My first penpal, Granddaddy Al and how love letters matter.

I learned how exciting it is to get mail when I was little.  I was around six when I started writing to my mother’s father, our Granddaddy Al.  (Here I am on the far right of the picture — my little blonde brother Steve, Annie, Kitty, my Mom, and me, gazing down).  Granddaddy Al was a wonderfully prompt correspondent.  He typed and capitalized all the Verbs and Adjectives so Everything Looked Very Exciting when I tore into a letter.  He’d go into detail about Tuffy, the snarly little dog he loved that terrorized my gentle grandmother.  He’d share about what he’d made for dinner as ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer’.  He’d talk about the ‘Fruits and Nuts’ we had in California, and rave about his ‘Seattle Seahawks’ and the new stadium they were building for them. He gave weather reports about the ‘Liquid Sunshine’ (which was frequent!) or describe how when the rains were over, folks would come out and sit on their stoops, enjoying the clean air, nibbling on fresh-picked blueberries.

We went up for the World’s Fair when I was in the first grade but I got pneumonia and stayed cloistered in my mother’s old bedroom reading “Little Women” series.  (My grandparents kept my mother’s room as a shrine for her, their beloved Only Child, with the twin bed freshly made and shelves of books perfectly dusted and lined up, just as when she’d left for graduate school.  I always fantasized that would happen with MY childhood room, but since I had three siblings  all eager for some space,  my  “shrine” never happened).

Granddaddy Al was very newsy and interesting — and now I see how my mother came to be a journalist and how I followed suit, years later, first by writing stories for the local newspaper and then producing documentaries on video.  We all loved to tell stories just like he did.

As I’m writing young Cate, my friend’s daughter who’s in New York, I realize she’s about the same age now as I was then, and I’m struck by how the importance of writing has carried me through my entire life.  I kept Granddaddy Al’s letters from move to move, and when I would open the musty boxes that contained them, I’d get a sense memory of his aftershave, his clean-shaven pink face, and the boiled cauliflower in his kitchen.  I adored my grandfather, and our special bond as pen pals kept us connected until his last mail delivery — where as he lay dying, I spied my most recent love letter on the putty-colored hospital tray near his bed.  I’m happy his last love letter came from me.  He knew I loved him, and I knew he felt the same way.