Return to Sender
Think of all the reasons someone might like postcards. I’m sure I like them for all those reasons. Also, I like the idea of postcards beyond the premise of dropping a line. There’s something romantic about it. Back in the 19th and well into the 20th century, postcards were like Twitter for letter writers.
Over the last three or so years, I’ve purchased stacks of postcards, but I’m not a traditional postcard collector. In fact, over the next few months, I’m going to look into what makes a traditional postcard collector.
I suspect that there are people who collect them as art. There are some truly beautiful postcards among my piles of tacky tourist detritus. Scads of people probably collect them for the canceled stamps or the historical interest of the notes on them (if you didn’t know you could buy used postcards, now you do).
I’m not going to try and unpack all the “whys” today. I just want you to know that I acquire postcards with no intention of holding onto them.
Postcard Possibilities
Kelly and I were just outside of St. Louis at a KOA on our first cross-country road trip when I first understood the possibilities postcards held.
Quick aside: KOAs occupy a minor moral problem for me. The downside is, they’re like a forest zoo where people pretend to camp. The upside is they’re clean and convenient and I’m a goddamn American. Later on in this trip, Kelly and I would check out of the Wis Dells KOA without unpacking. Wisconsin Dells is a regional tourist trap, and this campground packed families together cheek-and-jowl. The kids roamed free, summer vacation style, so the gravel road was dark with filthy, barefoot urchins. It was more refugee camp than vacation spot and too depressing to dwell upon.
A post-dinner quiet overcame the St. Louis KOA. The long July dusk faded into a quiet night that squeezed the day’s humidity from the air, approximating a chill. The cooling quiet was broken only by the occasional call and response of separated family members or the fizz-crackle of a new fire.
I’d been picking up postcards along the trip and started writing to friends and family. Some were pointedly tacky contrasting the somber approach to natural beauty favored by state departments of tourism. I struggled for longer than I usually have to for something to write. Every time I thought about little side adventures or observations we’d had, I discovered a problem: Instagram.
We made a big deal about the trip and were posting pictures and descriptions, updates and observations almost constantly between us. Anything I could write about on a postcard was already old news, thanks to digital media.
Insta-Cation
I’m a newspaper veteran and, for better or worse, having to compete with digital from within an analog world is something with which I’m familiar. Rather than send Instagram addenda, I filed the postcards with nonsequiturs and absurd observations or commentary about the card itself.
After the first stutter-step attempts, I found my groove and started having genuine fun, giggling at my cleverness in the fading light. I imagined the confusion or amusement people would have reading these pointedly random messages.
Sending a postcard in the 21st century is radically different than sending one in, say, the 20th century, when you reasonably could expect to surprise or inform a close friend about your whereabouts and other vacation tidbits.
Sending a postcard from St. Louis after spending the entire day sharing the trip out there on social media seems like overkill. No one in their right mind would try and communicate important information via postcard, and, since I couldn’t compete with Kelly’s Instagram stories, I made a game of sending silly postcards.
I also stopped signing them, sending them to friends as mysterious, benign, and strange gifts.
Sending letters can feel a little indulgent sometimes; it’s one of the few hobbies you can have at somebody. Postcards are unilateral by design. I don’t send letters with any expectation of getting an answer, but I can’t send a postcard with an expectation of a return. That’s not what they’re for anymore.
Snail Mail and Me
I had so much postcard fun sending those postcards that it developed into a habit. So for the last three years, I’ve sent postcards scattershot. I’ll send one or two a day for a week and then none for three or so months. I purchased stamp purses for when I’m on the road.
Last year I bought postcards on eBay that were sold in a lot of, like, 200 or something. The package included “filled in” postcards among the blanks.
These mostly were from Minnesota. Many were essentially verbal vacation photos, though some were updates from business trips or other personal, non-leisure excursions. Some are just quick updates, like personalized Facebook posts.
Prodigious postcard writers will reference previous and forthcoming postcards knowing they might not arrive in order. Sorting through and finding multiple postcards from the same people (or to the same people) is kind of where historical research meets voyeurism. After all, I’m going through someone else’s mail.
