The Lost Art of Letter Reading

I was poking around the U.S. Census Bureau web site today, and noticed a August 14 announcement by the bureau that said, "Shortly after 2:29 p.m. EDT today, the U.S. population clock... will show there are 314,159,265 residents, or pi times 100 million... 'This is a once in a many generations event, so go out and celebrate this American pi,' said Census Bureau Chief Demographer Howard Hogan."

Today I also had a small amount of business to do at one of those endangered entities, a post office. I parked near another car, and inside the car sat a woman intently reading a long, handwritten letter. She must have just picked up some mail at her p.o. box, maybe something she was expecting and really wanted to read. Or maybe it was a surprise -- a letter from someone she hadn't seen in years.

How long will it be before no one sits in public reading freshly opened mail? Occasionally I saw that in college, people sitting on benches near the entrance of the campus p.o. with their mail from home or old friends. Visiting the post office was a daily thing for most people, me included, and pretty much everyone liked getting mail. The (lame) joke on my freshman hall that described getting no mail that day was, "I got air mail."

How long will it be before no one, while visiting far away countries, sits on a bench to rest and compose a post card or even a letter? I couldn't have been the only one to do that. The one I remember most fondly was a letter to a girl I'd recently met, which I wrote sitting on a bench on the terraced grounds of Schönbrunn Palace, with the summer sun above, a light but constant wind blowing, and a panoramic view of the palace below me. Who's going to ever be nostalgic about sitting around Schönbrunn sending text messages?

Next Voyage for the Swan: Faroe Islands

Got another postcard from Ed today. His cards can be counted on to be from far-flung places I’m unlikely to visit. Sure enough, today’s missive from the Shetland Islands, since he’s on a long tour of near-Arctic places best visited in August.

I’m more likely to visit the Shetlands than, say, Uganda, but even getting to Scotland, much less remote islands to the north, would be something of an achievement. It’s a lovely card, one of the long ones (8.5 x 3.5 inches, or more likely in the EU, 21.5 cm x 9 cm). The image is a waterside view of Lerwick, capital of the islands, looking very Nordic, or maybe a Scot-Nordic blend. The back of the card simply says The Swan.

There’s no other explanation of that, so I had to look it up. It’s the sailing ship in the picture, near the right side of the card: a restored vessel that the SwanTrust calls “one of the finest boats among the Scottish fishing fleet, and… the largest ever built at Lerwick in Shetland… The Swan Trust offers voyages around the Shetland Islands, and to other destinations such as Faroe, Norway, Iceland and Amsterdam.”

Ed mailed it on July 30, so that’s only four days in transit, a minor marvel by itself. It costs 87p to send a long card from the Shetlands. Her Majesty is still looking not elderly on her stamps, unlike the woman who opened the Olympics last week.

Lost Mail

This weekend, Friday especially, was cold payback for the temporary summer we experienced last month. Even sunny skies today didn't make the air that warm. But it will warm up again soon, so essentially what we're feeling is a normal April. Except we're seeing May in terms of greenery.

On Saturday I received Ed's postcard from Kenya (see last Wednesday), which arrived after the one from Uganda, even though he says it was mailed earlier. Odd time we live in, when you can communicate electronically to tell someone the specifics of a paper communication that's still en route.

But at least Ed's Kenya card did not disappear down the international mail memory hole. When I was in college, a friend of mine took an early summer trip to the Soviet Union. Thirty years later I'm still waiting for the postcard she said she sent me from there. Afterwards she told me that about half of them got through. I thought of her in Russia a decade later when mailing cards in St. Petersburg, but as far as I know, all of those made their trips successfully (unfortunately I didn't have her address at that point, or I would have sent her a card).

While mulling on the subject of missing mail, I followed a whim and Googled "Titanic mail," and sure enough an article published 20 years ago by the National Postal Museum came up: "Titanic's Mail," it's called. Oddly enough. From it I learned that 7 million pieces of mail, including about $150,000 in postal money orders (in fat, 1912 dollars), went down with the ship, along with five postal clerks, who apparently spent their last hours trying to bring mail sacks out the bowels of the ship. Now there's a story that no big-budget boy-meets-girl-boy-freezes-in-the-north-Altantic movie is going to tell.

