Inside King Tut's Tomb

Last weekend I was poking around in some boxes that I found in the basement closet, and I came across a stash of letters and photos. I knew they were there, but you know how it is--you forget the specifics, and when you finally get around to hauling the boxes out to the middle of the basement and rigging up a spotlight so you can see (because the overhead fluorescent light keeps flickering on and off) and sitting down on the cold floor and removing the lid, anything you find inside is a true surprise.

Above is one of the photos, the colors faded and a little wonky, a little too red, an old print made from an even older slide. It's seven of us, and I do not think that this was the way we always reserved a picnic table, but it's a pretty effective way.

I can't tell where that picture was taken. Pattison Park? Park Point? Somewhere up the North Shore? (And scattered throughout this post are more old photos. My nephew, Christopher, and his skateboard. Kristin and her son, Shawn. Guv's family, back on the farm.)

More interesting than the photos (which got pretty repetitive after a while--the photos that you stuff in a box and shove into the back of a closet are usually not the best pictures you've taken) were the letters.

I have been bad about saving letters. When I lived in Duluth, I had a big red and white paper shopping bag from the Museum of Modern Art, which I kept under my desk and tossed letters into. But eventually even a bag of that size will fill up, as this one did, and then the side began to split open, and every time I moved it letters would slither out through the tear, or slide off the top of the stack, and when I left Duluth, I ruthlessly threw most of them away.

Idiot.

The letters I found last weekend were letters from my father. Most of them were from the summer of 1994, the summer I lived in the Thurber House.

The longer letters were typed on his old Remington Rand typewriter--the font and the ink as recognizable to me as the sound of his voice--and the shorter ones were hand-written on note paper with his name printed at the top.

Reading these was not quite like listening to him speak--the letters are not chatty or casual, but written deliberately. Most of them end obliquely, which made their message stick in my mind. And I had forgotten how funny he was.

His humor was dry and subtle; in one letter he mentioned a family portrait that my sister had given him. This photo was truly enormous--four feet wide and perhaps three feet tall--and my father wrote that he and my mother had had it framed and were going to hang it above the fireplace, "to show our support for family values."

You would have to know Guv to understand on how many levels that was a joke.

After I read the letters, I put them all back in their envelopes, along with the newspaper clippings and other ephemera he liked to include, and I put them back in the box, and I shoved the box over to a new corner of the basement (my own peculiar method of "decluttering"--just move things). And since last weekend I have been thinking about letter writing, and how common it once was, and what a dwindling pleasure it has become.

I used to write letters all the time, and when I was a girl I once asked my grandmother for a year's supply of stamps for Christmas. I spent most of them on her, and on my cousin Patti Lynn, the patient victims of my insatiable letter-writing.

The winter of 1967, when my father moved to Winnipeg to teach and work on his dissertation, we communicated almost entirely by letter. Long-distance phone calls were expensive and alarming. The Internet did not exist.

When my friend P. Miller moved to Alaska in the late 1980s, she and I exchanged weekly letters. Five and eight and ten-page letters, written over a period of days. (And perhaps read over a period of days, too.)

The summer I was in Finland and Russia, I wrote long letters home to everyone (and wish I'd kept copies of them, somehow, but was never that self-conscious). Even the summer I was at the Thurber House, after the creation of e-mail, people wrote me letters and I wrote back.

That was 1994, and that was probably pretty close to the end of it. Now everything is electronic, and the question for nostalgics and historians and librarians and archivists is: what do you keep?

I suppose you can print out your e-mails and toss them into a big paper sack under your desk and pull them out from time to time and read them, but the feeling is entirely different. E-mails are less thoughtful; they're faster; they contain typos and misspellings and sentence fragments, and sometimes they're just one line, in response to a previous message that you would also have to print out or else all context would be gone. And because they are quick and brief, there are millions of them. I get hundreds every day. Hundreds.

With an e-mail you can attach a photo or a document, but that feels official and perfunctory (See: Attached).

Attachments can be annoying; they sometimes make the message difficult to open, or the attachment won't download, or they send everything to spam.

They lack the warmth of shaking an envelope and finding something extra included inside--knowing that someone went to the trouble of cutting a story out of the newspaper, or pressing a flower dry, or opening their wallet and removing a five-dollar bill, and sliding it into the envelope for you. They touched it, and now, days and miles later, you are touching it, too.