Send Me a Postcard, Not an E-Mail
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It’s Christmas in July.
The bad part of Christmas, that is. The part where you get those Christmas letters from C-list friends all about their fantastic jobs, Broadway-bound kids, stunning new homes, and mind-blowing sex (if you read between the lines).
Except now, those letters are e-mails. And they’re not about Christmas. They are all about your friends’ vacations — e-mail blasts so chock-full of photos, fun, exclamation points, and detailed meal descriptions they make you want to scream: All right! Yes! I was planning a terrorist attack. Now please — stop!
“I don’t have time to look at my own photos. What makes anyone believe I have time to log in, create a new password, and scroll through 500 photos of their road trip to Toledo?” asked my friend, Marcia Clark.
Marcia would much prefer another kind of vacation blast — a blast from the past, as it were. So would I. Our plea?
Bring back the postcard.
Surely some of you remember the postcard? The rectangular thing you’d get in the mail?
Surely some of you remember mail?
“The idea of anyone receiving a postcard in the mail is kind of mind-boggling to me,” a 21-year-old college student, Eric Kuhn, said. “Have you ever gotten one?”
As a matter of fact, sonny, yes. And there’s a lot to be said for the medium, once as time-sensitive and sexy as texting.
“What started the postcard’s popularity was that it was the fastest method of contacting people,” the author of “The History of the Snowman,” Bob Eckstein, said. “When it first came around like 1890, you could send a postcard a few blocks to a friend and it would get there in about four hours.”
“Mail was delivered three times a day sometimes,” a postcard collector, Pat Sabin, said. Each time the postman arrived, “it would be the big event.” A friend might write something like, “I can’t wait to see you for lunch on Tuesday” — short and sweet as a Twitter tweet. But it had one huge advantage.
It was actually written to one person. You.
“It means so much more to me to get a good, old-fashioned note that makes me feel connected to the person, versus an e-mail blast that might include their dentist,” a personal organizer, Dana Korey, said.
Blasts are not only dentist-heavy, they’re heavy, period. Every, “Then we ran into the people we met two days ago.” Every, “The crepes here are so amazing.” Every, “Now I’m soooooo sick of crepes.” Imagine “War and Peace” written by Natasha with digital photos of all her boyfriends and samovars.
A colleague of mine who is traveling cross-country (so I feel safe printing this right now) put this in a recent posting: “Here’s our glove compartment. Thought you’d like to see it.”
And indeed there it is — digitally: Wide open, and, I see, filled with a flashlight, Kleenex, and cough drops.
Bring back the postcard.
Postcards boast sweeping views, stunning art, or at least sofa-sized trouts lashed to cars with captions like, “You should’ve seen the one that got away.” And don’t forget the fact that the ones mailed from abroad have cool, foreign stamps. They’re a way of sharing your vacation, rather than imposing it.
On the bulletin board at work, nobody’s pinning up the group e-mail from Bob in Fiji. At home, nobody’s printing it out to stick to the fridge, or save in a shoebox, or use as cookbook bookmark. In another generation, we’ll still be collecting old postcards, they’ll just be older.
“My grandmother sent one from St. Lucia. It’s made of straw on one side, with a silky yellow flower. It’s got to be 40 years old and I think I can still smell her Shalimar on it,” Ms. Clark said.
The 21-year-old, Mr. Kuhn, swears he prefers his friend’s 3,000-word, 3,000-recipient blogs. “They tend to write every single detail,” he admitted, “but to be honest I read them all, and my friends read mine, and we have fun with sharing all these experiences.”
And what would happen — to be honest — if he didn’t read each and every word? “Oh, that’s embarrassing,” he said. “It’s always the last thing they write that’s the most important to them and you didn’t read.”
So — to be honest — he doesn’t read them all?
“They are time consuming,” he said.
Nothing time consuming about a postcard, except, okay, the time it takes to find your friend’s real world address. But today, if you are under the age of 47 and on vacation, the chances of you sitting down to write a postcard are on par with the chances of you being eaten by a shark … who is sitting down to write a postcard.
Too bad, because all you’d have to scribble is, “Thinking of you,” and we’d know you really were.
Bring back the postcard.
lskenazy@yahoo.com