Don't Expect Privacy

Sometimes, the mail brings a big surprise.

Yesterday, there was a letter in our mailbox.  Yes, a real live, actual, letter.  The return name and address were that of someone we haven't seen in many years - a man that my spouse served in the military with and had become friends with. (Let's call him OMF or Old Military Friend).  

After spouse got out of the military, we visited OMF and his family in the late 1970's when we were in his home area.  I think we exchanged a handful of letters (this was before email) and then lost touch.

Back around 2009-2010, I found a blog.  The blog author was a high school teacher in that same state with the same name as OMF.  I took a chance and contacted him asking if he was the same man my spouse had served with.  He was.  

But after one exchange of letters we lost touch with each other.  Again.

Until yesterday.

The letter began:  "Hello (my spouse's nickname in the military) (at least I hope so)" and went on to say that he found my spouse's address through a 2010 document that discussed a manufacturing building (now demolished) in our neighborhood.  It was owned by the military and rented out to a major defense contractor.

It was ruined in a flood the year after the document was published.

It's a wonderful thing when something online helps old friends reconnect. 

But that document....

I found it online in less than a minute.  I won't get into the document except it had to do with pollution found at the site (not unknown to me).  There was a plan to clean up the site.

And, in an appendix, I found this: (bolding is mine)

Residents Living Nearby [name of building]

Residential Contacts – Pursuant to Exemption 6 of the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA), 5 USC 552(b)(6), this list should not be released to the public to protect the personal privacy of the residents living nearby [name of building].

Below that heading was a list of the name and address of  people living in my neighborhood and a couple of other neighborhoods as of 2010.

Online,where anyone can find it.

And no, I'm not linking to it.

I believe all the information in this appendix is public information and, I know several named people are either deceased or have moved away.

But some of us are still living there.

True, the document had a good use - it helped OMF find us (yet again).  But what ever happened to the disclosure that a list of names and addresses should not be released?  Because it certainly was released.  I'm not a lawyer, and maybe there is a time limit to this exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.  After all, the document is from 2010.

We all know we have no expectation of privacy nowadays. I already have a footprint on search engines due to blogging and use of social media.  So do many of my readers.  And there are all the databases that contain information on us.

But it still feels weird to see what I saw online yesterday.  Maybe "weird" isn't the right word, but I can't find the right word to describe it.

P.S.  yes, my spouse is going to answer that letter.

The Vacation Postcard

Several days ago, I received a postcard from a Facebook friend who was vacationing.  We exchanged holiday cards last year, so she has my address.

"Having tons of fun, my friend!" it said.  She had just visited a famous mountain in the Northeast United States, one I've never been to, although I live a lot closer to it than she does.

I got so much enjoyment out of that postcard!

I thought, when I was a teen and even a young adult, I used to send postcards when on vacation. A lot.  But when was the last time I did that?

Or, when was the last time I received a postcard?  

Thanks to blogging, I do remember the last time I got a postcard.  It was March 3, 2021. It came from Iceland, and I blogged about it here.

And the story behind it, here.

But the time before that?  And when was the last time I sent a postcard?

I do get postcards from time to time. There is the local store that sends me postcards now and again, thanking me for my business and offering me a discount on purchases made in the following month.  The same store I nearly (accidentally) shoplifted from once.

I appreciate their postcards. 

And, sometimes solicitations for Medicare plans come on postcards.  Postcards that I immediately toss (after shredding the part with my name and address).

But other than that?

I honestly don't know.  

Have postcards become one of the many lost arts of my childhood and early adulthood, along with letter writing?

Are you someone who still sends postcards?

Pen Pals

Yesterday, I  got a postcard from Iceland.  There's a story behind it, which I plan to tell next week.

The person who sent it to me wrote a short message on the card.  It didn't strike me at first, but I realized that it was printed.

It's also the first time I've received a non business letter (handwritten) or a postcard in forever.

Does anyone write in cursive anymore?  For that matter, does anyone reading this blog post have a pen pal?  

