What Next?

FTLComm - Tisdale - Thursday, November 8, 2001

Now I can some how understand that it has taken the post office more than twenty years to move into the computer information age but self sticking stamps! What's this world coming to, the whole letter sending experience is a nostalgia trip in itself but now you don't even lick the stamp. I am shocked and appalled. Correspondence on paper was one of the truly great experiences in my life and I am certain in the lives of most people my age. The utter freedom and total excitement of getting a letter from a pen pal was the highlight of my existence as a grade six kid and on into my teens. Both of the people I wrote to and received replies from for years were American girls my age, one in Montana and the other in Arkansas Our letters would describe our lives and environment to each other and bring us just a bit closer to understanding the wonder of growing up anywhere. The Montana girl had never heard of curling and in grade seven it was a sport I had taken up. Curling on my dad's team. Well for a while I curled with my dad but he got fed up with my fooling around and I was traded to Cliff Halloway's team. I tried valiantly to explain the game to this girl who lived in the desert of Montana and no wonder she was confused about the game. The girl in Arkansas I had actually met as she had been to our village to visit her cousin and with her the most important discussions revolved around race relations. This was the late fifties, the time of the emerging civil rights movement in the South and this girl was definitely white. The irony of this story is that though she was indeed white and from her parents and friends of Little Rock she held the basic attitudes of white superiority. I realise that these views would seem laughable today but then it was a wonder to me that race was an issue at all and further more that any sensible individual would claim that their skin colour had something to do with their rights and privileges as a person. Now the irony part. This girl's grandmother looked just like any other person in our little village and I delivered her news paper every day but on her birth certificate under "race" the word "Negro" darkened that spot. The age of pen pals never really went away. I will always cherish those letters and the distant touch that came with them. I believe strongly that the wonders of ICQ and various other chat lines on the Internet provide kids today and adults alike, with the wonder of communications across vast distances. E-mail is one of the greatest things to ever come along. I first began using it regularly in 1984 and live by it every day. It is in many ways so much like the paper correspondence of years ago, up close communications, person to person, unlike telephone with tonal and subtle phrase variations, the printed word stands on its own. E-mail never had any stamps to lick but sadly pen pal letters did.

Timothy W. Shire