I am an admitted note and list writer. One of the greatest days of my life was when they came out with Post-it Notes. I can remind myself of everything anywhere I choose. I can stick up lists and “to dos” and unstick them when I am done.
I guess I just like the idea of paper. I have kept every greeting card from everyone who has ever loved me. I have a collection of tickets from all the concerts and special events I have gone to in the past decades. I have the Playbills from the plays I loved. Some I saw some on Broadway, some at community theater. I have the programs from all my kids’ graduations and sadly, I kept the memorial hand outs from the funerals of the people I love who are no longer on this earth.
I have all my love letters. I am old enough to have even received a telegram or two. I have all these treasures in a lovely old German cookie tin that looks like a treasure chest. It must have held 25 lbs of cookies, so it isn’t small. From time to time I love to go through everything and remember. I figure that my children will one day look through all this stuff and get to know me from another angle.
Did you ever see the movie “The Bridges of Madison County”? If you weren’t one of the 50,000,000 people who bought the book, you may have seen the very romantic movie with Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood. If you didn’t do either, it’s the story of a married but lonely Italian woman, living in 1960s Madison County, Iowa. She engages in a short but intense affair with a National Geographic photographer who is on location in order to create a pictorial essay of the lovely covered bridges in the area. The woman’s husband is out of town with their teenage kids. The affair lasted but a few days because she could not leave her family, but she wrote about it in her diary and the experience lasted her a lifetime. I don’t remember if they ever slept together, but they dined and danced and looked into each other’s souls. Her secret was not discovered until after her death when her grown children found her personal papers and mementos in her trunk.
Is sending a love text as romantic as receiving a note from someone who is falling for you?
When I die, there won’t be much to go through in my keepsake box that is very controversial or shocking, but my children will feel me every time they revisit the treasures I have left behind. I think they will smile when they see how dear their cards and notes were to me.
This is the way it used to be back when people respected paper. There were diaries and love letters and keepsakes. Tell me, how does this cell-phone crazy, tablet-loving younger generation fall in love? Is sending a love text as romantic as receiving a note from someone who is falling for you? How could an email expressing even the most profound love be as dreamy as a scented love letter? I can tell you that the gushy feeling you get after you read such a special piece of mail can be life changing. The emotions you experience when you ceremoniously put it back in the envelope for safe keeping until you read it again can never be outdone by receiving a romantic email and hitting “SAVE” so you can re-read it later. And where are the keepsakes? There are no longer plane tickets to keep recalling a beautiful vacation. Theater and concert tickets are being replaced by print outs on the computer. If that’s not bad enough, this young breed of computer brains will leave no yellowed photographs of important relatives or family events from decades before. There are no real photos anymore. All the pictures and memories are floating around in cyber space and can only be recalled on some electronic device. Goodbye to sitting around with the family and reminiscing over the photo albums.
I am not some old dinosaur that refuses to go electronic. I have an iPhone and an iPad. I text like a champ and do all sorts of things on my devices that I used to do on paper. But there are just some things that should stay the same.
I am not a big fan of e-cards. It is true that they are fun while you are looking at them, but after the music stops and the birds and the butterflies stop skywriting “Happy Birthday”, then what? You can’t put your card in your secret keepsake place to hold and enjoy all over again. Oh sure, you can store it away and revisit it later in your Documents. Now THAT’S warm and fuzzy.
In my humble opinion, I believe that we should get on board to "Save The Keepsakes". Just because something is old fashioned doesn’t mean it’s bad. Please... for me... please tell the people in your life to think about writing real love letters and thank you notes, keeping a diary, creating a photo album with real pages and sending paper cards to celebrate special days. Tell everyone you know. I did. I just posted it on Facebook a few minutes ago.
