Modern Love: Snail Mail

My grandma screens my calls. When I call she lets the phone ring, waits for me to identify myself on the answering machine, then picks up the receiver hastily. I can’t see her, but I imagine her adjusting the phone carefully so as not to offset her gray permed hair, which she bobby-pins every morning. “Am I holding the phone to my ear correctly? Can you hear me?” she asks.

I usually do more of the talking, first telling her about the crisp weather and later bringing up a piece of news she may find interesting, or a new factoid I have overheard. At 93 years old, Bubs, my grandmother, spends her days nibbling at three newspapers and the American Heritage dictionary that sits on the dinner table next to her seat.

I ask Bubs about her weekly trip to the community center in Japantown to play bridge with other seniors. Her partner this week also has two grandsons and two granddaughters. She trails off and a pregnant pause hangs in the airwaves. Bubs freezes up under the pressure of being live on the air, even though it’s just me. We’ve reached an inevitable dead end in the conversation. “Well, you’re busy, go have fun,” she says.

Bubs and I have lived in the 21st century for the same amount of time, but she has no interest in embracing new methods of communication.  Bubs can talk to me on the phone, but a pen and paper are all she really needs to stay in touch.  Bubs is conscientious about corresponding. When I first arrived at school the fall of my freshman year, there already was a letter waiting for me in Harvard Yard Mailbox 2432. She has kept it up ever since, sending along letters once every couple weeks.

Anticipating a letter from Bubs, I go down to the mailroom almost every week, so frequently that I have memorized my lock combination. I pull at the adhesive on the envelope lips and remove her letter, which is written on gray and sturdy paper, slightly longer than eight and a half by eleven and folded into fourths rather than thirds. Her notes have traces of blue carbon from the paper she uses to make literal carbon copies of each letter. While I archive mail only through gmail, Bubs stores away written letters herself in one of her meticulously organized manila folders.

I unravel the page and see Bubs’s handwriting. It is a narrow scrawled cursive, elegant, but not intimidating or formal.  Her exclamation points add particular emphasis, as the dot under the long vertical line is a drawn circle or spiral. Occasionally she writes something in Japanese, even though I do not speak, read or understand it. She sometimes forgets to give a translation and I smile, assuming that it probably says something encouraging.

Many of her letters are almost like a travelogue of what happens at home, broken into section by days of the week about what she did, where mom went, or what she read.  My parents and Bubs are off to Arnie’s for dinner tomorrow night. My brother Cyrus was down in Palo Alto yesterday. King Richard III’s skeleton was found.  Serena Williams has made it quite far in the tournament. And as I fold up the letter to put back in the envelope, I notice a small cut out, a Peanuts comic.

I don’t have perfect pitch, but while I’m reading Bubs’s letters, it’s her voice and her characteristic chuckle and tongue-clicking that I hear, and no one else’s. I see her sitting at her old roll top desk in her room, down the hall from my room at home, using her old stamps and quietly sealing the envelope shut.

I should write back to Bubs more often, but I usually just send an email to my mom which she prints and leaves at Bubs’s spot at the dinner table, next to the dictionary. Bubs earnestly reads every word during her afternoon “tea time” break, as she sits with a mug of hot water and maybe a shortbread cookie. She takes note of things she finds particularly interesting, and in her next letter asks me what I mean by the word “deets.”

I have my own manila folders at school, safely on the bottom shelf by my bed, with all the letters Bubs has sent me. I don’t reread the letters often, but I do stare at the folder from my bed before I go to sleep. I feel comfortable knowing I have saved these letters. I’ll be able to introduce my children and grandchildren to her and also to myself, the college-aged Ezuchan.

Bubs uses pencil to write many things. When she annotates books around the house, or keeps score while playing bridge, she likes the security of knowing it could be erased and corrected. Yet all my letters are written with everyday ballpoint pens, that won’t smear in the way that graphite falls off of paper with time. Bubs’s letters are not muffled by phone static, and do not cease to exist when we hang up. At the bottom of every letter, after I make it through the weekly curated newsreel, the Japanese and questions about classes, she never forgets to write, “Love and BIG HUG, Bubs.”