mail

A day without e-mail is-- complete your own metaphor, please. The thought of twenty-four hours without my habitual form of communication pretty near gives me a twitch. I e-mail across town; I e-mail across continents and oceans. I e-mail one word replies and ridiculously long letters in conversations that have been going on since before the birth of my eleven year old child. I count as dear friends women whom I only know through my inbox. And yet the other day, I scribbled one of them a note--the keyboard is hell on the penmanship--and sent it the old-fashioned way, with an overpriced stamp. Perhaps it has arrived in California by now, I'm not sure, but we've got some time: the wedding is not 'til next week.

For after nineteen years, and two children, and countless other legalities--adoptions and powers of attorney and all that--my friend and her woman can finally get married, and so next week they are. Just now I've gotten an e-mail describing their happy trip down to the county clerk for the license--and I type this with a warm smile. If only I could be there for cake! But I can't. So I sent them a note for their memory book.

My impulse to put pen to paper struck me as kind of silly; if I thought stationery were necessary to genuinely express my thoughts to my far-flung friends, my Gmail wouldn't be nearly so cluttered, and my life wouldn't be so nearly so rich. The odds of me making it to the post office regularly or keeping a supply of stamps is small, to be honest. I'd end up writing great letters in my head, and never get them sent. But this occasion is special, and perhaps I wanted to acknowledge that in a way that one more e-mail wouldn't seem to do. Either that or I had some colored paper, and I wanted to better fit in to their rainbow theme. One or the other or both.