I read through them all and got well caught up in the mysteries of some. There was one by a guy complaining about how shitty his treatment at the Mayo Clinic was and letting the addressee know he was switching hospitals. For a while, I thought it would be fun to construct narratives surrounding the postcards. I still may do that with some of the more dramatic ones.
Over the last year, I’ve picked up a couple more “used” postcards here and there, but they’re piling up and, remember, I don’t want to collect these. I like dashing off pointless notes on the blank ones, but as far as the used postcards, there’s no end for me, no reason to have them. Even if I turn some of them into fun, off-beat stories, I still have a cache of physical cards.
Return to Sender
Recently, it occurred to me to just send them back.
At the end of last year’s trip west, I came across a cheap cache of postcards. I will pay a quarter but prefer to pay a dime, these were a dime. Most people charge between .50 cents and $3, which I find outrageous, but as with any collectible, the sky is the limit price-wise).
After dashing off some notes, I went through some of the used cards and discovered that someone had written one but failed to post it. Among the “Wish You Were Here” notes was something a little more serious, a note telling a friend about a medical procedure.
It was written in the Philippines in 1979 and discovered in a Moscow, Idaho, junk shop.
I felt like I had to send the postcard to the provided address. It was a ghost that needed exorcising, and mailing it was the only way for it to achieve its purpose and rest in peace. I had to release it from limbo and give it a meaningful end, but I couldn’t leave it at that. It’s one thing to get a goofy postcard, it’s another to get a quasi-serious postcard 44 years late without explanation. Plus, what if they knew what happened to Franz? What if they’d always wondered what happened to Franz and this was their chance to find out?
I dropped the postcard in the mail and sent a note under separate cover explaining the situation. I told them that if they knew anything about Margaret Seeley or Franz that they’d like to share to please send it along. The letter also acknowledged that it was a little weird to get this from a stranger.
I provided my contact information in case they wanted to get in touch.
They didn’t.
I’m not surprised.
Sorting through my postcards later last week, dithering over putting them in an album, it occurred to me to send them all back and see whether anyone responds. Not too, too long ago I got a letter from a stranger. It was the person who used to live in my house responding to a short story I’d written about my decision to buy it.
She had both questions and answers and it was cool to connect with someone from my home’s past and to set them at ease about how things were going here.
I’m not looking for pen pals per se (although I would happily accept one). My greatest hope is that someone recognizes the handwriting and wants to tell me about the family member who wrote (or received) it.
Many of these postcards were written between adults before 1950, so the preponderance of the correspondents are likely dead. For example, whether Franz ended up with serious bladder and prostate issues or not, the odds are he’s no longer with us nearly 50 years later.
The worst-case scenario is that I give someone an extra piece of junk mail to throw out. The best case is that I facilitate connections with a part of someone’s family history they forgot.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
PostScript
I’ll be doing a lot with postcards this year. Besides sending them back, I’m developing a podcast around researching the places and other oddities I’ve discovered in my postcard pile.
If you want to be on my snail mail list of people to whom I randomly send postcards, reach out privately and I’ll include you in my next batch. I’ve got scads of Hawaiian postcards in all their glorious 1970s tackiness.
Follow Me on Instagram?
I read a really interesting story about coming to new terms with social media. As I’ve mentioned, I’m done working for those clowns. Plus, it feels so desperate to constantly try and get people to stop scrolling their feeds just to read or listen to some dopy thing I did.
If you’re feeling a little trapped by social media, I can’t recommend this story enough. It talks about the cycle of enshittification possessing social media. It also encouraged me to start posting again.
My problem was trying to come up with something to post every day was tedious and felt too self-promotey. I mean, Christ, I share this newsletter whenever it comes out but I don’t always have something I want to share.
I don’t publish something every day, but I do write every day. I decided to just start Instagram Reel-ing the best sentence I’d written so far that day. I have a BeReal account, which prompts me to take a photo every day at a random time. Whenever the BeReal goes off I look back at what I’ve written so far and pull out a sentence that I’m happy with.
Here’s one from yesterday:
Substack has a “Notes” social media. It’s particularly useful if you have the app, but either way, I’m going to start sharing my letters and postcards there if you’re interested. If not, no sweat, I’ll share them here as well.
Here are some of my favorite notes from the past week: