Did you ever have a penpal?  I remember having several at various points throughout my elementary school career.  We were paired up with kids from around the world and we exchanged letters.

Boy was it exciting to get those tell-tale red and blue boardered international mail envelopes with such exotic stamps.  There was such thrill and intrigue in opening up this piece of mail that had traveled around the globe right to my very doorstep from some kid who was in winter when I was in summer and who lived a whole day ahead of me (that kind of realization could leave a girl’s head spinning with the wonder of the time/space continuum and the possible wrinkles therein…but that’s a daydream for another post). 

I remember seeing the handwriting of that other child, thinking about where he or she sat while writing the letter, thinking about what he or she would see if they looked out the window, thinking about making plans to visit said penpal someday for some international adventure.

Today I got a random text from a random, unsaved number.  I asked the sender who they were in case it was one of my people that I had erroneously forgotten to save.  Turns out it was not one of my people but a stranger who had simply misdialed.  We exchanged a few pleasantries and ultimately ended the “conversations.”

I thought about this day and age where we can just shoot off emails and text messages instantly to people all over the world.  I thought about how two people can randomly connect not by purpose but by dialing one digit off.  Sometimes we send an intimate message to the person above or below the intended recipient’s name on our contact list; sometimes we recieve random and nonsensical sounding texts from strangers; sometimes our phone calls and leaves messages for people without our knowledge–we’ve all been there.

I thought about the idea of striking up a Text Pal relationship with some random phone number.  Then I remembered, sadly, that things have gotten far to creepy and unsafe these days to have such a carefree and benign correspondence.   And I sigh wistfully about the fading art of hand-written letters; about the anticipation of what “mail call” will bring; about the keeping of certain letters tied up in ribbon tucked away in special boxes kept under the bed to be taken out and re-read and re-cherished over and over again.  *Sigh…

So while I won’t be starting correspondence with a Text Pal any time soon, I think I should like to try to write more hand written letters this year.  What about you?  Have you ever had a penpal?  How long did you keep in touch?  Did you ever visit each other?  What was your favorite memory of your correspondence?