presents she’d ever received. The gift was a batch of letters. I gave my friend all the letters she’d written to me back when we were teenagers, young career women and then young brides. I’d kept them. Them, and lots of others, too. I don’t really know why, but I had. I’m glad that I did. Glad for her and glad for me, too. She read them out loud, both of us alternating between laughter and tears.

We remembered a night — “the best night of our lives” — that had got us grounded for weeks. Was it worth the immeasurable worry we caused our parents coming home at, was it 5 a.m.? It depends on who’s asking. With wicked little smiles, we sing the chorus from the song we sang that fateful, crazy night.

We remembered my visit when she had moved to a strange, new land: that of the newly wed. I couldn’t decide what was more exotic: Edmonton, or matrimony.

We remembered the boys we were crazy about. Our parents. Our siblings. Our teachers.

The world we were going to set on fire.

And here we were today, holding our youthful hearts in our timeworn hands, remembering that we were — are — each other’s lives.

None of it would we have remembered if not for these tri-folded pieces of paper.

You know, I just don’t think the Cloud is going to be able to do the same thing.

There’s just something about a letter.

Over the years, I had placed every personal letter I received into a box. I started this when I was — and I’m almost ashamed to tell you this — in elementary school. What I was saving them for, I had no idea. The DSM must have a name for it. Surfeit sentimentality? Nostalgia-itis? Reminiscence in extremis? I kept it up until about 10 years ago. In the last few years of the collection, most of the entries were to my kids: birthday and post cards, most of them from relatives. Corresponding seemed to be falling out of favour. The box worked its way into the deepest recesses of my home: the crawlspace.

The crawlspace is my personal Mariana Trench. It’s where I house my son’s billion- dollar Brio wooden train set, plus the rocking horses and dollhouses. Long-range planning stuff.

I house a pretty extensive and varied archive. Vintage circus tutus? Pink, lavender or yellow; you choose. Two dozen silver-plated salvers required to pass hors d’oeuvres at a housewarming? Comin’ up! That I would have an archive of mail really didn’t sur- prise me. Nevertheless, I had forgotten about the box of letters. In the moment that I opened the lid, I knew the day was shot. To come across such a box of letters is to fall into a rabbit hole. You promise yourself to spend only a minute looking at them. After all, some greater purpose took you into the storage space. The minute becomes the hour becomes the day.

To re- read letters years later is to be dumbfounded. Vast swaths of unremembered life comes flooding back. More than just the essence of the writer, each relationship is captured on the page. The mind conjures the voice, the mannerisms, the cadences of the writer, each line animating a cinema in your mind. The private joke that falls flat on other ears, lives again in the mind of the addressee. There is something earnest about putting pen to paper. Even in the breeziest missive, there’s a deliberateness. Certain courtesies are observed; language is couched in temperate tones. The conventions of a letter seem to impose a degree of thoughtfulness. Perhaps this formality curtails grousing? No one seems to dwell on bad news too long in a letter.

A paragraph that alludes to better days ahead follows a dark passage. Hopes, dreams and plans — many of which simply got crowded off the agenda — are enumerated. A type of snow blindness accompanies the love letters. A tumbling descent from “forever” to “nevermore” catalogued in blue ink. More than just scrawling, looping, slashing marks on a page, each letter is a portrait. A portrait of both parties. If you have any sense, you’ll avoid reading old love letters while crouched in a crawlspace.

I can’t recall the last time I wrote an honest- to- god letter. Cards, I send out all the time. My great objective with a card is to be as brief as possible. I’ve always considered Katharine Hepburn’s card to Christopher Reeve following his catastrophic fall — “Golly! What a mess!” — to be the acme of social correspondence. Brevity, however, seems a shame. There is a shallowing out of emotion, a disregard for the conventions that bind us to one another. The very idea of a letter — the time it takes to write it, the trouble it takes to acquire postage and to mail it — seems enormous compared to today’s hasty, effortless bulletins. Compared to email, a letter is a gift. Closing my eyes now, I can see my 16-year-old self, dashing for the mailbox. “A letter! A letter!” It has taken two readings — decades apart — to fully understand what these letters meant. And maybe that’s the reason I kept them all these years.