I’m 99 percent finished with this year’s Christmas cards! This dying tradition had me remembering how I developed a Hallmark Gene as one friend joked about. I would have to blame it all on the move to Houston 40 years ago. The anniversary was long ago, I think right at the end of August; as I’ve always said, leaving Central IL for the Boomtown Days of Houston in the early Eighties was the closest I’ll be to living in another country. I was so homesick within days of attending Strake Jesuit. I guess I never thought the day would come when we’d leave Springfield! As if the move were a form of vaporware or Dad found a way to let us all stay put while he toiled away in The Energy City (Houston’s nickname in Rollerball).
Then out of the blue, we started to receive letters. Or did I write them first? It’s all hazy. Besides Grandma, who thought it was her duty to proofread what I sent and return my writings for my betterment; the most surprising person I would go on to have almost four years of correspondence with was Kim. We weren’t the best of friends at St. Agnes, more like on-off-again friends/antagonists. Kim was still a pretty cool person. A tomboy compared to the other girls since she was more athletic than most and it didn’t bother me. Mom on the other hand was now transforming into the next stage of psycho I had to deal with until I got married; every girl/woman I date is a whore. No wait, every girl/woman I know, even as a friend, is a whore. It’s as if she believed Letters to Penthouse were factual but after two decades of therapy, I’ve learned, no, some parents just project their fears and anxieties into their offspring. What I’d give to travel back in time a la Marty McFly to really discover what my pre-married mother was actually like. Given what a killjoy and sourpuss she has been, I doubt she was hot-to-trot as per Lea Thompson; probably someone turned down a few notches in the boy-crazy department with enough wet-blanket to make her unpopular amongst her peers.
To anyone under 40, you’re probably wondering…letters? Were the Eighties seriously pathetic? I bet you’re imagining my friends, relatives and me having our correspondence read aloud by Morgan Freeman and Glenn Close with all their gravitas as Ken Burns pans over the colored ink on notebook paper! Until MCI and Sprint got their breakthrough after AT&T’s complete breakup in 1984; a long-distance phone call was often around 50 cents ($1.50 today) for the first minute and over 35 cents ($1.15) for every minute after it. What really sucked, some parts of Houston and adjoining towns were long-distance calls too. So you can understand why a 20-cent stamp (on par with today’s 60) was the route to go. I’m confident if I were born 10 years later and the same events took place, we’d all be keeping in better touch via AOL. The rates dropping to as low as ten-cents-a-minute wasn’t an improvement since time adds up and you could buy stuff with dimes then. I did splurge as a young adult in the Nineties and August because it was my phone bill to pay.
Today, nobody frickin’ bothers to call, it’s primarily these terse, text messages. The Mills and Gen Z aren’t all to blame. My fellow Gen Xers and Boomers are equally guilty in their avoidance in having a real conversation. I guess tech solved a problem! Jerry Seinfeld was right, people are afraid of public speaking and the definition extends to one-on-one.
It was fun while it lasted, from the Fall of 1982 to the Fall of 1986. Thanks to beer, no set bedtime, music, concerts and girls, college got in the way of me writing back to all those pen pals I accrued. Somedays I feel a cringe of guilt about it, especially for those remaining in North Dakota or stuck in the military. If e-mail were more widely available, I bet I would’ve done better. I even spent hours in the word-processing lab willingly, until I found the Biz College’s Mac Lab!
After I graduated, I did get back into writing some letters and unemployment amped it up into a magazine. With my move to Austin, AOL took over as the preferred communication and when I was finally making enough money, I initiated the tradition of blasphemous cards. Some are pointless with the humorless, over-religious and they’ll never change.
Today, the letters are no more than an individualized, hand-written notes with the cards; a few are skipped like stores. I do write an e-mail here and there, depends upon how much of a response I get in return. This Web site has taken over what 1982 initiated circa 1998 and continues to evolve. From PageMill to GoLive to Blojsom to its umpteenth version of WordPress. I fear what the near future holds, probably some icky telepathic nonsense.
I do hope what few readers out there I have are enjoying this. I regret some of the political tirades at times, but I have to be myself. You better be as well. Maybe I’ll find those Vans boxes filled with letters I received from 1982-84 and re-read them.