REAL MAIL. REMEMBER IT.

I visited my Son's house in Kirksville, Missouri. He was graduating from college and we were there attending the commencement exercises. My wife and I looked nostalgically at the mementos he had collected that adorned the walls of his room. I surveyed the wall above his desk, and I was awestruck. There, tacked to the wall, was every card we and others had sent him over his college years. This was a tribute to the importance of real mail.

Everyone loves to get mail. Real mail that is. People especially young children and college students are fascinated by receiving mail. It is analogous to meeting Tinker Bell in Peter Pan. It comes in an envelope and is magically delivered to their house. When a person opens an envelope, it is a mystical moment. Their eyes light up like stars and twinkle like pixie dust. Real mail does that you know.

Getting mail is a wondrous occasion. Even our youngest son who is now 22 used to run to the mailbox when he arrived home from school. He flung his books on the table, grabbed the mail box key, flew open the front door and raced like the wind to be the first to get the mail. He clutched the mail close to his body. He studied each envelope imagining what lay secretly inside. What many incredible offers were being made to other members of his family? Would dad get another envelope that said, “Open quickly you have been pre-approved to receive a check for $268,000?”

Email will never replace getting mail the old fashioned way. It may be anathema for a person like me schooled in the creed of high technology to recognize the immortality of real mail, but there I have said it. Email will never replace real mail.

People have no respect for email. It can be deleted with a single keystroke. A click of the mouse and the email vanishes into oblivion. Not so with real mail. One must open it to see the extraordinary content that is packed inside, so carefully labeled, sealed and placed in a mail box perhaps a thousand miles a way. And then as if by a supernatural power, the letter is delivered to you as if someone knew where you lived.

Perhaps when children are little, the mailbox is viewed as some spiritual place where mail suddenly appears from grandparents. When a child places a thank you letter in a mail box, one can only imagine what must be going through the child’s mind as he contemplates what marvelous mysteries are created inside the mailbox that takes the thank you letter to the other person.

Would Ben Franklin our first postmaster general have ever dreamed the impact that real mail would have on a person? I get more than 30 emails a day, but I still treasure each real letter delivered to my mailbox. It must be an appreciation for the work that has gone into the making of the letter that is so valuable.

The old ways are not so bad. As always, I like to think of the past, but I would not want to live there again. There are some aspects of the past however, like real mail that suitably resist extinction and survive to mystify a new generation of children and people like me.

And when I see a tribute to real mail carefully tacked to the wall of a college student, particularly my son, it makes me remember how important real mail really is.

Let's not forget it.

I am going to send some real mail to someone today. You do the same.