Wish You Were Here

On the power of the written word on a 4x6, or when Zoom just falls flat. (PS: I made you a drink at the end, read on.)

A very few of the postcards I grabbed from the piles in my desk drawer and the pages of books on my nightstand, plus one kitschy but special card I picked up over the summer

When was the last time you sent a postcard?

Until this past August, I hadn’t mailed one in years. They used to be such a delightful part of our lives. In addition to the “wish you were here” vacation posts, I remember trading these short-form updates with friends during our college years, when staying connected required stamps, unless you were able to foot the bill for long-distance on a pay phone in your dorm hall or lobby. And, even then, a postcard was better for the visual snapshot the front of the card communicated — of a person’s state of mind or current experience — before you even read the words in that little square of space on the back.

A collection of postcards, either received in the mail or collected at museums and on tourist racks, was also the poor student’s gallery wall, pinned up on cinderblock dorm walls with blue sticky tack.

Anyway, despite the fact that I hadn’t mailed a postcard in a while, I have continued to amass them. They are still a lovely physical way to remember a few striking pieces from a museum exhibit, a relatively clutter-free souvenir to mark a trip (Hi, Iceland! Miss you.) — even if I only ever use them as bookmarks. When my kids were little and I traveled frequently for work, I decided that I wouldn’t set a precedent of bringing home gifts from those business trips; instead I’d pick up a postcard for them. If I was really on it, I’d actually write and mail that card from wherever I was.

As I was preparing to send my oldest child off to college this summer, contemplating the unprecedented distance we would suddenly face, I thought about postcards again and the spider-silk tendrils of connection they might weave. About how nice it is to get actual physical mail, especially if you’ve just left everything familiar and might be sharing a table with loneliness. About tangible reminders that your people are still with you, even if they’re far away.

An idea formed around sending my kid a weekly-ish postcard, something that wouldn’t take too long to write or read, something meant primarily to light up her eyes when she opened her campus mailbox after lunch in the dining hall and before her next humanities class. As I plotted in my mother-brain, I was solely focused on the disconnection she might experience and how I could help lighten that.

What I hadn’t really factored was my own unmooring as she unpacked her clothes into a dresser under a lofted bed; when she hung posters alongside new friends before she’d even slept in that bed; and how we had to get back in the car and leave her to her new world.

I do hope the “Greetings from Iowa” card I picked up at the World’s Largest Truckstop on the drive back made her feel a little like my arms were wrapping around her shoulders. But I realize now that I probably need to send out these threads more than she needs to receive them.

So I’ll invert that old business trip tradition. I’ll send the postcards out from home to wherever she is and trust they’re doing their job, for both of us.

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Postscripts

PS: Do you know how much it costs to send a postcard through the USPS? Neither did I. And we’d be forgiven for not knowing that, now that most stamps are “forever” and unless you do the math when you buy those jaunty sailboat or coastal bird designs, it’s all a little fuzzy. (Postcard stamps are $0.51 apiece at the moment, by the way, and a standard letter currently costs $0.66, in case you’re now wondering that too. A bargain, I say.)

PPS: It occurs to me that what we refer to now as “gallery walls” in decorating parlance share next to nothing with the way actual galleries display art on their walls. Discuss.

PPPS: To hear about an extraordinary example of mother-daughter correspondence, I recommend an interview with Isabel Allende on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast, Wiser Than Me. From the time Allende was 15 and living with her grandfather while her mother lived abroad with her diplomat husband, the two of them wrote to each other every day. Because of the time it took for a given letter to travel through the post (particularly internationally), Allende describes their correspondence more as a kind of diary or monologue than a conversation. One they kept up throughout her mother’s life!

PPPS: Wish someone would send you a postcard? Haiku Andy of the Substack Daily Haiku Actual Postcard wants to mail you an original haiku on a postcard!

PPPPS: My curiosity about the decline in people sending postcards also got me thinking about the weird shared DNA between these old-school notes and social media. Both are so exposed. In fact, privacy concerns were responsible for the earliest proposals for flat cards that could be sent without envelopes being rejected and for the first cards introduced being little used. The format did take off, however, and postcards were wildly popular around the turn of the 20th century. Alas, before video killed the radio star, telephone dimmed the postcard’s light. In more recent times, perhaps it’s only the general decline in sending physical mail that’s made the postcard ever more rare, but I wonder if it doesn’t also have to do with a kind of counterintuitive reluctance over the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in the form. While many of us don’t hesitate to [over]share with acquaintances and strangers in the digital realm, we might be uneasy about the fact that any postal person or nosy housemate can read the details of a postcard message—scandalous or deadly mundane. Strange how we think about privacy in this modern age.

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I love a cocktail that’s on theme. Enter, the Airmail.

Care for a drink?

How about the Airmail, a sparkling daiquiri riff:

1 oz rum (some recipes call for white rum, some for aged, I used a moderately priced, aged Barbados style)

.5 oz lime juice

.5 oz honey simple syrup (2:1)

1–2 oz dry sparkling wine

Shake the first three ingredients and strain into a coupe; top with sparkling wine. Sit right down and write yourself (or someone else) a letter, err… postcard.

Cheers to the (almost) weekend and reconnecting to communications that don’t involve a webcam.