The pleasures of old-fashioned letters

 My friend Melvyn and I have exchanged letters recently. This is not an exchange of email. These are letters delivered by the postal service.

Melvyn, who is 90 and still practicing medicine, doesn’t have a computer at home. He’s not afraid of technology. He has a computer at work, and that is enough, he says.

When people talk about letters now, they are apt to talk about the joy of having something you can hold in your hand, like a present on your birthday. But I’ve noticed a change in me — in the way I sense time.

Melvyn and I are discussing ideas, rather than the news of the day. I wrote him because I wanted to know what he thought about an idea I’d been toying with. He wrote back, and I was still thinking about the problem when his letter arrived a week or two later. What he had to say struck me as important, not merely urgent.

With me at least, email is not like that. Each email is a minor emergency that must be returned promptly, preferably within 24 hours, regardless how superficial the reply. Somehow, with paper and ink, that kind of urgency is just not there.

It’s all right to let a letter sit by my easy chair for a day or a week. I can think it through before replying.

But I’ve just replied and had the pleasure of seeing the postman take the letter away. So now, I have that other great pleasure of letter writing: the knowledge that I am owed a letter.