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I’m reading Virginia Evans’ epistolary novel The Correspondent right now (well, listening to it, which I highly recommend unless you have an aversion to sobbing in your car on the way to work).
It centres on Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a woman in her 70s living in Maryland who has spent her life writing letters to people — mostly actual missives on paper, sent via post, but she has made concessions to email in her later years, though she laments the effects of its immediacy.
She has written thousands over the course of her life, to friends and family, of course, but also to celebrities and authors and political figures. She writes letters to the editor, corresponds with the troubled son of a former co-worker, keeps her childhood best friend up to date on her life, complains to customer service agents.
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I used to write letters too, mostly when I was bored in university classes. I have a box of correspondence in my closet — postcards and quick notes and doodled notecards, but also meaningful multi-page letters, soft and worn along the seams from being folded and refolded. It’s a tangible reminder of a particular period of my life and the people who were part of it.
I also used to send long letter-like emails, chatty and full of news and crafted with intention. Those back-and-forths are also saved; I maintain an old Yahoo account for just this reason.
Nowadays, I mostly communicate via text or Facebook Messenger and though I’ve written about the valid love language of memes and funny videos, I do miss actual language.
Aside from the often-meditative nature of just setting down one’s thoughts, it’s left a gap in my history. Post-2016 or thereabouts, there’s no saved record of what I was thinking or doing, or who I was thinking about.
The other day, my co-worker and I were engaged in a heated debate about whether Mr. Peanut is wearing a kind of unitard under his shell or whether he is naked and just has black legs (this is going to get back to correspondence, I swear) when I suddenly remembered one of my favourite pieces of writing, which was published on the humour website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency many years ago.
It was (and is) called Mr. Peanut Tries on Glasses at Lenscrafters. It is about the Planters mascot attempting to replace his signature monocle with new frames. It is deeply ridiculous, but something about it just tickled me so much that I still think about phrases from it 16 years later. (“What do you think I am, Jeremy, a Brazil nut?”)
I looked it up to send to my co-worker (it confirms the “no pants” theory) and noticed that the author’s name, Seth Weitbeg, was clickable on the site. On a whim, I clicked — I wasn’t even sure if it was still a valid address — and sent him a quick email just telling him how much pleasure the piece has given me and how often it pops into my head, despite the unlikely subject matter.
I forgot all about it until two weeks later, when a reply appeared in my inbox.
“What a fun, lovely email to get! It’s an honor to have written something holding a cozy little spot in your memory,” wrote Seth Weitberg — who, it turns out, is the Emmy-nominated producer and narrator of Drunk History and a crossword creator whose puzzles have appeared in the Free Press.
It was nothing much — a few lines in response to my few lines — but it was so satisfying, a mutual acknowledgment of appreciation. It made me really happy. I hope it made Seth Weitberg happy. Sometimes you just need to see it in writing.
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