Word From Uganda

This week I got more mail from Uganda than I've ever gotten during the rest of my life so far. Both pieces were from Ed, of course.

Ed actually mailed the letter from his home base in Washington state, but he'd acquired the envelope at the Paraa Safari Lodge at Murchison Falls. The postcard, on the other hand, was mailed in Uganda. It pictures Murchison Falls.

"The River Nile, on its journey from its source at Lake Victoria to join Lake Albert -- here it is suddenly channeled into a gorge only six meters wide, and cascades 43 meters below," explains the Paraa Lodge web site. Cool.

The stamps on the card inspired me to check up on Ugandan currency, since I couldn't remember what they use. Shillings (Ush). Good for them. One stamp is Ush 1,200, the other Ush 700, for a total of 1,900 shillings postage. According to XE.com, it's very nearly 2,500 shillings to the U.S. dollar, so that's not so bad to mail a card from the Pearl of Africa to the heart of darkest North America.

One stamp depicts the Bell's Hinged Tortoise, the other the Rastrinebola agentea fish, no common name given. But Wiki tells me that, as a denizen of Lake Victoria, it's "local names are omena (Kenya), dagaa (Tanzania) and mukene (Uganda)," and I'll go along with that.

Among the Bills and Circulars

This postcard arrived from the poet Geof Huth last week.

28 January 2012

"Dees ----------------

The reverse of this card... I used to practice three poems that were physical in nature, three poems that I could not start over because I was creating each onto surfaces that I had only one copy of, so this is colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed onto & tomorrow I may begin another one of these. Geof.

Not Yet Off to Storage

The post-holiday pattern is settling in, even though the season ought to last until January 6. Only a scattering of houses still have Christmas lights aglow; spent Christmas trees are appearing curbside, naked and forlorn; and stores are marking down holiday items 50 percent or 75 percent off, at least in the case of candies whose sale can't be delayed much longer. I got a package of six Russel Stover chocolate santas and snowmen for well under a dollar yesterday. I think they were priced at about $3 not so long ago.

Our tree still stands. It comes down next weekend, with its ornaments packed away for the next 11 months. I suppose one-twelfth of a year isn't too bad a run for seasonal decor.

Speaking of storage, Geof Huth reports that his latest contribution to the archives of the University at Albany has been completed, just before the old year expired. Even though I've known Geof going on 30 years, that wouldn't be of any particular interest to me except that about four years' worth of my correspondence to him has been included in the transfer, as well as my brother Jay's.

Geof calls what we send him "mailart." I call it a hobby based on sending (mostly) postcards to people who will appreciate them. Geof gets more than anyone else because he sends (mostly) postcards in return.

Wednesday Macédoine

Temperature when I got up this morning, just after sunrise: zero Fahrenheit. By midday, the air had warmed into the mid-20s F. Remarkable how pleasant that seemed by comparison.

The neighbors who put up an electric-light simplified Serbian flag last year for Christmas didn't do it again this year. For whatever reason, this year they were later in stringing lights -- last weekend -- and instead of a glowing Serbian flag, put up a string of blue icicle lights near their roof, plus blue lights in the shape of stylized Christmas trees closer to the ground. A nice effect.

We received another odd business-advertising 2011 calendar in the mail yesterday. A calendar after my own heart: this one includes more presidential birthdays than the standard Lincoln and Washington. But not all of the presidents. Chronologically through the year, these chief executives made the cut: Franklin Roosevelt; McKinley; Lincoln; Washington; Jackson; Madison; Jefferson; Grant; Kennedy; John Quincy Adams; Hoover; Benjamin Harrison; Eisenhower; Teddy Roosevelt; and Wilson.

Fifteen out of 43 (Cleveland counts only once for this purpose). I guess the calendar-maker didn't want to clutter it up with all the birthdays, but still -- Benjamin Harrison but not Cleveland? John Quincy Adams but not John Adams or James Monroe? Hoover but not Truman? And what about poor President Fillmore? He would have been first on the calendar (January 7) had he been included.

