Lost Letters

In the spirit of being the "story teller" teacher, I mentioned the box of old love letters I had found in my attic last year. My students freaked out. Love letters? Notes? From boys?

As a "treat", I brought them into class yesterday to demonstrate the lost art form of letter writing. Texts just can't be saved for forty years. What I learned in the process? Romance is dead. It's dead, I tell ya. These kids are light-years away from understanding the passion and angst of my generation's middle school romances.

So, although the box contained letters starting in fifth grade and spanning all the way into my college years, I only read the first romance letters from my ten year old love. "Put answer is locker 572". Petitions of kids who thought I should "go" with said boy. Boxes to "check" whether I liked him or not. Chronologically, the letters moved from darling gestures of "Do you like me? I like you and think you look very nice" to "That's it! I'm dropping you! I'm done with you." In between, lines of Beatles lyrics and references to John Lennon's death scattered throughout. Treasures.

What I liked was the progression of hand-writing from simple printed block letters to elaborate cursive writing. I showed them as examples of the importance of cursive writing. How are this generation of kids going to read any primary documents if they can't read and write in cursive? Even the most simple: grandma's recipes hand-written on recipe cards and stained and yellowed and curled from years and years of use. Eventually, parents die. We can't always be there to "read" to them.

Sifting through the letters before class both awakened my senses and broke my heart. On one hand, isn't it great that I had so many suitors to pour their love onto the page for my eyes to read? Not so bad for this old lady. On the other hand, I found letters from a dear friend who died ten years ago, which made me cry. I also learned a lot of things about my young self. Things I probably should have read before I wrote my first book of poetry. Insights into the distance I created between myself and boys for protection of all parties involved. In fact, the bewilderment of my seventh grade's love was very telling to me. "I would like us to have a real conversation. Like, get to know each other". Of course, I ran. My unrequited high school love wrote me a letter in college that I still cherish. So clever. He wrote two letters in one. Every other line. One in black ink. The other in blue ink. The black ink was the standard "How are you?" letter. The blue ink was the "deeper" letter which stated, "I can't believe we never really had a heart-to-heart to cut through the b.s." Again, I ran.

However, walking the nostalgic road of these love notes is a gift that I grieve my students will never have. Snap chats and texts will not last the test of time. So, today... I will have each of them write a love letter to themselves to save for thirty years. At least, they'll have one yellowed note written on lined paper in pencil or ink. A lost art form, to be sure.