Dear Mom …

I am a letter writer. I send cards that are handwritten, sometimes in neat cursive penmanship and sometimes in bold printed capitalized letters; it depends on how much I have to say and what kind of message I want to send. I use paper, pen, and stamps. I’ve had English courses and creative writing classes, but it was my mother, Alice Baker, who was my teacher and model when it came to writing letters and sending cards. 

I left for college in 1973. The distance between New Jersey and Iowa was too far to even think about coming home until Christmas break and it was my first experience with being away from home. I received a letter from my mother that first week in my dorm. The letter was three or four pages long, handwritten. I immediately returned the favor with a shorter letter, also handwritten. No one used computers back in 1973. No email. No internet. We continued to exchange letters each week until she died in 2016. That’s over forty years of weekly letters. It was a rare week when either one of us would miss. 

Recently, I read “A Liturgy Before Writing a Letter,” by Allen Levi. His prayer reminded me of the relationship that developed between my mother and me because of our letter writing. I will share a few excerpts from Levi’s prayer at the end of this post.  

Long distance phone calls were costly back then, so my mom and I seldom talked on the phone. Occasionally between letters we would ‘signal’ each other. I would call home and let the phone ring once, then hang up. About 30 seconds later, my phone would ring once and then stop. That was just our way of saying, even though we were over a thousand miles apart, we were thinking of each other. My mom made one exception late one night when I was living in Prinsburg, Minnesota. Mom and Dad always bowled in leagues. In each letter she told me her scores for the week. The late night call was to tell me the exciting news that she had just rolled a perfect 300 game. On the envelope I used to mail my next letter I replaced 2 Miedama Place with “300” Miedama Place. It still got to her.  

The content of our letters, over the years, included things like the weather, activities of my brothers and sisters, bowling scores, of course, and other newsy stuff, but I also learned what made my mom cry, what made her laugh, when she felt proud and when she was embarrassed. I remember one stretch when she felt guilty for not doing a better job as a mother. We would counsel each other, at times, but those more heartfelt aspects to our letters are what helped us develop a tight bond. I was a safe person with whom she could be more transparent. I was halfway across the country. 

One milestone in our forty-year letter-writing history was the time when I finally suggested we use email instead of paper and pen. She was reluctant. She didn’t want to lose what we had established. She finally agreed to email as long as I still began my emails with, “Dear Mom and Dad.” That way it still qualified as a letter. 

Our new routine worked well. I sent an email letter early on Sunday morning. When those emails came, she printed it out and passed it around to other family members who came for coffee after church, and then at about 4pm that same day, I would get a return email letter from her. So now I was communicating to everyone in the family, not just my mom. 

Another significant milestone came in the later years of our letter writing. My mom suffered a stroke. She survived, but there was a noticeable change. She no longer picked up on my humor. My sarcasm seemed to be lost on her. She lost her laugh. She always took me seriously, getting a little upset and asking me questions so I’d have to explain that I was just kidding. That is when I started to italicize things when I was joking. To this day, in a weekly email I still send to my children, siblings and some nieces and nephews, I still italicize my sarcasm so they know I’m joking and no one gets mad. Sometimes my whole letter is in italics.

Alice Baker, my mother, died on March 9, 2016. It was a Wednesday. On Sunday, March 13, no email came at 4 pm. It was the end of an era. It took me many, many Sundays to get over the loss of my mother and my pen pal of over forty years. 

Excerpts from “A Liturgy Before Writing a Letter,” by Allen Levi

Before I begin the task at hand,

composing a letter to Mom, 

I pause to acknowledge, with gratitude,

the holy gift of language, through which

we have nurtured the friendship 

you kindly ordained for us.

I thank you, in particular, Lord, for the simple

elements of ink and stationery, for words

slowly written in longhand, for the way

those papered incarnations have allowed us 

to communicate our care for, and our

delight in, one another.

Let me write with a grateful sense 

of remembrance. Calling to mind the 

power that letters have had in my own life 

over the years, occasions when I was gladdened 

to know that for minutes or hours, someone 

had devoted their energies specifically 

to me and had taken time to compose 

their thoughts with me in mind. 

It is such a small thing, this writing 

dedicated to a readership of one. 

But I entrust it to you, O Lord, 

confident that, 

in your hands, 

it has power, like loaves 

and fishes, to nourish 

and bless another.