IT'S ALMOST HERE

Yup. Get ready. Sharpen those number 2 graphites. Or stop by Staples and get some White Out. It's Letter Writing Week.

When is the last time you received a handwritten letter from someone? Christmas updates don't count, if you even got one that wasn't stenciled. Ok, I was kidding about cutting a stencil. Or using a mimeograph machine, in days of old called a pocketa-pocketa machine, because of the sound.

Letter writing has become just as out of date. Notes don't count, even though they are rare these days, too. No wonder they try to have a special day. If I were still a classroom teacher, I would have my students write a letter to a friend, a relative, a neighbor, just to encourage the act of letter writing. I'd push out of my mind some of the old literary forms of lettres such as Pamela or Shamela that a cat by the name of Manny Schoenhorn made me read as a grad student. Boy, were they bad. I still remember Richardson's book of over 600 pages of one character writing a letter to another character who answered and fired off another letter to another character. One painful weekend for me on a couch.

So I would rescind the assignment. Maybe just writing one letter by hand to someone whom they may love but may not have much to say to would evoke the same kind of displeasure.

Have a good week of October 17 anyway(s).