My sister called to tell me that her friend Mary had received my thank-you note. Jaci laughed at Mary’s reaction to having received it. “She said, ‘He sent me a thank you note! He didn’t have to do that.’ But you’re good at that,” my sister said. “Good at what?” I asked. Jaci replied, “Writing notes.”
Jaci’s friend lives in Pittsburgh, Penn., and I relied on her for transportation when I spent a month in the city while my brother recuperated from an illness. I’ve known Mary for a long time; she and my sister call themselves “sisters,” (which makes her my sister, too, I guess) and Mary’s daughter and my youngest daughter have also gotten to be friends. So, while it was essentially a family affair, I still appreciated Mary’s selfless assistance in helping me get around the city when public transportation was not convenient. And I wrote her a note to thank her for that.
I’m a bit old-fashioned when it comes to writing notes to people; I prefer to do it by hand, rather than by typing or emailing. I get excited when I see an interesting piece of handmade paper, or a small series of interesting cards, and I like the visceral experience of dragging my pen across the paper that I have chosen, or onto a card purchased from a local artist. Writing by hand is like drawing for the artist in me: I want the words I choose to create a picture for the recipient that conveys my thoughts and feelings. And I often write to people for no reason other than to share my joy that the other person exists, and I know her. But I think that my sister remembers my “thank-you note” writing because of the grimly relentless and laborious hours that I spent scratching notes to the many people who responded to our mother’s death. My endless queries of, “Who is this? How did mom know her?” may have interrupted her mourning, but helped me toward the path to healing. And I still have many of those mass-manufactured notes, though they lack the creativity that I desire for the notes that fall outside of acknowledgement of mortality.
I was binging on some TV show and one character gave another job-seeking advice. The woman counseled her protégé to hand write a thank-you after the interview, but better yet — to write the thank-you before the meeting and mail it as you leave. Whether or not that second piece of advice is over the top, the first, in my opinion, is solid counsel. It has been a long time since I’ve interviewed a job seeker, and even longer since I’ve interviewed for one; I don’t know what people do these days about acknowledgements. We live in a texting and emailing time, a time of immediacy and perhaps, less intimacy. We have “emojis” to say “I heart you,” and “smile,” and shorthand that tells someone that we are “laughing out loud.” Such is life, and I love and live in it.
January, 2009 marked a new beginning for this publication; the co-owners were kind enough to provide me with a weekly forum for 600 of my “words.” In these last eight years, I have been graced with notes from my readers, notes in the form of emails. I’ve tried to tailor my responses to each individual in a way that shows appreciation for the writer’s having taken the time to reach out to me. I do have one consistent message in all my replies, however, and that is this:
Thank you for your readership.