With cursive writing, my son (who is 30-something) never learned how, and I wonder if my postcard writer is in his age group.  This postcard project (more on that next week) wasn't to start pen pal relationships, but it made me think about pen pals.

Pen pals were so popular "way back when".  I know the practice has gotten a bit of a resurgence during the pandemic. I suspect a lot of these are young people writing to nursing home residents, or something similar.  But it was different "back then".

I remember my pen pal; in fact, I woke up about 5am today thinking of her.  I am a bit superstitious about when I wake up thinking of someone I haven't thought of in many years.  In more than one case, I look online for an obituary and I find it.  But I digress.

Years ago, when I (born and raised in New York City) got the urge to "go back to the land", spouse and I bought about 34 acres of land in Arkansas.  We lasted only a few years, but during that time, I subscribed to a magazine for like minded people.  They had a section for finding a pen pal.

I wrote to three or four people, and got back a couple of answers.  With one, a woman living in the Midwest, I started up a pen pal relationship that lasted perhaps three years.  Yes, actual letters (this was the early 1980's, prior to the Internet), handwritten, snail mailed back and forth to each other.

She was planning to move to Arkansas and was interested in finding out more about it.  Whatever she found out, she and her family (she, husband, three teens) ended up moving to another part of Arkansas.

We never met.  We never really tried to.  Writing was fine, and she had a busy life, given the three teens.

Eventually, we moved from Arkansas back to New York State, and the letters petered out. 

I don't think I've written a non business letter in years.  The last person I regularly wrote letters to was an aunt who passed away in 2003.

I never thought about becoming a pen pal again during lockdown, but if you do an Internet search you will find a lot of stories about unlikely pen pals.

I hope my pen pal is OK.

Did you ever have a pen pal?

Spring Keeps Marching On - And Do You Read Cursive?

Tomorrow is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, where gardeners from all over the world post what is blooming in their worlds.  But today, history needs your help.

Flowers first.

This crocus in my front yard won't make it.  I only had four come up this year and three flowers were shredded by winds we had all week.

Here in upstate New York, on my off day from the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, I am enjoying every moment of spring - the days spring shows up, that is.

Today is not one of those days.  But yesterday was, and I headed out with my spouse to Cutler Botanical Gardens in Binghamton, New York to check spring out.

These trees, which may be maples, normally have small red flowers.  This year they are so big the trees almost can rank as a flower ornamental.

With the arrival of spring, we say goodbye to these yellow and red twigged dogwoods.  Once they leaf out, the colors will not be distinctive.

But hello daffodils.

Hello other spring bulbs.

Before I leave, hello blooming shrub.

Tomorrow a two-fer for you - my Music Move sMe and AtoZ Challenge "M" post (combined) and my Garden Bloggers Bloom Day post.

And now for the help needed.  Do you read cursive?  If you do, the Library of Congress and the National Archives need your help.  This is so amazing I have to share this article from a Michigan newspaper.

After all there are thousands of historical documents out there and new generations (including my son's) that can not read cursive.

Preserving history is up to my generation and maybe yours.

Can you help?

The Art of Keeping in Touch

A blog post I recently read reminded me of a blog post from 2012, which I repeat today with a little updating.

I had recently visited Brooklyn (over Christmas) and had dinner with several relatives who live in the area.  The death of a couple of my spouse's relatives in November and December, and the serious illness of one of my relatives (whom I visited a couple of days ago), have made me think more and more about keeping in touch.

Recently, in decluttering, my spouse found a CD of letters from the Round Robin, which also brought back this memory:

The Round Robin and the Art of Keeping in Touch

I had blogged about the Month of Letters project I had heard about through a fellow blogger.

The idea was to write 24 letters (hard letters, though the mail) during the month of February.  Or, at least, mail something.

It was a good idea but I didn't sign up.  But it did bring back memories of a letter writing tradition my father's side of the family participated in for a number of years.  And why trying to start it up again several years ago just didn't work out.

