But this isn't about that

One of my aunts passed away about two weeks ago, but this isn't about that. It took me about a week to get her kid's addresses from another one of the aunts. (The last of the aunts, it occurs to me now.) And, because I skipped a few opportunities, about another week before I got the appropriate condolence cards out to the cousins. Such a length of time would have horrified my mother as being completely impolite and inexcusably tardy. I put the blame where it belongs (not on me) on the Internet.

No one I know, except the last of the aunts, writes cards to anyone anymore. Do you? She does. Of course, she has been doing it for the past the seventy years so it's pretty much second nature to her now, but I, especially since I started communicating on the Internet, have just about ceased handwriting. It shows. When the aunt sends me a card - Just a Note to Say... - the writing - about the recent weather, the trip to the doctor's and her inability to play any Irish music on St. Patrick's day after the passing of her sister - is set down in precise lines of prose, each leading thoughtfully to the next with a little wry comment on the excitement of having a letter from me in the same mail as her blood work report to put a little punch in the finish and it makes anything I write seem awkward and pressed into place.

Added to that, my handwriting is now officially atrocious, though even on a good day my past handwriting was never actually legible, is it now completely encoded by some sort of palsy that takes over as I try to swing the crosspiece atop a capitol T. I have had to throw away many almost finished cards because somewhere in the middle of a paragraph my ballpoint pen went nuts.

I should tell you that my mother's family was full of card writers. The three sisters wrote to each other and their mother every week, sometimes more, from wherever they were in the world. Mae, the aunt who just died, traveled all over with her full-bird colonel husband and three kids, who could, in the words of my mother, pack a three-bedroom house into a duffle bag, sent mail to us from the middle of the Pacific and the middle of Washington, DC. My mom wrote to her mom, only ninety minutes away by car, at least twice a week detailing the mundane happenings of 20 Newman St and it's environs. The real champ, however, is the last aunt, she wrote to my mother during the final years of her life every day. There was mail every single day and two cards on Mondays. There were two big baskets of cards, notes, thin sheets of letter paper and envelopes in my mom's room, all from Rita. Little sunshine pictures, little pictures of cats and kittens, little boys and girls at play, all with a short note of hello and thinking of you today and maybe a blurb about Fitz and the boys. Just something to touch.

I once was good at writing cards. I'm not now. Years ago, I sent home bunches of cards and I bought penny postcards by the dozen and sent them to friends. Just something to touch, an arrow of an idea, a moment of thought about the people I was sending it to,

hmmm, it was a early form of this blog.

I just don't do it everyday, but I am thinking of you.

That's what this is about.

J.