July 29, 1976--A Sentimental Journey Back Via Snail-Mail Jul 19 '08    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet The Bottom Line It's July 19, 2008, and, in ten more days, this letter will be 32 years old--though, sometimes, it seems as if only a short time has passed... How long is 32 years? When I first met Dr. Allen James Harder during the summer of 1974 (on the Fourth of July, to be exact), he was just a few months away from turning 32 (on October 28). Thirty-two years have taken me from being a 23 1/2 year old college graduate (actually, an almost-graduate, because, while I had gone through the ceremony in May, I still had one summer class to finish in order to get my diploma, due to how I had switched my major and minor areas) to being somebody old enough to get Applebee's Golden Apple Discount. In less than half-a-year, I'll be leaving midway and entering what's known as my late-fifties (albeit the earliest part). At the time when I wrote the letter that I'm about to share with you, I didn't even have a single gray hair--I would be getting my first one the following spring and would be totally thrilled about it, because I was crushing on my 30 year old professor (graduate school) and thought that it made me look more "mature." My mom thought that was absolutely-silly (the part about my seeing that one gray hair as a sign of maturity, that is--though I think she thought the way that I was carrying on about the professor was a little bit on the nutty side as well. LOL). These days, the hair-color listed on my driver's license is gray. Actually, I don't have a full head of gray hair. In fact, it's still highlighted brunette for the most part. However, as some of the highlights are now of a gray color instead of honey-blonde, the clerk I visited for license renewal decided that it would be wise to put down gray, even though "graying" would have been more accurate, but that's not a color. Because the date of the letter I'm about to share is July 29, 1976, this means that it was Mark's 20th birthday (as well as the birthday of his twin brother). I very well remember that day and why I wouldn't be celebrating with Mark. Mark had accompanied his mother on a trip to Tennessee to go on the annual church retreat into the mountains made by the members of his grandpa's church. His brother usually went, too, but he had to work and couldn't make it--and he had called me up depressed about spending his birthday alone. I picked him up along with five other friends (two of them small children) in my Pacer, and we all went out for ice cream. After that, he went back to his house and picked up his "gee-tahr." We then rolled down the windows and sang "Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road" repeatedly while driving around and around his neighborhood. However, from something I said in my letter about studying for my final exam that same day, I must have been VERY busy. This would have also been the same day that I managed to lock my keys in the car up at the closest Steak 'n' Shake to my apartment--a whole other story. Therefore, all on the same day, I must have written to Eileen; locked the keys in my car when picking up a to-go order from Steak 'n' Shake (drive-through wasn't one of the options back then) to eat while I studied; managing to get back to my apartment (where our landlady had gone fishing so that I couldn't even get back into my place to study and ended up eating my meal on the stoop); getting my dad down to use his keys to get me back into my car; studying some for my test and managing to get an A on it even without the extra studying I would have done had I not locked my keys in my car; finishing up with my evening class and still having time to get that fun birthday celebration going...Gee! I had a lot more energy back then--which might have had something to do with not only being a whole lot younger but, also, weighing a whole lot less... Uncle Kermit sent my mom and me a letter that arrived today which contained something Eileen had recently sent to him: the letter which I'm about to share with you. In his letter to us, he had written... "Eileen is incapable of throwing anything away, including past correspondence, but lately she's been returning letters, cards, etc. of days long gone by. I'm enclosing her latest contribution from this treasure trove in the form of a "mini-letter" from AJ dated 29 July 1976. I started teaching at Texas Tech that fall, and I'd forgotten that you people visited me so soon after my start there." Actually, imo, it's good that Eileen and people like her (of which I'm one of them) are pack rats when it comes to saving old letters and other sentimental things, because they're a special part of history. Today, I had fun holding that old letter in my hands again, reading it, and going back to a time when I was in summer school and what I was like back then. I'm happy to report that I really haven't changed that much. Yes, I matured and learned more, but I'm still that free spirit--just a little older and wiser. I've had both my joys and my disappointments over the years, and so has everyone else. Notice that I told Eileen that I'd like to see "ALL of you" again. Back then, "ALL of you" referred to Eileen, Morrie (which I used to spell Morey), and their two young daughters. I had no idea back then that they and I would survive one of those daughters. Allen ended up passing away of February 28, 1977--but I notice that I was still holding out hope for his recovery from the benign (but, potentially, deadly) tumors