Nutshell

newyorker:

Life and Letters

Losing the mixed pleasures of just arrived letters may not mean as much in the end as what we’re missing by not writing them. Writing regularly to several people—a parent, a friend who’s moved to another coast, a daughter or son away at college—requires one to keep separate mental ledgers, storing up the weather or the idle thoughts or the disasters we need to pass on. We’re always getting ready to write. The letters out and back become a correspondence, and mysteriously take on a tone of their own: some rambly and comfortably boring; others cool and funny; some financial; some confessional. They stick in the mind and seem worth the trouble.

- In this week’s issue, Roger Angell writes about the decline of the U.S. Postal Service and what we’re missing by not writing letters http://nyr.kr/vGd98S

I’m going to write my grandmother.