Mondays with Mike: The power of handwritten letters

For decades now, hosting friends for dinner has been a cherished ritual in
our lives. I’ve always liked to cook—I began learning as a kid. But cooking and entertaining took on an added dimension some time after Beth lost her sight, and later, when Gus was born.

We leaned heavily on friends in those days. For rides, babysitting, you name it. And we had very little discretionary spending money. So, one of the best ways we could thank them was to make dinner for them. Beth learned to bake bread, I tried various cuisines, and we have always had some of the very best times of our lives enjoying meals and conversations with friends.

And that’s what happened yesterday, when we had four neighborhood friends over to meet Beth’s dog—and to catch up with Beth: She’d been gone three weeks.

Beforehand, we went through the familiar ritual: Do we want to have people over? Do we have the time? Energy? Then…the cookbooks. Beth and I narrow it down to, say, a cuisine. Then I haul out the cookbooks and pore over them, running recipes—some new, some familiar—by Beth. (She claims she always tells me what she wants and I always make something else. Not true!)

This past weekend we settled on pasta, so the Italian cookbooks came out. My mom was born to Italian immigrants, so I have some stuff committed to memory. But some of the more complex ones are preserved in handwriting.

I came across one this past weekend—my dad had handwritten my mom’s recipe, essentially recording it as she dictated it to him. Not sure why—might have been when her health wasn’t great.

I must’ve read it 10 times. Not because it was so complicated, but because I experienced that thing where when you happen upon an old handwritten letter or thank-you note, something kind of magical happens. More than the words are communicated. A time, a face, the person who wrote it is there.

On a grander scale, Beth and I visited the LBJ Museum at the University of Texas-Austin several years ago. First, it’s well worth visit. One of the exhibits was Jackie Kennedy’s thank-you note to the Johnsons for allowing her and her children to stay in their White House residence a few days in order to make moving arrangements. It was warm, it was sincere, it reflected an impossible poise given the circumstances.

Somehow, I doubt that an email pulled from a digital archive and displayed on a screen would carry the same impact. Or even the printed email.

Apparently, handwriting may offer other powers that electronic communication doesn’t. Evidence has been mounting for awhile that writing by hand stimulates areas of the brain that typing doesn’t—kids learn better and faster, for example.

So, I’ll try to bear that in mind from time to time, and fire off some snail mail for old time’s sake.

Only one problem: I do it so infrequently that it’s hard to even write my name legibly.