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City Life

Sometimes a letter can be better than e-mail

By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published January 7, 2006

Wednesday I didn't check my e-mail until after lunch.

A New York Times news alert told me something I would rather have waited until the next day, if ever, to hear. The trapped miners found alive had been a cause for celebration a few hours ago. Now I knew they were dead.

Next, an e-mail from friends in New York. The subject line said: Please Do Not Delete. I figured it was the list of Manhattan hotels they had told me they would send. It was not. It was a chain letter forwarded by their friend in Beijing, forwarded from his friend, whose brother's son had been killed in Iraq.

I HOPE I DO NOT SEE ANYONE BREAKING THIS ONE, it warned at the beginning. I scrolled down, and there were photos of soldiers in Iraq; the whole country seemed covered in mud. At first I thought one showed dead bodies, but now I'm not sure. Pray for the troops, it appealed, and forward this e-mail to 13 friends in the next 15 minutes.

While I was thinking about how to feel about this, an e-mail arrival flashed onto the screen: A Chamberlain High School girl had been hit by a car while crossing Busch Boulevard.

That did it.

No more opening e-mails. It was getting too depressing.

In my inbox, I have photos of New Zealanders splashing beached pilot whales and covering them with blankets, sent by my former sister-in-law, who was one of the rescuers. By contrast, this e-mail seemed absolutely joyful. Most of the whales survived.

I'm sure you Luddites - like my friend who says she doesn't believe in the Internet - are saying: You don't have to have e-mail.

But I love e-mail.

I grew up in suburban Chicago and have lived in New York City, St. Petersburg and Tampa. In our mobile society, I haven't moved around all that much, but I've made friends in all those places, and some of them have moved, too. No one in my family still lives in Chicago. I have friends all over the country. Before e-mail, we sent cards once a year at Christmas. Now we're in touch all year.

My daughter and her husband live in New York, and his family lives in Egypt. Last night she e-mailed me a photo of her mother-in-law and 3-year-old niece in Suez.

My daughter has never met her husband's family, but they communicate via Web cam and instant messaging, either in English or using phonetic spellings of words in Arabic. They've introduced his family to their dog and two cats, their apartment in New York.

This is global communication at its most personal.

But it has its downside.

I have always felt attracted to Jane Austen's time, when people wrote long letters on parchment stationery with quill-tipped pens and perfect penmanship. I miss the surprise of a letter in the mail and the anticipation that can last days or even weeks waiting for a reply. I miss seeing handwriting and the things you can learn about a person through it.

I love stationery and beautiful stamps. I have boxes and boxes of note cards hidden in a drawer, and while they seem about as relevant as sealing wax, this year I intend to use them.

Once in a while, instead of e-mail, even though my handwriting is almost illegible, I will try to send a card. That doesn't mean I'm not thrilled that I don't have to do it often. We're lazy, and time moves fast these days. Let's face it: It's e-mail or nothing.

And sometimes technology brings us full circle. One of my Florida friends, who now lives in Wisconsin, makes note cards on the computer from old photographs of her family - people I've never met, great-aunts and uncles, early photos of her father and mother.

This holiday season she sent a card made from a postcard she had found on a library Web site. The pink building on the card is Las Novedades, the historic Tampa restaurant. It had closed before either of us moved here.

Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sandrathompson1@mac.com City Life appears on Saturday.

[Last modified January 7, 2006, 01:09:14]