This project was called The Round Robin.  My father, who would be (in 2019) 104 if he was still alive, was one of six children.  As adults, they went their separate ways.  My Dad and two siblings stayed in the New York City area (they grew up in Brooklyn). One moved to Albany, one moved to Tampa, Florida and one ended up first in Texas and later in Iowa and Illinois.  Only one of them, the youngest, is still alive now in 2019.

To stay in touch (as telephoning, even someone in another part of New York City, was so expensive back then), they wrote letters.  I don't know who in our family started The Round Robin but the point was:  You wrote a letter, put it in a big envelope with everyone else's letter. When the packet got to you, you replaced your old letter with a current letter, and then sent it on.  The Robin's route was always the same.

By the time I was a teenager, I had taken over from my Dad.  So it was me, writing to five aunts and uncles.  I looked forward to getting those letters and I loved responding for my Dad.  But each time, the Robin packet would take longer and longer to come.  Finally, the Robin stopped.  In the meantime, I had grown up and had better things to do.  Time passed....lots of time.

Around 2007, I thought it would be a really good idea to start up the Robin again.   My Dad and his five brothers/sisters had a total of 12 children between them. (I am an only child.)  I contacted my 11 first cousins and almost all of them were eager to join in on Robin 2.0..  The oldest cousins at that point were near 60, the youngest were in their 40's.  All of us were of the last letter writing generation.  In fact, several of my cousins have never felt comfortable with computers.  (Guess I didn't inherit those genes.  My spouse thinks my computer is grafted to my body.)

Another cousin, whose grandmother and my grandmother were sisters, joined our Robin group.

The last of my father's siblings, an uncle, wanted to join, too, but...guess what happened.  The first packet took a year to make the rounds.  The second packet never made it back to me.  He never had a chance to write a letter-one that I saw, anyway.

And what about the generation of our children?  Between the 12 of us, we have 11 children.  Many of them are young adults, including my son.  None of them were interested in the Robin.

I have finally decided the Robin is not viable.  Not dead, mind you.  Just busy sunning him or herself in Florida, or the French Riviera, or somewhere else more pleasant than upstate New York, while most of us keep in touch by email, text, or Facebook.

Know how my last living uncle, who is in his mid 90's as of 2019, communicates with his three children?  Skype and email is a large part of it.  And I guess that's the point of this blog post.

Yes.  Letter writing has died out because....dare I say it?  There are now better ways to communicate.  Sad but true.

I wish letter writing projects the best, but I wonder how many of those people will still write to each other when February fades into March.

What do you think?  Did any of you have a family letter  packet like the Round Robin?  Do any of you keep in touch with siblings or cousins by snail mail nowadays?

Day 19 of the Ultimate Blog Challenge #blogboost

Five Reasons Why You Should Still Write Letters

Yesterday, I saw a blog post asking "Is letter writing a fading art?"

It really made me think about all the things of my childhood that are now obsolete:

Typewriters
Mimeograph machines
Vacuum tubes
Airmail
Rotary phones
Waiting for a letter in the mail.

When I was growing up, long distance telephone calls were expensive.  Adjusted for 2014 dollars, a 10 minute long distance call from New York to Los Angeles (east coast to west coast of our vast country) in 1950, two years before I was born, would have cost about $65.81.  (For those not in the United States = that's a lot of money). So, let me explain it another way for my foreign blog fans.  On this date in 1950, the minimum wage in the United States was $1.00 an hour.  If you made the minimum wage, that 10 minute phone call would have cost a lot of hours of work.

So, unless it was urgent, people wrote letters to each other.

I wrote so many letters in the first 30 or so years of my life. It was as natural as breathing for me. And, in the last 10 years, I've hardly written any.  Shame on me.

So, why should anyone care about the fine art of writing a letter?

1.  It's a way for young people to communicate with older generations.  I just got to thinking - bet my spouse's 103 year old aunt (yes, she turned 103 earlier this year) would be delighted to get a letter.  Which leads me to reason #2:

2.  It's a way to preserve history.  Can you imagine a collection of love texts bundled and tied by a lovely ribbon, to be found in a closet years later by a grandson or daughter?  I can't, either.

How about all those historic correspondences that historians depend on to get glimpses into history?