that formed on his central nervous system. After all, it had happened before. Before I'd even met him in 1974, I'd been praying for him for months. When he started becoming too ill to teach was when he hand-picked Uncle Kermit to fill in for him at Iowa State University during the 1973-74 year. My uncle had just received his PhD. He had returned to Ames from staying with his mom and dad in Kansas City, Missouri that summer. Sadly, he ended up having to leave again for more treatments--all during which he'd stayed in good spirits. In 1975, he was finally not only able to return and teach again but he'd also married his college sweetheart, Julie, on Thanksgiving Day of that same year. Then, in the spring of 1976, he wrote me a letter telling me that the original brain tumor (located on his brainstem) had started growing again. Anyway, this was how life was back in 1976 when I wrote this letter. Two more things before reading it: The "KOJACK" reference is to how Uncle Kermit looked a little like Telly Savalis back then (only much more handsome) due to his clipper-cut hairstyle which has always looked really smashing on him. "My girls" refers to the bunch of inner-city girls who became a wonderful part of my life when I volunteered at Fountain Square Girls Club as part of a class assignment--and they were the ones who clued me into Fonzie/Henry Winkler. Before then, I hardly knew that he existed, as I was too busy with college to watch that much TV and only watched a few select programs with Happy Days not being one of them. Anyway, my introduction is longer than the letter. It was written on a fold-over notecard (where it makes its own envelope) with a picture of a little girl in a sunbonnet standing on a rail fence surrounded by sunflowers. The postage stamp shows a picture of our early heroes getting ready to sign The Declaration of Independence and has the words JULY 4, 1976 at the bottom. In the top left-hand corner is written something that shows that quite a bit of time has gone by: USA 13c The postmark is the same day as the letter is dated. Now, without further ado, here's the letter... Well, Ei, Here I go with a mini-letter, which is all I can afford to write since I'M (No reason for the "M" to be capitalized, so it must have been a typo...)having a final exam today. Morey came to see us last Sunday, but we were in church. We're sorry we missed him. I hope he'll catch us in on his way back to Dayton. (I must have meant on his way back FROM Dayton, but I might have meant that he was somewhere else in Indiana and was returning to Dayton for some reason) I'd like to see him--in fact I'd like to see ALL of you--again. Guess what! My folks and I are going to Lubbock to see your "boyfriend" in about a week or so, and we're stopping at KCMO to see MY "boyfriend" just for a little bit. He's in bad health but good spirits. Maybe the Lord will let us keep him after all, as he's lived this long. If not, I'll see him in Heaven. But I feel that God will keep him alive long enough for us to see him as it will be such a short time 'til we do. But I wish that he could get well and he and Julie could have some little brats that I could watch grow up. I bet they'd be good-looking kids if they had some. I KNOW that Allen's a doll and I've heard that Julie's fairly attractive, too. She's a real sweet person. I got to talk to her a little over the phone. Allen sounds bad. His speech is slurred like that of a feeble-minded person, but you can still tell he's smart by the things that he says and he still has that sense of humor and quick wit. I'd just LOVE to see him teach again. If he taught again, I'd probably make a special trip out to ISU just to be in one of his classes--at least stay long enough to attend his classes a few times. Wouldn't you? Oh yeah! Guess who's coming back to Indiana in two weeks--with us. Clue #1: He looks like KOJACK and Clue #2: You feel about him like my girls feel about the FONZ. Give up? Well, if you haven't figured it out by your next letter to me--which had better be soon--let me know, and I'll give you the answer. AAAAAAAY! (No, silly, it's not the FONZ!) Anyway, you had better give us a call about August 18 or 20 to find out who the mystery man is. Well, for now, adios! AJ One Final Thought: I love e-mail! Even as I'm sitting here typing this, I could be getting more e-mail in my inbox. No more wait-until-the-next-day when it comes to hearing from people--and no more long wait on correspondence coming from another state! Still, I find that snail-mail (for me, anyway) plays an important part in our lives, because it's not only nice to hold a real card or letter in my hands--in its own way, it's just as wonderful as the convenience of e-mail--but it's still around over three decades later (or more!) for special trips down memory lane and sharing with others the way it was, whether back to my college days or letters home from World War II or clear back to the early part of the 20th Century when my maternal grandparents were courting through the use of cute postcards containing sweet and newsy notes. Life today too often seems to be transient and temporary where everything revolves around nothing but the present moment while neither looking back nor dreaming forward. While it's great to live life in the present moment to the fullest, we need to remember that present moments are most stable when placed on sturdy foundations and where they, in turn, become the foundation for future dreams.

Write the first comment on this review!

Write an essay on this topic.