Once Upon A Postage Stamp
These days, I am dying to write something sweet, sentimental and uplifting. I don’t have it in me to pretend that everything that’s going on in the world right now can be glitter-painted over with festive cheer, but I do have one little something up my sleeve that’s kind of season-appropriate, and I hope you’ll indulge me.
This week, I mailed a holiday card to the UK. As I was popping it into the box, it occurred to me that this was the 30th time I had sent an annual card to this person. Sweet merciful whatever, I thought, I have been doing this for 30 years. Cue feelings of being incomprehensibly ancient, etc.
The message in the card is never lengthy or profound, just a simple wish for a cheerful holiday season and a pleasant new year. I don’t have much else to say to the recipient. I don’t know her that well. Besides a name and an address, I know maybe one or two details about her family, and have a very hazy mental picture of her home from three decades ago. If she were standing right in front of me, I wouldn’t know it was her. Given that the last time she saw me, I was a dorky teenage band geek, I doubt she’d recognize me either.
On a high school band trip, I did homestay for a couple of days at her house. Now that I think of it, I’m not sure it was even her house. I think she and her husband may have been helping out a friend or neighbour by feeding and checking in on a handful of us while said neighbour was away. That part is as hazy as any of it. I do remember she and her husband were kind, and we all chatted with them briefly here and there. I also remember they introduced us to Hobnobs (quite possibly the best store-bought cookie ever made). After a couple of days, we packed up and headed out for our next stop on the trip.
This dates me a little bit, but as a teenager, I used to exchange addresses with people I met on trips, and dutifully sent them a card each December. Most of the time, this exchange only lasted a year or two. They’d move or I’d move, or they’d think it was corny and weird to send cards to a near-stranger in another continent. But for whatever reason, with this couple, it kept going. Maybe it was the small pleasure of finding another card in the mail each year, the novelty of still getting cards at all. Maybe neither of us wanted to be the one to break our winning streak. In any case, these cards found me while I was at university, at my first apartment, and at several houses after that. Every year, I got a very brief run-down on their family, and volleyed back a very brief run-down on the particular milestones I had reached. A year or two ago, there was only one signature at the bottom of the card, one name in the return address, and despite not knowing anything about this person other than their name, I teared up a little.
There are very few holiday traditions I care about, but I’m somehow devoted to this one. Call it being overly civil or pointlessly nostalgic, but it’s been part of my entire adult life. Maybe it’s just comforting to know that random connections like this can still happen, that some stranger on the other side of the world might still consider you important enough to take a few minutes to reach out every year. Maybe it’s just nice, simple, pleasant in a way that few things are anymore.
There will come a day when the cards stop coming, and there probably won’t be a way for me to find out why. It’s likely no one in her family or circle of friends knows she sends these to me. After all these years, I’ve never even tried to dig around online to find her. The mere idea of that feels really icky, like it would spoil something important. For the time being, I’m grateful to have had 30 years of this simple miracle, this tiny nugget of goodness that flew over an ocean and back again, for no particular reason.