Our annual Think Geek catalog came recently as well. High amusement value, as always. This year I noticed an entire page devoted to The Big Bang Theory merchandise. The TV show, not the cosmological event. Maybe the page was there last year, but I hadn't seen the show then, so wouldn't have paid attention to its merchandise. Lately we've been working our way through TBBT DVDs, because the show has that certain something that most sitcoms lack. Namely, it's funny. Hard to believe that the same producers are responsible for the not funny Two and a Half Men, but the strength of TBBT seems to lie in its talented writers and cast, especially Jim Parsons, who's probably stuck with Sheldon Cooper for the rest of his career. These are examples from the first, second and third seasons.

I'd order a Periodic Table shower curtain if it weren't $30. It would have to sing Tom Lehrer's "The Elements," and maybe some other songs about elements, to be worth that much. That isn't far-fetched: you can buy a "personal soundtrack" t-shirt from the Think Geek catalog.

Sunday Funnies Stamps

One more thing about the USPS: I bought a sheet of Sunday Funnies stamps at a post office last week. Five comic strips were selected for the series: Beetle Bailey, Calvin & Hobbes, Archie, Garfield and Dennis the Menace. Not the strips I would have chosen, except for C&H, if the selection criteria were (1) really popular strips (2) beginning after World War II, but not including Peanuts, which got its own stamp, and certainly deserved it. Older strips were covered by a 1995 release.

Archie -- isn't that really a comic book, not a Sunday funny? Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey make me shrug, but that one that really rankles is Garfield, which is easy to hate. On the other hand, this version of the strip, Garfield Minus Garfield, actually makes me laugh.

But I have odd tastes. Eyebeam, for instance, should have its own stamp, except that almost no one has ever heard of it. Assuming the choices have to be popular, what of Bloom County? For Bill the Cat, if no other reason. Or Get Fuzzy, for another cat -- that's two comic strip cats that put Garfield to shame. And, though I don't always like it, what about Dilbert, which certainly qualifies as a cultural phenomenon? Or Doonesbury? Its heyday might have been decades ago, but it was quite a heyday.

From the Pribilofs to Schaumburg in Five Days

On a day like today, the thing to say is, Mitch Miller was still alive? I never saw Sing Along With Mitch that I remember, being more in the Slam Bang Theater demographic.

I'll also put in a kind word or two for the beleaguered USPS, despite the prospect of another price increase, the occasionally ugly stamps, and the items that go astray. (No Saturday delivery, that would bother me.) This is an interesting graph that depicts the nominal cost of first-class postage vs. the cost in 2008 cents. Mailing a letter, for those of us who still do that, is now moderately high by historical standards. But the real cost has been higher at times: during the 1890s and first two decades of the 20th century; during the Depression; and during the late 1970s. The eras of cheap postage, on the other hand, were the 1920s and the post-World War II years until about 1965.

As for losing things, that's no monopoly of a quasi-public monopoly that really isn't a monopoly any more. Some years ago when I was an editor, we used to ship physical images for use in our magazine to the printer via a well-known overnight delivery service. Good thing we had plan B images, because one time -- oops, now where did that shipment go? The delivery company found it, weeks later, and returned the images to us. Some of them. Those we got back looked like they'd been dropped to the floor and ground up by heavy boots.

This comes to mind because I got a postcard -- two postcards -- today from the Pribilof Islands, Alaska. They were mailed on July 28, which is speedy service considering that the islands are in the Bering Sea. One card depicts Saint Paul Island, one of the group, and the other card sports Wrangell, which is on the mainland. Both postmarks depict Saint Paul Island, home of Aleuts, seals and sea birds.

Of course Ed sent them to me. The generation -- maybe Lilly and Ann's -- that doesn't know the pleasure of dropping a physical message in a box, with the near-assurance that it will reach a remote location (everywhere is remote from the perspective of the Pribilofs) for a small fee, will be poorer for it. Nor will they know the pleasure of receiving such a card. They won't realize what they're missing.

Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate

A direct-mail solicitation from Big Auto Insurance Co. arrived recently. I was poised to throw it away, unopened, when I noticed the following printed on the envelope under the red letters IMPORTANT:

"Do not deliver to the wrong addressee... Do not fold, spindle or mutilate..." followed by other, increasingly gag-line warnings (e.g., do not wear brown shoes with a navy suit), ending with an injunction against paying too much for car insurance.

