Dear Anyone...

        Text messages are great: convenient, simple, and to the point. Can you believe that people used to talk to each other? Or worse yet, write letters to each other. Yeah, I know, gross. So when I found an old shoebox containing letters my grandfather had received in the 1950s and 60s, I was naturally curious. How did these poor people communicate back in the Stone Age before texts? You can imagine my surprise when I found that the letters were funny, interesting, and touching, even decades later. For instance, Mike, one of my grandpa's college friends, worked in the Marine Corps. In a letter dated June 2, 1957, Mike wrote, "Professor Ed Paul once stated that our class had only two interests- sex and athletics. At the time I wittingly suggested that we really didn't care for athletics." Despite the fact that this letter is more than 50 years old, I still laughed out loud when I read it. And even though Mike was clearly trying to be funny throughout his letter, he still managed to sound deep and profound without really trying. He described his training for the position of first Lieutenant and said, "I do have 44 men to lead. Or should I say experiment with. They play victim while I learn to be a leader of men." The phrase "leader of men" really struck me for some reason. Beneath Mike's joking exterior, I could sense he felt a lot of responsibility in caring for his men. Another one of my grandpa's friends worked at a Goodyear plant in Java, Indonesia. At the time, the Indonesians wanted to annex West New Guinea which the Dutch has possession of, thus leading to fighting and riots. Fred wrote of the events,”So we now have a country that is potentially the third richest country on Earth facing hunger and political chaos. Also I'm a little angry that the U.S. abstained from voting in the U.N." I had never even heard of this event before. The last place I expected to learn about an important international incident was in a letter to my grandpa. The first hand account is so much more affecting than the impersonal news stories that dominate the news today. Reading all of these letters made me sad that letter-writing seems to be a dying art. I am sure the rate of correspondence was a lot slower than in today's age; however, a letter conveys so much more depth and personality than simply shooting someone a text. A person has to actually sit down and plan out what to say and how to say it.