These Letters

When he entered The White House, newly elected President Barak Obama asked for ten letters.

 At the time The White House received 65,000 paper and 100,000 email letters – to say nothing of phone calls and faxes – weekly. Obama asked his correspondence staff to sift through them and choose – daily – the ten most meaningful ones they felt the President should read, representing all different sides of the American experience.

“Lately I’ve been getting a lot of health care letters, and this one is a good example,” Obama said, reading one about a family whose retirement funds were being drained as they supported a son who could not afford the cost of his insurance premiums because of a preexisting condition.

Another letter contained a photograph of a vegetable garden that a woman had sent, showing the president how she had used her stimulus payment.

And then there was the letter written during World War II.

“My dearest daughter,” it began, as the father, newly deployed, described to his newborn daughter what he was doing and why it was so important to him. And to the country.

“These letters do more, I think, to keep me in touch with what’s happening around the country than just about anything else,” the president said.

The Power of a Postcard

In the Season Three finale of Madame Secretary, Elizabeth McCord travels to Brussels, asking NATO’s alliance for their support in preventing an incursion in Eastern Europe. In doing so she removes a postcard from her jacket pocket and reads it out loud, illustrating the power of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.   

“This is a postcard my uncle sent to his father when he arrived in Italy, William Adams. He was in the Third Infantry Division, the Battle of Anzio. ‘We landed safely yesterday, passed the ruins of a school today. Kids in grey rags scrambling over the heap. We got out some K Rations but no, they only wanted to shake our hands. Greatest feeling of my life.’ ”

She goes on.

“He died the next day, at the counterattack. But the thing that strikes me is this validation of purpose. The invigoration of fighting for something greater than himself. For a future that he believed in. This certainty that he was on the right side of history.”

All on a postcard.

The Letters of Miss A. G. Bushell

Mine is no mystery. And not nearly as elegant. However, I have every, single one.

My letter collection is still intact. From recent months, and years ago. Yes, indeed, even from childhood. The adult end met up with its former self when I cleaned out my dad’s apartment several years ago. There it was, untouched, in a childhood desk drawer, simply waiting to be seen. Letters from camp, letters from family, and, yes, letters from long-lost friends.

One is from high school and, just like that, I’m back, transported to the hallway, seeing the writer and how she dressed, her smile, as I now read her letter, pouring her heart out about – imagine – a boy.

Another is from middle school, a neighbor who moved away. How different her life was in sunny California, away from the grey of a New York winter, where we once made Lemon Squares together. She wrote out the recipe and my memory of her neat, manuscript printing matches the letter I now hold in my hands.

Then there are the ones unrecognized. I don’t know the writer. Were they friends not for long? Yet they took the time to sit down and write. I only hope I did the same for them.

As much as I adore the visual and tactile nature of my letter collection, what strikes at the heart is the sense of time, of its passage, of first loves and lost friendships, family that remains only in spirit, and memories that challenge us to think, reflect, and give context to a time gone by.