In praise of pen and ink

Many years ago, a thoroughly love-besotted college sophomore kept his Dad and brother-in-law, who had made a three-hour trip to Maine to pick him up for summer vacation, waiting for a couple of hours in his dorm room.

He was busy helping his girlfriend pack and doing his best to charm her parents and sister.

The Dad was a mild-mannered man, but steam was almost coming out of his ears when his distracted offspring finally showed up and started to pack his own stuff.

I know about this because the guy was me, the girl was Emily, and we wrote about this day, humorous only in retrospect, in letters that we have retained all of these years.

This weekend we dusted off a few of the hundreds of letters we wrote back and forth over a summer she was away being a camp counselor and the two years she spent at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst after transferring from Colby. (That move was, she now says, her last-ditch attempt to find a nice Jewish boy. Oh well, can't win 'em all.)

One thing we both noticed immediately while reading the letters was how much clearer our handwriting was back in the '60s. Funny what you can do when there aren't any keyboards around.

What will be the equivalent in another 40 years of the old bags into which we jammed these letters, and will there be an electronic version of the back of a closet where they have sat since we moved here in 1984?

Much is gained by blogs, e-mails, twitters, etc., but much can be lost by the passing of more prosaic technology as well. Hopefully devices to save such seemingly prosaic but eventually precious communications are being developed even as I write this.