Paragraphs, please

My aunts like to recall a memory of my grandpa Dan—a teacher and father of five who moved his young family from Terre Haute to Scottsdale in 1958. On weekends, he’d wheel a portable typewriter out to the front porch and write letters to family back home in Indiana.

I never met my grandpa Dan, but I like to imagine him out there: in shorts, wearing a cowboy hat (true to his pragmatic but approachable nonconformity), maybe drinking a cold beer while typing up family news and a thought or two about events near and far.

Letter writing has withered from common practice in the sixty years since then—and within my own life, perhaps no faster than in the last ten. This is mostly a story of technological progress—of welcome changes and greater connectivity. And yet I wonder what I’ve lost in so rarely choosing to shape and share thoughts in paragraph form—and what we’re missing out on when others no longer share paragraphs with us. I worry that I’m losing an important faculty and a unique type of connection with my favorite people.

As the new year begins, I want to make more room for writing and correspondence, both as a means of creative leisure as well as a means of reconnecting with old penpals. Those who’ve read this blog before know that the content is all over the place, and I suspect that’ll continue to be the case. The one thing I definitely want to write about is climate change, so I’ll probably start there.

The blog (or the newsletter, which is the same stuff, delivered straight to your inbox) is of course no substitute for direct correspondence. And there’s truth in Michelle Wolf’s quip that a blog is “a conversation no one wanted to have with you.” But maybe what I write here will occasionally strike a chord and invite a conversation via email or phone. I hope so, anyway. 🙂