These days the mail carrier brings only junk mail and bills

This most definitely is a “how times have changed” type of a post. I feel I ought to be writing it from a rocking chair, positioned next to my steamer trunk of faded memories.

Because, in fact, I do have a large steamer trunk (see photo below) filled with letters from my young adult years --letters sent to me when I returned to live in the States to finish my studies here. Apparently, instead of attending to my studies, I attended to my correspondence because there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands of letters there, dated from the years 1973 – 1977 (end of college, beginning grad school – up until the point when I got married; the cessation of correspondence at that moment is in itself a sad statement about how we treat our friends at moments of transition.)

What should I do with them? I am typically not a keeper of paper. It overwhelms me – there is always too much of it and I can’t remember where and what most of it is. These days I throw out as much as I can. I think I can safely say that I do not regret having discarded 99% of all that is now decomposing in a landfill or being recycled into grocery bags.

But the trunk of letters is another matter. It holds all sorts of personalities in one heap of faded paper. There is a small stack from a good university friend who committed suicide shortly after writing me his last letter. I feel I ought not throw that stack away. And the rest?

It’s the entirety that has me stumped: I pick up any single letter (most are from friends in Poland and other distant places) and it is mildly amusing but not much more than that. Quite a number of my friends were, let’s face it, terrible letter writers. I always longed for the personal statements, the ones that contained some small inkling to what was on their minds, an idea, a revelation, a display of weakness, an uncertainty maybe. I know I asked probing questions that sought to elicit these kinds of musings.

But more often than not there would be chronological accounts of who did what and when, gossipy stories and, especially from men, lengthy descriptions of academic work.

Yet the entirety seems to me to be some kind of testament to the transition that I went through as I slowly relinquished my links to my Polish world and connected more and more to people on this side of the ocean.

And so I can’t get myself to simply put this all in ten garbage bags and lay it out with the trash come Wednesday. Still, all that faded paper, locked in a musty trunk…

[n.b.: Though almost all the letters are addressed to me, occasionally there will be an unsent letter written by me. I’m sure I was waiting a decent amount of time to send the next one and the next one. I had firm ideas about how one ought not respond immediately and with five letters to every one that came in. I have no doubt that I violated my own rule then, just like I violate it all the time now in email.]