As a loyal soldier in the digital revolution, I write dozens of emails each day, along with scores of texts and my usual share of social media posts. But recently, I’ve become a regular sender of postcards, embracing a tradition once popular in an earlier century. Dropping them into the mail always makes me smile, proof of the old truth that givers get more from such gestures than receivers.
I didn’t set out to revive a lost art or make some larger point when I took up my postcard pastime. Like so many of life’s happy turns, it came about by serendipity. While in Pittsburgh to attend my son’s college graduation, our family spent a sunny morning at Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, one of the city’s star attractions. We like to stop by the gift shop when we visit museums and public gardens, though my wife and I are empty nesters more interested in downsizing our possessions than in acquiring new stuff. But gift shops help keep cultural institutions afloat, so we make token purchases when we can as a small nod of support.
Though warm spring weather told us that the Yuletide season was months away, my wife selected some Christmas ornaments to remind us of Phipps during the holidays. While standing in line with her at the cash register, I spotted a rack of postcards. For a few years now, I’ve brought home postcards from various places and perched them along a bookshelf near my home computer, creating a private gallery that reminds me of faraway destinations. Clattering away at my keyboard, I often glance at a postcard from a Van Gogh exhibition in Dallas, for example, and mentally travel into one of his vivid olive groves brightened by a luminous cloud.
Why We Wrote This
Always dialed in to the digital world, one writer finds respite in his postcard pastime – proof of the old truth that givers get more than receivers.
With that pleasant idea in mind, I purchased a few postcards depicting Phipps’ botanical wonders, including a cactus as big as a bushel basket and a blue blossom, grand as a windmill, that seemed to radiate warmth. They looked like great candidates for the bookshelf tableau in my home office.
Once we returned home, though, I could see that the improvised art exhibit in my home office was getting cluttered. I felt greedy hoarding all those visual treasures, and I was beginning to understand that postcards don’t really reach their promise unless they’re sent to someone else. Those beautifully colored miniatures – a snowy woodscape, a pink dog rose, an impressionist painting of two women on a sailboat – now struck me as oddly constrained in my bookcase, like tropical birds confined to a cage.
Fetching a ballpoint pen and a book of stamps, I decided to set them free. I addressed one to a friend who had recently lost his job, another to someone navigating new struggles at home. I inscribed a third postcard to my son in Massachusetts, and scribbled greetings on a fourth card to my daughter in California.
What I learned, in doing so, is that postcards are a perfect balance between a hastily composed email and the long, leisurely pace of a handwritten letter. Their compact format, which nudges writers to keep the message short and sweet, chimes with our hurried times. But the physical presence of a postcard, with its bright art and durable card stock, is a pleasure that abides more vividly than any message in an inbox.
Which is why, though most of the postcards from my shelf have flown the coop to other homes, I’ve continued to send them, and I now even buy them in bulk. A new box arrived this morning – luminous reproductions of masterpieces by Henri Matisse. I’m not yet sure where they’ll end up, but I’m fortunate to live within a circle of friends and family who welcome whatever cheer might happen to land in their mailbox.
Who knows? I might even get a few postcards in return.