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate? Wow, there's a copywriter who remembers punch cards. Or maybe a younger one who heard the phrase somewhere or other, and thought it funny even without a sense of context.

I spent the golden age of punch cards being a child, and so didn't interact with them much, but I am old enough to remember receiving phone bills (from the Phone Company) in the form of punch cards. That stopped sometime in the very early '80s. As far as I remember, Vanderbilt had quit using them by the time I was a student.

I don't think I ever had a spindle on any of my desks at any of my offices, either. With air conditioning in just about every office, the spindle was redundant, besides being more of a hazard than the equally obsolete but more decorative paperweight.

I'm not sure I have anything around here to properly spindle my junk mail from Big Auto Insurance, so I guess I'll have to fold and then mutilate it before throwing it away, unopened.

Inspected For Your Safety?

I got a couple of Geof Huth postcards from Manchester, England, recently. One of them was postmarked May 4 and featured a picture of an early 2000s Manchester building known as Urbis. On the card, and his blog, he describes a city well worth seeing. Good thing he updated my notion of Manchester, because the last thing I heard about it involved a football riot last year.

Attached to the message side of the Urbis card was this curiosity:

I'd never spent any time looking at the TSA seal before. It's a not-very-imaginative variation of the Great Seal of the United States, complete with displayed eagle. Instead of arrows and an olive branch, the eagle ought to be holding some scanning wands.

I didn't know the TSA bailiwick included inspecting incoming postcards. Maybe it doesn't. The TSA does inspect bags and issue stickers at JKF, however, and maybe Geof recycled it. The sticker is placed on exactly one of the few spots that has no printing or handwriting. In fact, it seems like the handwriting goes around the sticker slightly.

Still, I like the image of a fellow in some TSA warren somewhere reading overseas postcards with a decoder ring nearby, hoping day after day to catch some bit of useful data.

News & Update

News From Afar: My old friend Nancy, who lives in Austin with her husband Jon, is expecting a child toward the end of this year, her first. Some context: I've known her since 1976, during her freshman year in high school and my sophomore year. Congratulations and best of luck to them. Fewer and fewer of my cohort (more or less) are producing children, though I suppose there will be a trickle for many years yet.

Update: Geof Huth, who had open-heart surgery earlier this year, seems to have made a strong recovery. In any case, he's sending me a steady stream of postcards once more, including a goodly number from his recent destination of Englewood, Florida, on the Gulf coast between Sarasota and Fort Myers. Including one depicting a trail in Oscar Scherer State Park, a place I was previously unfamiliar with, though in planning our '05 Florida trip I briefly considered the nearby Myakka River State Park as a destination. I would have happily skipped Disneyworld for it.

"We spent part if the day," Geof wrote on April 14, "--enough of it to sunburn my neck--walking the trials of Oscar Scherer State Park, parts of which are remarkably prehistoric in their feel, though the park's gift shop is careful not to include any postcards that accurately portray that character of the park."

There aren't too many places in North America any more with that prehistoric feel, I'd think. Wouldn't park management want to play that up? Come for the nature trails, stay for the hunting/gathering.

Timbuktu! (or Tombouctou!) (or Timbuctoo!) (or even Tumbutu!)

I got a postcard from Timbuktu today. It's the first and perhaps last one I'll ever receive from that city, with such a storied name. Naturally, it was from Ed, very likely the only person I know who will actually make it to Timbuktu, a journey that takes a concentrated mix of time, money and inclination.

“Tombouctou” is the spelling the card uses. It’s a simple card, a picture of tourists (and other people, many of whom are probably touts, buzzing nearby) at the Djigarey-ber, one of the city's golden-age mosques, which to me looks instead like the inspiration for the Foreign Legion fortifications in every Beau Geste knockoff since Gary Cooper played the part.

The postmark says “Postes Mali 26.02.08” and the colorful Republique du Mali stamps are of 20F and 385F, the former with a “Scene de thé dans le desert” and the later sporting a “Femme Peulh.” There was some damage in transit, so the tea in the desert scene was a bit torn away, but you can still see the tribesmen dismounted from their camels, enjoying a relaxing spot of tea on the sands. I had to look up the Peulh, and they are the west and central African people variously known as Fula or Fulani or Fulbe or Peul or Peulh or Peuhl, at least according to Wiki.

