Letters. We've got letters

Virginia Evans’ New York Times Best Seller book this summer is a simple, feel-good book, and a reminder of the power of letters in the world.

On the jacket cover of the book, a critic wrote, “I finished this wonderful book in tears. Equal parts sorrow and quiet joy, the stuff of life. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make you reflect on your own life, which is what a good novel does.”

Letters do that, especially if you have a box with letters written for a specific reason. Love letters are worthy of a shoe box, bound in ribbon, sprinkled with rose pedals. Sympathy letters and notes kept by the bed in a gift bag can be pulled out and read when sadness overwhelms.

I inherited three caches of letters when we cleaned out Mother’s house after she died.

One stash is a collection of letters written by my Great Grandfather,

‘Papa,” to a hospital in Baltimore. My Grandfather was hospitalized for months with a nervous breakdown. Papa wrote the hospital imploring the staff to transport him to a hospital in North Carolina, where at least the rest of the family could visit him. The pathos of those letters is tearjerking.

The second stash is a batch written by members of the US Congress to my Great Grandmother. Evan Evans Settle was a member of Congress during the McKinley administration. He died at age 38 while serving as a Representative from Kentucky. It is gratifying to see how much empathy and compassion are expressed in these letters.

The third batch is a collection of letters for my Grandmother, Aggie, when her son, Drury was killed by a train on July 4, 1933. The two guys in the front seat survived the accident. Drury was a seminarian at Drake University. His professors said he was a gifted preacher. Who knows what the world missed in his death.

Letters are tender and personal. Letters can be angry and hurtful. Either way they offer a glimpse into the basic nature we all share. The yen and the yang of love and hate, joy and despondency. The full gamut of the human condition.

Most of us learned to write letters in fifth or sixth grade. We wrote personal letters, business letters, resumes.

Daddy thought it was important that people get mail, especially those in nursing homes or living alone. Each week he penned, in his own cursive writing, a letter he called, “Happinotes,” passing along interesting things he observed during the week. It was so popular that the list grew to include hundreds each week.

Letter writing is quickly becoming a lost art. School children are no longer taught to write in cursive. In the last hundred years, we have lost the ability to write a personal letter.

Email is so much quicker and easier. There is no lasting record that will come back to bite you.

We see how the loss of penmanship affects our culture from the heads of state to the rest of us.

Donald Trump couldn’t put together a compound sentence on a bet. It’s not likely he could draft a letter at all. He communicates at a grade school level. It is embarrassing to see how inadequate he is to serve as Commander in Chief.

Funding in public schools and universities has been slashed. Evidently some people think we don’t need education and instruction in how to communicate. Grow us stupid and keep us ignorant. Let’s see where that takes us.

Grab a pen and write a letter to someone this week.

Lib Campbell is a retired Methodist pastor, retreat leader, columnist, and host of the blogsite Avirtualchurch.com. She can be contacted at libcam05@gmail.com.