I have something at my house that the current generation will not have. Love letters. Specifically the ones from my wife. The generation of marrying age, late teens to late twenties, have abandoned marriage and have abandoned writing love on paper.
I have something at my house that the current generation will not have. Letters from their grandparents. My grandchildren are an exception of course. Children have stopped writing to their grandparents the big news of their lives, and perhaps they never did it much. In college I wrote letters to my grandmother and grandfather. They wrote me back. My grandfather only made it to third grade, my grandmother to the eighth. My grandmother wrote letters quite often, especially to far flung loved ones, like her daughter Audrey, my mother. My grandfather almost never wrote to anyone, thus the two letters I have from him are particularly treasured.
A hundred years from now your great -grandchildren may have an old email or two that someone told them was from you. How will they really know. My grandchildren, ages 4-11, five of them, all have a lot of letters from granddad. The ones who live close and the ones that are far away. So do my grown children.
One of the failings of this age is the depersonalization and coding of our communication into an electronic form. Go ahead, send your grandkids or kids a nice email. It will look just like the ones I have sent. Exactly. Identical. But my letters are known. They recognize the handwriting. How it is folded, The coffee cup stains that show up from time to time. How I switch from print to cursive as they get older. A lot of them will survive this century.
Recently my wife and I read some of those old love letters, From 1978 and 1979 I kept most of hers and she kept a few of mine. Dozens of them. They speak of events and family and a wedding and money and jobs and car repairs and babies yet to draw a breath. They dream of a future that turned out in a way that would would have amazed them. The real was better than the imagined, in many ways. I know this because I have a written record.
I also have letters from my brothers in their teens, when I was away at college. One is dead and the other very much alive and well. It is good to revisit our lives back then. The things brothers share only with each other. I have letters from my parents and they are the type of letters a parent should send. Mom chiding me about bad grades and Dad giving me some practical advice about job hunting. One was task oriented, the other more forward looking. Mom and Dad.
I have a letter from my Dad. He was responding to the news that I was engaged. "Please send me her home address, I want to write her a letter".