At the bottom of each stamp is “Imp. Poste Tunis” which I would think means that that Tunisia had something to do with the manufacture of these stamps. Just a guess.

Ed says: “I’ve been here & you haven’t. Ha.”

True enough. If I can get a card at the Ford Presidential Museum later this month, I will write exactly the same thing back – it’s a fairly safe bet.

The Big Wink

The arrival of the mail is important to me these days, since I’m paid by checks that arrive that way. Usually the mailman shows up late in the morning, but occasionally – often after a holiday – he’s a little later. That’s what I thought today, until about dark. But mail delivery is never that late.

Then I realized that the federal day of mourning probably also extended to the USPS, meaning that it would make no deliveries. I checked, and sure enough it was a postal day off, a curious way to honor the recently deceased Gerald Ford, but there you have it.

When Lyndon Johnson died in January 1973, we schoolkids of Texas got a day off for the funeral, one that didn’t have to be made up at the end of the year. I believe that was by act of the Texas legislature. I don’t remember doing anything Johnson-related that day. And I don’t know if the mail stopped.

I heard a bit of the eulogies for Ford on the radio, especially the one by the elder Bush. Remarkably, at one point that he actually mentioned Chevy Chase by name, to illustrate Mr. Ford’s sense of humor about that sort of thing, and perhaps in unspoken contrast to his predecessor, who wasn’t known for his sense of humor.

There was no speaking ill of the dead during these eulogies, but even before he died, not many people I knew spoke ill of Ford. Except, that is, for a Canadian I met at a gaijin party in Japan in the early ’90s. I expect it’s actually a fairly small number of people, but there is a brand of Canadian for whom every problem in the world is the fault of the US government.

He was one such. I remember little about him except he went on a rant about Gerald Ford and how he was really much more evil than people realized, especially Americans, forever the dupes. The evidence he cited was a diplomatic incident I later saw referred to as the Big Wink. Specifically, that term refers to US complicity in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975, not long after the Portuguese had bugged out. It was also right after a visit with Suharto by Ford and Henry Kissinger, who let it be known that the US wouldn’t make a fuss about Jakarta’s expansionism.

Despite that incident, the Canadian didn’t convince me on the point of Ford’s essential perfidy. I’m inclined to put the Big Wink on Kissinger; it sounds like a bit of his realpolitik to me. “Don’t worry about it, Mr. President. It will make the Indonesians very happy at no cost to the United States. No one in America knows East Timor from East Jesus, so no one will care.”

Go Great Danes!

Today I spent a little while learning about the University at Albany, an institution I previously knew nothing about. For instance, I found out that this state school has about 17,000 students, grad and undergrad, 637 full-time faculty and about 300 part time, and three libraries with two million volumes. Its mascot is the Great Dane. Besides the University at Buffalo, it’s the only domestic institution of higher learning I can find on my World Almanac list that uses “at” instead of “of,” not counting constructions such as the University of Arkansas at Ft. Smith.

Also, there’s a statue of Minerva on campus. According to the UAlbany web site: “Since the University at Albany's beginnings as the New York State Normal College [in 1844], Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, has been the institution's enduring symbol. The figure of Minerva and the Latin motto, Sapientia et sua et docendi causa ("Wisdom both for its own sake and for the sake of teaching") have appeared on the University seal since about 1913. Today, Minerva, wearing her distinctive helmet, continues to symbolize the University's proud past and long-standing reputation for educational excellence.”

Why the sudden interest in a school I previously had no connection with? A postcard from Geof Huth arrived today, including this information: “… my ten boxes of correspondence are going to UAlbany on Sunday [meaning October 15, I think] along w/ all correspondence from you through Sep 2006. Ah, sweet posterity.”

I wouldn’t have thought of donating correspondence to a university, but then again Geof is a professional archivist. I expect the University at Albany to last a lot longer than I will, so with any luck the items Geof has deposited will linger there for a few centuries, probably lasting longer than any other documents I have created or will create, or any other memory of me. Until the massive destruction of the great Quebec-New York war of 2452 or the abandonment of the school after the 23rd century New Black Death or something.