Love is in the mail

I have a distinct memory from childhood of wanting to receive something in the mail. I imagine finding an envelope addressed just to me, and only I am allowed to open it and find the treasure inside. I ask my mom how I can get something in the mail with my name on it, and she says the best thing to do is to send a letter to someone so that they will write back. I send a letter to my grandma, who lives four hours away, and wait rather impatiently to see her reply. She sends me back a beautiful note card shaped like a butterfly with rainbows of color on the wings. The day I receive this card is the beginning of my love affair with the postal service.

Flash forward fifteen years, and I am in college. I take pleasure in getting cards and letters in the mail, and now I really love sending them too. I have learned to enjoy the idea of the happiness my card will bring to the recipient even more than the thought that they might return the favor and send something back to me. I study abroad and send postcards to family and friends. I even send them weekly to a (now ex) boyfriend who never sends a single thing back in the mail, and assumes e-mails are the equivalent. They are NOT. I search for birthday cards in Italian to send to old roommates, since I imagine they will think the card is cool even if they can’t read it.

Now, post-college, I have a drawer full of cards and stationery and envelopes. I buy packs of note cards at bookstores and museums (right now my stash includes cards bought at the Louvre, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.), and individually packaged, often hand-made, cards at cool stores like Arts & Letters in my old Santa Monica neighborhood. I save beautiful paper to fold into envelopes to send far away. I buy cards even when I have no plan to send them- I just save them until the time is right. I see a card that reminds me of a friend and I buy it to send to him because I think he needs to have it. I rip out newspaper articles so that I can include them in a letter to my aunt. I go to the post office and buy pre-stamped postcards with designs of Native American blankets on them, so that I’ll have them ready when I feel like sending an unexpected note to my sister.

I realize that my feelings about mail are not universal, but I have been lucky in having some wonderful friends who enjoy postmarks and paper as much as I do. I recently received a card in the mail from my old roommate Teresa. My sister-in-law Raychel is an excellent thank-you-note writer, and my sister Jeanette just used the stationery I gave her for her birthday to send me a letter. My old roommate Janet uses beautiful penmanship in her cards. And my most recent ex-roommate Carrie just sent me a package of my mail from my old apartment. Inside the heaps of credit card offers was a note from her, and smuggled in the pages of my Oxfam America newsletter was a CD labeled “hip hop mix.” I haven’t asked her yet if she meant to send it or if it fell in the envelope by mistake, but she’ll eventually read this and let me know. And if it was a mistake, it was a good one- I laughed out loud when I found it. This mix is special to me because it was the only thing that would help me sleep after a break-up (see mail-impaired ex-boyfriend, noted above). I stayed awake at night staring at the wall, and I didn’t want to listen to love songs, which are most songs- definitely not the happy ones that sounded like they were rubbing it in or the sad ones that reminded me of the sickness in my stomach. So I listened to Snoop and Dre talk about forcing bitches to give them head and Outkast saying sorry to Mrs. Jackson and the Geto Boys reminding me that “real gangsta ass n#^^@!s don’t sleep.” Now when I think about it, the CD makes me smile, and I’m glad I had Carrie there, ready to go with the perfect comfort music. This is why I love the mail-- it is full of surprises.