"Stuff" the Postman Brings

I normally bring in the mail. I normally get home hours before my husband and I bring in the mail, but occasionally he brings in the mail and separates it into stacks of bills, magazines, junk and stuff addressed to me. The stuff addressed to me goes on the side table in the den next to "my chair". I usually ignore it for days until the pile grows large and I have no choice but to look through it. Today I decided to purge my mail - this is what I found:

• a statement from my retirement account
• something from an organization called Investor Protection Association for America urging me to "tell Washington what I think"
• a statement from my Doctor on a medical procedure I had in October that my insurance is supposed to pay, but hasn't
• an advertisement for an antique show at our Civic Center
• a magazine from my college sorority - The Eleusis of Chi Omega
• 2 Valentine's Day cards from two of my dear friends
• an advertisement begging me to subscribe to Organic Gardening
• an advertisement from Dillard's Department store begging me to try MAC Cosmetics
• a post card from my college Alumni Association marked URGENT NOTICE trying to sell me an alumni directory
• a notice from the Arboretum reminding me of a program at the arboretum that happened a week ago
• a 2009 Obama Agenda Survey
• a dues reminder from Texas Democratic Women
• another URGENT NOTICE from my college alumni association
• an advertisement from Dillard's Department store begging me to try Prescriptives Cosmetics
• my February bank statement
• an advertisement from Pier 1 Imports
• an advertisement from Sally Beauty supply
• an actual letter from a dear friend
• a gift certificate from Daughter #1 for an online writing class
• a newsletter from our lake Municipal Water District
• an advertisement from Better Homes and Gardens Magazine

This is less than a week's worth of mail that was routed to me. It saddens me that there is not more real mail. I am reminded of mail we received when I was a child. The mail my mother received was much more exciting. Especially the family chain letter.

There was one delivery from the United States Postal Service we especially looked forward to when I was young. It was the much anticipated family chain letter. My mother was the oldest of ten children; five girls and five boys. These nine aunts and uncles and their children along with my widowed grandmother made up the maternal side of my family. We lived over 500 miles from my mother’s hometown, where my grandmother still lived in the same pink brick ranch-style house where she raised her ten children after being widowed in her early fifties. All of my mother’s siblings, with the exception of my youngest uncle, had moved away from home, as well. In the days when long distance phone calls were still considered a luxury the best way to keep in touch was through the postal system. In the case of my mother’s family, the most expeditious way was through the family chain letter. One wrote a letter to everyone, mailed it to the next person on the list, in turn, each person added their own letter, and so on down the line until there were eleven letters in total, including one from my grandmother.

The chain letter arrived twice a year, if we were lucky and if the aunts and uncles, or uncles wives were on their best behavior. One year it was left on an airplane and didn’t make its way back to the family for almost a year. Another time it was delivered to the wrong address at Christmas time and was accidentally put away with Christmas decorations not to be unpacked and returned to the rightful addressee until the next year.

The arrival of the fat, brown manila envelope with various denominations of different colored postage stamps was something akin to a religious holiday at our house. If it arrived while we kids were at school Mother would put it aside, saving it as a special treat until she had finished her day’s housework. I did not inherit that gene. I would have ripped it open immediately and devoured every bit of news. If the letter arrived when we kids were home we cajoled and harassed Mother until she had to acquiesce and open it right away.

The first crucial task upon opening the manila envelope was to put each individual letter in chronological order. There was definitely a right way and a wrong way to read the chain letter. It would have been unthinkable to read about Stevie’s date to the Senior Prom in May before reading about Sandra’s children’s Easter egg hunt in April.

After mother had the letters in order we could begin. She would carefully open the first envelope, if we were really lucky there would be photos. Depending on the decade there could be white-bordered black and white square Brownie snapshots, Polaroid’s with a white paper bottom, or textured, too-colorful Kodak Instamatic pics in their Fox Photo or Photo-Mat envelopes. Mother always handed us the pictures first, with a stern warning not to get fingerprints on them, while she settled back to read the letter. She knew we were much more interested in seeing our cousins, our aunts and uncles, their new cars, and pets than in hearing the news. But all too soon we would be finished with the photos from that first envelope, even if we looked at each one five or six times. We knew we couldn’t move on to the next envelope until Mother had digested the entire first letter and seen the photos herself. We began asking questions and mother began telling us about our far flung family. This is how we got to know each other. The twin uncles, Ron and Don, Aunt Sandra’s five stair-stepped children, Aunt Gail in foreign New York city, wild Uncle Mike who almost died in a Corvette Stingray wreck, Aunt Mary who married her college sweetheart, Aunt Karen and her perpetually pale winter Wisconsin children, our hippie Uncle Sam, and Uncle Steve who was only three years older than I, and yet still carried the “uncle” status. From that much anticipated manila envelope came at least 10 smaller envelopes, each pregnant with greetings, photos, newspaper clippings, recipes and news of births, deaths, graduations, marriages, good times and hard times from our relatives in other towns and other states.

The chain letter was a part of my life for as long as I can remember. After my mother’s death, as the oldest daughter, I took her place as the recipient of the letter. Later, the next generation started our own cousin letter. Sadly, email and free long distance cell phones have replaced our chain letter. We still attempt it, but it rarely makes a round in under a year and by the time it is received the news is old and I have already seen the photos in an email download. But the legacy lives on. A few years ago we had two major family reunions. One was a gathering of my maternal grandmother’s descendants and the other a celebration for her one hundredth birthday. Each gathering boasted close to one hundred family members. My friends and co-workers can’t believe I know all of my cousins, first second, third, double and twice removed, but I do. I met them all when I was young through the chain letter.