Back when I was in middle and high school, there was a service that hooked students up with penpals in other countries. This was in the mid-90s, before I had “discovered” the internet, and being able to write letters to someone in another country was exotic and exciting!
I chose to get a penpal from England, for two reasons. 1) I know they’d speak English 2) I enjoyed English humor
I received my little slip of paper with the name and address of a girl in England after a few months, I still have this piece of paper. I wrote her a letter.
Through my moving and her name change we’ve managed to keep track of each other over the years, even if our letters end up being months apart. We’ve both grown up a lot since that time I was in high school, have watched our lives play out differently, she’s now married with 2 children.
And even though the internet has brought people from all over the world into my house (sometimes literally), my penpal Lucy has always held a special place in my heart. She’s one of the few people I still have contact with from my High School days. But until now she didn’t have internet access, so I still received wonderful paper letters every few months. On Tuesday I got an email.
Subject: Lucy wants to talk to you!
Luckily I opened it instead of deleting it, it was one of the invites to use MSN messenger and to add Lucy! She had a computer at home now and was online! This is exciting news, I’ll finally be able to talk to my old penpal in real time, last night was the first time I was able to do this and it was great.
But I can’t help but feel like an era is ending. I’d clung on to this wonderful old letter-writing form of communication, and it’s now obsolete. Do kids even have the old penpal programs anymore? Are they all brought up in a world today where talking to people on the other side of the planet is natural? I think these are wonderful advances in technology, and the way the world should be. But there is an intimacy to be gained from paper letters that electronic communications lack.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and came to a conclusion. Our paper communication does not have to end, but it can change. Now that we both have online journals we can read about our everyday lives, but perhaps there are things we’d like to continue discussing in paper letters. Certainly we can continue to send each other paper photos and cards.
In closing, welcome to the Internet Lucy! It’ll be quite a chance to get to know each other better.