Postcards Verses Texting: My Vote For Snail Mail

From my Granddaughter Evie

From Pam in China

From Bertha to Rudolph

From Chuck to Fred

From Father to Charlotte

From Bertha to her sister

From a Postcrosser friend

From my friend Mary Jo

Mail art postcard from Doug Travis

Postcard I sent to my self as a memento of my Italian vacation

I had to buy a new cell phone this weekend. I had a cool little black and silver clam phone that fit in the palm of my hand, but it stopped clamming and I knew it was only a matter of time until it bit the dust. It was a great little phone. When I traveled to Italy recently I bought an international calling package that allowed me to use it over there. Our friends bought the same package and a fancy new phone to go with it, but they had to use my little phone when theirs wouldn’t work. My phone took pictures, but my digital camera takes better ones so I never used that feature. To be honest, I just used it to call people. And I mean that literally. I would turn it on to use it then shut it off when I was finished. Believe me in this day of instant communication I took a lot of flack from my family and friends for my lack of cell phone etiquette.

My children and my two best friends are texters, though my son, who is a serious computer techie, does understand my need to hear his voice and calls me regularly. In all honesty I hate texting. It seems curt and rude and often there are misspelled words which makes me crazy. I have been a texting hold out. As part of my excuse I use my arthritic hands and farsightedness as my physical limitations to texting. My thumbs don’t work that well and I have trouble seeing such a little screen. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a Luddite or a technology dropout. I use a computer with mediocre skill both at home and at work and I have an iPad that I now cannot live without. (But, as I continue to admonish my family and friends, I can see the screen on my iPad!) I admit that I have resorted to having my husband text my friends or our children to have them call me when I can‘t get them to answer my phone calls. I also realize that technology stops for no one and I need to just move along and stop whining.

After an hour at the phone store and with the help of a great sales guy named Chris, who really did seem to know what I wanted and did not pressure me, I left with a snazzy, non-smart phone with the word “Ease” in its name. It wasn’t the pretty pink one I really wanted, instead it has a nice big display and a slide out keyboard that I can actually read without my glasses if I hold it far enough away from me. It has lots of fun features; you can actually tell it who to call if your thumbs are too sore to type. It has a calculator, alarm clock, tip calculator, camera, and probably a lot of things I haven’t even found yet, and yes, I broke down and got the texting package.

When I got home I texted my son and daughter and they welcomed me into the second decade of the 21st century with a few snide remarks. I texted my best friend next. I had emailed her a recipe earlier in the day and I wanted to surprise her with a text asking if she got the recipe. She then proceeded to send me text after text and after I sent two reply texts I just stopped the texting game and deleted all the rest of the messages she sent me without reading them. I did it a bit gleefully, I might add. I told my son later what I’d done and he laughed told me that if I was going to text people I couldn’t just shut off the phone in the middle of a texting flurry. “Oh, yes I can, I said.” I admitted to my friend last night what I did and she wasn’t surprised and loves me anyway.

In the midst of all this telephone craziness I was thinking how simple life would be if we were all still communicating with postcards. Ponder it a bit. Obviously postcards moved slower than text messages, but life was slower back then as well. Postcards have only a small space where one can write a message. Some people will squeeze a long message into that small space with tiny, cramped handwriting, but most messages are short and to the point. A card my Granddaughter Evie sent to me this summer reads, “Dear Grandma This is where we went on summer vacation. I miss you. Love Evie.” My friend Pam went to China in August and sent me a card that reads, “ As promised postcard from China-oldest trading port in country-from tallest bldg-with outdoor ferris wheel!! OMG.” Both of these messages are about the length of a text message, but I got a little gift along with my message, a souvenir from their travels and a postcard for my collection.

Looking through a box of postcards in the Teich Archives I read a number of messages sent nearly 100 years ago. Bertha writes to Rudolph, “Dear Friend: Do you remember a pleasant evening spent at this place? Will write soon.” Chuck writes to Fred, “Well, I’m back in Chicago again, how’s everything in Rock Island?” A father writes to his daughter, “Dear Charlotte, You saw this elephant. Be a good girl when Father is gone.” Bertha from Racine, Minnesota writes to her sister living in Sargeant, Minnesota, “Dear Sister: We are planning to drive to Sargeant tomorrow morning if the weather is pleasant. Hope to find you all well. Regards to all.” These messages sound as if they could be text messages sent from someone’s cell phone. Instead they are permanently recorded on the backs of postcards. Obviously the cards were meaningful enough to be tucked away and saved, only to find their way to the collection here nearly a century later. Perhaps that’s what I love best about receiving a postcard from someone. It becomes a permanent reminder. Years later when cyber space will be filled with random snippets of text messages, I’ll still have these postcards to remind me of a certain time in my life, when someone I loved, was thinking of me.