A few weeks ago, I rambled on ad nauseam about discovering my big ol’ box of correspondence. I mentioned one letter that filled me with sadness because the writer died a few years later, lost at sea:
Sometimes we lose the memory, and sometimes the memory loses us. The letter that saddened me the most was a handmade card from another girl at college, mailed a few months after I graduated. It’s filled with reminiscences, travel plans, charity work, the day-to-day — “Other than my little crusade to save the world, I’m still working at the same cafe/bookstore that I did last summer. . .” — all written in a jaunty, lively hand and decorated with a painting (I’ll post the picture later).
I try to live up to my promises, so here’s the front of the card:
But I’m not here to depress the heck out of you, so I also offer up the following images of the single most mangled piece of mail ever to arrive at its destination (address smudged out in Photoshop). It was a mailer for a college alumni event. I think:
