MORE Tastes of Home te ("&context=" + escape(document.context)); if (document.mmm_fo) document.write ("&mmm_fo=1"); document.write ("'>"); //]]>-->

    My brother Glenn recendy bought a computer. He called me on the phone, wanting my e-mail address.

    "What's an e-mail address, and why do you want it?" I asked him.

    "So we can talk on our computers," he said.

    "I don't have a computer," I told him. "I have a phone. Why can't we talk on that?"

    My mailman, Charlie, says he's holding on to his job by a thread, a modern-day Ned Ludd.

    "It's the computers," he tells me. "Everyone's sending e-mail. Nobody's writing letters anymore."

    He doesn't like fax machines, either. I bought a fax machine a few months back, and haven't been able to look Charlie in the eye since.

Can people save their e-mail in a shoe box?

    In my kitchen sits an antique cupboard. On the bottom shelf is a shoe box filled with letters. There's one from my Grandma Norma, now absent from this world. Scratchy, old-woman writing, congratulating me for graduating from high school in 1979. It overflows with praise, as if I'd graduated number one from Harvard. She sent me twenty dollars, too. Can't remember what I spent it on. But I bet it didn't bring me the joy that Grandma's letter brings me every time I open the shoe box and see it there. If our house ever caught on fire, I'd grab my wife, my kids, and my shoe box, in that order.

    Can people save their e-mail in a shoe box? Will they pass it down to their children, like I'll pass Grandma's letter down to my sons?

    "This was from your great-grandmother Norma. Didn't she have beautiful writing? They called it the Palmet method. They used to teach that in school."

    Today's kids learn the keyboard; twenty years from now we'll be reminiscing over the dot matrix and laser printer. It won't be the same.

    Friends, here's a little encouragement. Go buy the finest pen and paper you can afford. If you have to go a day or two with an empty wallet, it'll be worth it. Set aside a quiet hour one evening after the kids are in bed, and write someone a letter. Tell her how much you love her, how proud she makes you, how her friendship means more to you than anything in the world. I'll make you a promise. When she dies and her children are sorting through her belongings, they'll come across that letter tucked away in a shoe box. The paper will be creased from its many readings. The children will tell you that when their mother was discouraged, she went to the shoe box, read that letter, and brushed away a tear.

    Ned Ludd was right. These new ways aren't always the best ways, and before we embrace them, we'd better be sure we know what it is we're giving up.

From the book Home Town Tales: Recollections of Peace, Love, and Joy by Philip Gulley. (c) 1999 by Multnomah Pub., used by permission. Also available on audio cassette!

TOP
HOME

HEARTLIGHT(R) Magazine is a ministry of loving Christians and the Westover Hills church of Christ.
Edited by Phil Ware and Paul Lee.
Article copyright © 1996-97, Randy Becton. Used by permission.
Design copyright © 1996-97, Heartlight, Inc., 8332 Mesa Drive, Austin, TX 78759.
May be reprinted and reused for non-commercial purposes only if copyright credits are appropriately displayed.
HEARTLIGHT and the flared heart design are service marks of Heartlight, Inc.

ARTICLES   ART & MUSIC   DEVOTIONALS   COMMUNITY   SHOPPING   SEARCH     Support   Contact