3.  It makes you stand out.  Who gets letters anymore?  Write letters, and you are sure to be noticed. Some newspapers even want to interview you.

4.  It brings out the artist in you.  When I was a teen, I decorated envelopes with cartoons, jokes, and so forth.  Last year, I got a gift from a blogger, and guess what? A decorated envelope.  Memories!  And, remember stationery?  I used to get such joy shopping for stationery.

5.  Pen pals? Anyone out there remember pen pals?  As an adult, I had a pen pal for a while who I found through a pen pal section of a country living magazine.  I sometimes wonder what happened to her.

There are even more reasons than the ones I can come up with.  I won't even blog about how cursive writing is dying out.  Soon, there will be few people even able to read it, meaning so many historical documents will be unreadable by the average man or woman.

Some things deserve to become obsolete - such as $65.81 phone calls.

Some things, such as writing letters, shouldn't become obsolete.  And I am just as guilty of enabling letter writing to die out as anyone of my generation that has abandoned the art.  Or not transmitted the art to their children. I didn't do that, either.

Do you still write letters?

The Round Robin and the Art of Keeping in Touch

Earlier, I had blogged about the Month of Letters project I had heard about through a fellow blogger.

The idea was to write 24 letters (hard letters, though the mail) during the month of February.  Or, at least, mail something.

It was a good idea but I didn't sign up.  But it did bring back memories of a letter writing tradition my father's side of the family participated in for a number of years.  And why trying to start it up again several years ago just didn't work out.

This project was called The Round Robin.  My father, who would be 97 if he was still alive, was one of six children.  As adults, they went their separate ways.  My Dad and two siblings stayed in the New York City area (they grew up in Brooklyn). One moved to Albany, one moved to Tampa, FL and one ended up first in Texas and later in Iowa.  Only one of them, the youngest, is still alive and is in his late 80's.

To stay in touch (as telephoning, even someone in another part of New York City, was so expensive back then), they wrote letters.  I don't know who started The Round Robin but the point was:  You wrote a letter, put it in a big envelope with everyone else's letter. When the packet got to you, you replaced your old letter with a current letter, and then sent it on.  The Robin's route was always the same.

By the time I was a teenager, I had taken over from my Dad.  So it was me, writing to five aunts and uncles.  I looked forward to getting those letters and I loved responding for my Dad.  But each time, the Robin packet would take longer and longer to come.  Finally, the Robin stopped.  In the meantime, I had grown up and had better things to do.  Time passed....lots of time.

About 5 years ago, I thought it would be a really good idea to start up the Robin again.   My Dad and his 5 brothers/sisters had a total of 12 children between them. (I am an only child.)  I contacted my 11 first cousins and almost all of them were eager to join in on Robin 2.0..  The oldest cousins at that point were near 60, the youngest were in their 40's.  All of us were of the last letter writing generation.  In fact, several of my cousins have never felt comfortable with computers.  (Guess I didn't inherit those genes.  My spouse thinks my computer is grafted to my body.)

Another cousin, whose grandmother and my grandmother were sisters, joined our Robin group.

The last of my father's siblings, an uncle, wanted to join, too, but...guess what happened.  The first packet took a year to make the rounds.  The second packet never made it back to me.  He never had a chance to write a letter-one that I saw, anyway.

And what about the generation of our children?  Between the 12 of us, we have 11 children.  Many of them are young adults, including my son.  None of them were interested in the Robin.

I have finally decided the Robin is not viable.  Not dead, mind you.  Just busy sunning him or herself in Florida, or Tunisia, or somewhere else more pleasant than upstate NY, while most of us keep in touch by email or Facebook.


Know how my 80-something communicates with his three children?  Skype and email.  And I guess that's the point of this blog post.

Yes.  Letter writing has died out because....dare I say it?  There are now better ways to communicate.  Sad but true.

I wish the Month of Letters project the best, but I wonder how many of those people will still write to each other when February fades into March.

What do you think?  Did any of you have a family letter  packet like the Round Robin?  Do any of you keep in touch with siblings or cousins by snail mail nowadays?