This week's column.
As homesick freshmen in Chapel Hill, my college roommate and I waged a quiet war whose ammunition was pastel envelopes lightly laced with perfume.
The object was to get the most letters from home penned in delicate cursive writing by our respective female sweethearts.
Once each letter arrived in the afternoon mail we’d rip open the envelopes and hang breathlessly onto every sugar-coated syllable.
If the prose wasn’t romantic enough, we’d read between the lines and theorize on what she’d obviously meant to say even if she didn’t exactly say it.
Then we’d carefully place each letter on the other roomies’ bed, so he could read it and weep when he returned from class.
Top that, loser.
Even when the fragrant pink and blue stationery faded, the memories didn’t.
There is something special about a handwritten letter.
Keep your harried e-mails and your hieroglyphic text messages. Give me sweet nothings in flowing blue ink.
The power of handwritten prose came to mind recently with the release of a new book, “Dear First Lady,” which compiles letters over the years to first ladies, from Mary Lincoln to Lou Henry Hoover to Eleanor Roosevelt to Hillary Clinton.
Consider this modest request, penned with care and precision on lined notebook paper to Mrs. Roosevelt in the winter of 1934:
“I feel worthy of asking you about this. I am greatly in need of a coat. If you have one which you have laid aside from last season [I] would appreciate it so much if you would send it to me. I will pay postage if you see fit to send it. ...”
It was from a widow, Clara Leonard, during the depths of the Great Depression and in the midst of an unusually cold December in Miami.
The meticulous handwriting said something that mere words couldn’t — how this woman held fast to her dignity despite her desperation.
Even in the digital age, some readers still choose the same route in their letters to the editor: They write them by hand.
Max Roseman of High Point prints most of his missives on yellow legal sheets.
Fred Cundiff of Greensboro also chose yellow legal paper for his most recent letter, onto which he wrote, in some of the prettiest penmanship I’ve seen in years, a scathing assessment of some City Council members.
Bob Blakeney of High Point, on the other hand, often scribbles in tiny words on envelopes, index cards, or scraps ripped from the corners of larger sheets of paper.
It’s a dying art (far fewer than 10 percent, I’d guess) but each week’s batch of reader wisdom and outrage includes at least a handful.
Until recently, Eppie and Remus Turner, both 86, each wrote their letters in flowing characters that expressed appreciation or outrage with equal elegance.
Now they use e-mail. Eppie Turner, a retired guidance counselor, said she finally gave in and took a six-week computer class.
“I still don’t love it,” she says of e-mail and the Internet, “but I can do it.”
Rarely had I seen anyone diss the FedEx hub with such class and dignity.
There is something extra, something special, when a writer expresses himself or herself in hand — a small piece of who they are put to paper and sealed in an envelope.
This isn’t to say every handwritten letter is so pretty or so legible. Some challenge our abilities to see and understand the words (with my handwriting, I’m one to talk). Nor is it to say that an e-mailed letter can’t convey the same power as one composed by hand.
For instance, Diane Kroeger’s e-mailed letter on April 17. ...
“Thank you for publishing the inspiring story ‘Austin the Amazing,’ ” she writes. “As the parent of my own amazing 7-year-old boy with Down syndrome, I appreciate the positive press.
“The new recommendation that all pregnant women, not just those over 35, have a screen test for Down syndrome has also been in the news recently. Having had a prenatal diagnosis during the pregnancy with our son makes this recommendation especially significant to me. We approached prenatal testing as a way to be better prepared for any issues our baby could have
.
We did not see it as a ‘search and destroy mission’ if a problem was detected. We have never regretted our decision to accept our baby boy into our lives.
“Yes, we were scared at first of the unknown, but we quickly realized he was just a baby who needed to be taken home and loved.”
By the same token, every handwritten letter isn’t poetry, either. Probably the most memorable (in that way, at least) I ever received was scrawled in anger on crumpled notebook paper and smeared with excrement.
Enclosed was a column I had written.
But for every one of those we get, there are hundreds of others, penned by hand, that say interesting things in heartfelt ways.
I wish I could remember the name of the man who began his letter with an apology for his letter’s appearance.
Try as I might, I can’t find it in our files, but it made a lasting impression.
The words quivered because his fingers had quivered while he wrote them.
Please forgive him, he explained, but his hand wasn’t as steady as it used to be.
But he had labored until he finished, with nearly two full pages of his thoughts. It couldn’t have been easy. Then he’d folded it, stuffed it into an envelope, stuck a stamp on it and slipped it into a mailbox.
No e-mail could have told us with such honesty and clarity what those trembling sentences had to say.
