From Peter Marbach’s gift of a packet of postcards in 2008; photo by Peter Marbach
Part 2 of 2: In part one I looked at the timeless joy of the phrase “for your collection,” a familiar phrase on cards collected by my father dating to the mid-1930s, and one I still receive today …
Then there is the other category of card in my possession: “Please Save”. The phrase carries emotional power similar to “For your collection”: a sentiment of the moment, yet lasting. The “Please Save” indicated those that my parents wanted to see again, at some point, and my brothers and other family members, and friends, did indeed Save and return them to my parents. I have kept these – though I am in process of returning them to my brothers and others from whom my parents reacquired the cards when, in retirement, they traveled widely. These are not the first postcards that made it back to my parents that I have returned to their original recipients.
In December 2008 I wrote, “In this final week, the final card will go to my parents, for I have not been able to see them in recent weeks and I owe them so much -- including an affection for postcards -- over the years. The other destinations leading up to Dec. 31 included my wife, each of my brothers, and my parents.”
Jan. 17, 2009: “The anticipated trickle of replies to late-2008 postcards has thus far not happened. My disappointment is mild, because I am not exactly surprised at the dearth of cards.
“The similarity of dearth and death in spelling and meaning has always fascinated me. So I looked it up; dearth is "scarcity that makes dear" and death is from Old English. I enjoyed etymology; it puts a poetic, if not positive, twist on dearth, a word I always held negative. There is a healthy corollary to my need to avoid dwelling on the negative side of my regimen of correspondence, this lack of responses. Scarcity that makes dear, indeed.”
Continuing my January 2009 notes on the year of postcards:
“My daily postcard odyssey is just the latest iteration of my efforts to give ‘going postal’ a positive connotation. In 2003 and again in 2005 I wrote a letter a day, the responses being less than 1 in 4 both years. In 2006 I wrote a letter a week, and this year made it a postcard a day. I do not honestly know at this writing what new or renewed practice I will pursue. Perhaps that of 2004 and 2007: wait and see who writes to me. But I am beginning to feel like the regular act of correspondence, be it daily or weekly, is too full of merits besides that of return mail, to completely forsake. Postcards feel like vitamins for the soul.
“More evidence of postcard fondness: I enjoy listening to Will Shortz' Puzzle Master each Sunday, and contestants are always asked how long they have played ‘Sunday Puzzle.’ In two straight weeks in January 2009 the players said, ‘since the postcard days’. " First of all, I had forgotten that entrants submitted via postcard -- as it was years before I could ever actually solve one of the puzzles. Beyond that, I was intrigued by the fact that people saw fit to mention the ‘postcard days,’ and I detected a certain wistfulness for such a musty tradition.”
(April 2024: I am happy to report that “Sunday Puzzle” guests still frequently say they have played since the Postcard Days.)
What will become of my postcards some day? I hang onto the ones I had sent (restored to me by my parents) and miss the ones I know I mailed but have never seen again (my summer at YMCA conference center in North Carolina, 1976, for example – I have exactly one from that year, and in 2016 had a photo taken of myself holding the postcard matchings perspective, while on a visit to the same location). And, I treasure those sent and received by my parents, by my Aunt Bobo and Grandma Neumann. I appreciated it when my cousin Robyn returned postcards from my youth, still in her late mother's collection. I in turn sent back some Robyn had mailed to my parents, when she was a teenager. Those cards had been in my parents' collection and I wanted Robyn to have them back. I would have loved to see the look on her face when she saw the card from Girl Scout camp in Colorado, when she was 12, in the mid-60s.
Meanwhile, she sent back cards of mine but also some written by my brother, Joel, and I restored them to him. Postcards from my brothers Matt and Brent I have returned to them, and I have also done so with postcards my Aunt Catherine Rea Haslop sent to my parents and to her mother, my Grandma Rea. To Catherine's children I have also returned postcards they sent to Grandma Rea.
Blue Ridge Assembly, 2016, with a 1976 postcard of the main assembly hall and the same scene 40 years later.
As a kind of twist to this, I discovered something intriguing on the back of one of those blank postcards Peter Marbach gave me in December, 2008. I wrote: “I have mailed almost all those cards, but one I cannot part with yet is of ‘Mt. Hood at Government Camp,’ with the snow-clad peak under a full moon. The start of a message was already on that postcard. ‘Geno and Jeanne: Hope you are settling in just fine ‘... "
Peter, I presume wrote those words: He must have intended to mail this card, and started to write a message to friends. In January I addressed an envelope and returned the card to Peter. — N.R.
I enjoyed this piece Kirby as I have all you latest submissions!
Thanks! John M.