Not long ago I came across some letters I had written home from camp. The envelopes were marked S.W.A.K. (For those who weren’t preteens back then, that stands for “Sealed With A Kiss.”) In the same shoe box were a few stilted “newsy” letters that my parents, who had no vocabulary for that kind of correspondence, had sent me – and several letters from friends. I recognized the handwriting on just about every one. After all, we had signed each others autograph books, corresponded over many summers and, in several cases, for years afterwards, and exchanged our hand-written homework at school.
Soon after that find, I unearthed some letters that my daughter had written home from camp at about the same age, some fifteen years ago. Accounts of theatrical triumphs, color-war games, and bunk gossip were intermixed with exclamation points and pleas to be taken home – standard fare. I loved the sight of her new-found script writing and smiled at the recollections of those emotionally tumultuous years evoked in her letters. So much like the ones I sent off decades earlier.
When I mentioned this vein of history to a friend with younger kids, she informed me that campers now e-mailed home. Where her children went, e-mailing was allowed on only one day in the week. And cell phones were prohibited. Very Spartan by prevailing standards, but enough to preclude letter-writing. It is unlikely that she or her children will come across a shoebox of memories in the future. And I am pretty sure her kids won’t have seen enough of their friends’ handwriting to recognize it fifty years later.
I’m not bemoaning the lost intimacy of yesteryear, but I am aware of how capturing experience and communicating it between parents and children is different now. When they go away from home for long periods of time, our kids don’t have a mailing address except for packages and don’t get a local phone number. The contact info is the same – an e-mail address and cell phone. They could be anywhere in the world, for all we would know.
On the other hand, they are much more connected to us than we were to our parents, according to studies of their generation. A recruiter for a major investment firm cited one of those studies to explain why when her company is wooing perspective college graduates, they sometimes fly the parents as well as the candidate to the important interview. They have found that young adults these days actually value their parents’ opinions.
We also have many more levels of intimacy at our disposal than previous families. Not just doing things together. Or talking on the phone. When my daughter was at college, I learned to pick up clues from the medium of choice in her communiqués. An e-mail was either business or school work (another channel of intimacy for us was sharing her papers) or something she didn’t want to hear my reaction to right away. An IM was usually about something she hadn’t processed yet emotionally, and while she wanted feedback in real time, she felt she needed a little time to frame her responses. Text messages were generally about logistics.
While we have lost the notion of snapshots of our children’s early years – I am picturing those yellowing black-and-white photos with the scalloped edges, as well as the decorated envelopes and childish handwriting – we have gained, I think, an evolving comfort zone between our lives that didn’t exist back when my contemporaries were beginning to detach from our parents. That is surely a good thing. I must admit, though, that I regret that the time-capsule evidence of long-ago innocence – mine as well as my children’s – embodied in those letters is not being generated any more.