When Stamps Were Cool

I was reading Twitter posts and came across John Mayer's, talking about how he "laments the loss of fan mails because of tech age". I am not entirely sure if Mr. Mayer meant snail mails, but reading his post reminded me that I’ve had this phase where writing letters was part of my weekly routine. I was a snail mail addict, writing tons of letters to a lot of people almost every day. A shiny silver box housed all the evidence of that phase. Covered with dust, I pulled the box from the top my cabinet and found a few I've saved before we moved in to our new address eight years ago.

Writing the letter in a scented stationery or pieces of intermediate paper, neatly folding the pages, carefully placing it inside an envelop (I often use the Air Mail ones because I am afraid that my letter would get lost if I use the envelops that comes with the stationery set :P), writing the addressee’s details at the back of the envelop, the 30-minute travel from our house to the post office, buying stamps, licking the back of the stamp and sticking it at the upper right-hand corner of the back of the envelop, and finally putting your letter into the post office’s big mail box are all part of the snail mail madness. Hearing that subtle thud my envelops make when they hit the corners of the mail box gives me this unexplained happiness knowing that I would eventually receive replies from my pen pals soon.

Letters from my friends usually arrive during the start of the week. One from the bunch of envelopes would normally be a newsletter or a postcard from 5 and Up, while the rest were replies from the friends I’ve made from the summer writing workshop. Our house would always be empty by 9am since my mom, me and my brothers all went to school and my dad’s off to work so I asked my cousin, who lives next door, to watch out for mr. post man for me. My cousin, who gladly accepted the task, would hand in 3 to 6 letters each week. It was fun reading these letters after a busy and sometimes stressful day from school. I immediately would start writing replies after I read the letters two to three times. The replies would be ready by Wednesday and the letters would be on its way to its recipients by Saturday morning.

The exchange of penned letters with my pals lasted for two years. I cannot recall who stopped writing who. I outgrew the enthusiasm to write letters, and eventually my pen pals did too.

I spent my afternoon reading the salvaged letters one by one. I noticed that the topics that we talked about were so mundane that you can sum it up into a paragraph with five sentence instead of  five sheets. But that’s what made it fun. How the budding writers that we were played with words to describe how our day was, what worries us and what made us giggle.

Now I am thinking of writing to these people again...see what happens ;)